Blockchain Basics by Coursera

The Blockchain specialization's first course provides an overview of key concepts and outlines the basics of blockchain technology. It begins with the Bitcoin protocol, then moves on to the Ethereum protocol. This will give you the foundation for programming and developing applications. You will have the knowledge to create nodes on an Ethereum blockchain, unlock accounts, mine Ethers, transfer Ethers, check balances, and create accounts.

This course will teach you about the decentralized peer to peer network, immutable distributed ledger, and trust model that define a blockchain. This course will help you understand the basic components of a Blockchain (transactions, blocks, block headers and chains), its operations (verification validation and consensus model), underlying algorithms and the essentials of trust (hard and soft fork) This course covers the cryptography and hashing foundations that are essential to blockchain programming. It is also the subject of two specialization courses, Smart Contracts (Dapps) and Decentralized Applicationss (Dapps). To build and operate an Ethereum test chain, you will use a virtual machine image that was created specifically for this course. This hands-on activity will allow you to understand the functioning of a blockchain and its transactions, blocks, mining, and other aspects. Videos, demonstrations and hands-on activities are used to convey the main concepts.