Grasp Blockchain Basics Quickly with this Coursera Program

Bhomik Jain

06 April 2023

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Course Overview

Blockchain Basics course provides a broad overview of the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology, beginning with the Bitcoin protocol and progressing to the Ethereum protocol. This helps lay the groundwork for developing applications and programming. You will learn how to set up nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will also learn about blockchain's decentralized peer-to-peer network, immutable distributed ledger, and trust model.

It was really fun and quite engaging to learn from Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott about what is blockchain, how it works, the relationship between bitcoin and blockchain, and the steps for bitcoin transactions.

"This program developed by Coursera, is the most engaging way to learn about blockchain and develop a foundation to build applications or programs."

- Bhomik Jain

Course Structure

The course teaches learners about the limitations of the present-day internet for business and economic activity, and about the aspect of user privacy. Terminology like mining, hashing, nonce, and public-key cryptography is also explained well. Towards the end, I learned about the 9 types of stakeholders in the blockchain ecosystem, the current challenges the technology faces, and the possible ways of overcoming those. Overall, it was a good learning experience.

This course will teach you how to explain the fundamental components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and chain), its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model), underlying algorithms, and trust fundamentals (hard fork and soft fork). The hashing and cryptography foundations required for blockchain programming are covered, as are the Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications specialization courses (Dapps).

Insider Tips

To get the best out of this course, I have included some important tips that you might find useful.

Make Notes

Create notes of each video and engage with the community of previous learners on LinkedIn.

Hands-on training/ Capstone Project

You will use a virtual machine image created for this course to build and operate an Ethereum test chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand how a blockchain works, including transactions, blocks, and mining.

Assessment

You must submit graded quizzes and assignments for each module on time. Some of these are then graded by peers.

Final Take

I am currently a sophomore student studying Bachelors in Computer Science Engineering at Chandigarh University. Through this course, I learned a lot about Blockchain basics and the vast applications of this domain.

The following courses are good if you wish to study blockchain further:

The pace of the course was appropriate for me as was the detailing of concepts. There was also a lot of reading and video material provided that proved helpful in learning.

Key Takeaways

Learn about the 9 types of stakeholders in the blockchain ecosystem, the main challenges that the technology is facing currently, and solutions to overcome them

Study the limitations of the present-day internet for business and economic activity, as well as the privacy of the users

Get familiar with the terms like mining, hashing, nonce, and public-key cryptography

Work on virtual machine image