Cryptocurrency and Friends Class

Jan 25, 2023

The filed of cryptocurrency applies cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design as the foundation to build a global and self-sustaining network.

Even more so, it is the embodiment of a new field of trust engineering:

Trust engineering focuses on how to define and minimise human trust for enforcing the rules of a system. We know human enforcement can’t scale to protect billions of users, but software can. Thus the engineering discipline focuses on replacing trusted humans with verifiable software.

As we dive deep into how something like Bitcoin or Ethereum can work, a keen student will notice a continuous theme of trying to replace humans with self-enforcing smart contracts — leading to seamless and trust-minimised interactions on a global scale.

All educational material is designed to allow bystanders to join the cryptocurrency community. Anyone with a slight technical background can benefit from this course. No programming experience required, but it will be helpful for some of the exercises.

Table of contents:

All lecture and teaching material is developed by Patrick McCorry. All material is open-source and it is free to access, use modify or share.