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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
7,501 ratings

About the Course

This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises....

Top reviews

TT

Nov 18, 2018

This is an introductory course to Blockchain. The supplemented material (in other words self-study) is excellent and in my opinion is the only way to master the concepts and details of this discipline

U

Dec 31, 2019

One of the Best course for Absolutely Beginners :-) Discussed Core Fundamental Factors of Blockchain of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Amazing Resources & Really Helpful Content. Thanks Bina Ramamurthy Ma'am.

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1326 - 1350 of 1,877 Reviews for Blockchain Basics

By Manuel A

•

Mar 28, 2022

The course is easy, very easy, if you already have previous knowledge as an autodidact. However, there are some new things that you learn, and others that you consolidate. The quality of the materials is very good, especially the videos. The optional materials open doors for you to continue researching on your own. The practice of the final evaluation is very well done. You will be able to do it even if you don't know how to program. However, if you are not a bit techy, you will get stuck at the first attempt. Installing an Ubuntu virtual environment allows you to interact in a private Ethereum blockchain in which you create two nodes and perform transactions between them. There are courses in Spain offered by centers associated with universities that are self-cataloged as "masters", but that do not hold a candle up to this one. I value it with four stars out of five because you always have to aspire to improve everything. Now, if one takes this course to enter the world of blockchain ex novo, from scratch, then it surely deserves a five out of five.

By Irina

•

Oct 14, 2022

The "Key Takeways" at the end of the course are clear and sum up the data well. Inside the course itself, some of the things were less clear. The references to external resources were sometimes outdated. A promising startup in 2017 has not necessarily materialized by 2022. And the English transcription had some errors, making it hard to understand the videos. Overall, I am happy with the course: it laid in the foundation. I didn't earlier know the key advantage of Ethereum: the business logic built into it. I learned it for the first time on this course and am grateful for this. Also, the vitual machine at the end was built to make it easy on students, I appreciate it! It gave me a couple of error messages but with little Googling I was able to resolve them.

By Basem A

•

Mar 18, 2021

Some might argue that the video content is too brief and not worth it, but in my opinion they really help succinctly explain the concepts that are covered within the external resources mentioned for each week. Those resources do tend to take a lot more time to cover, but what worked very well for me was the approach of watching the lectures, going over all of the resources provided for a given week, and then re-watching the lecture to completely retain all of the information that was provided. The course served it's purpose for covering the contents of the Blockchain basics and so I would recommend it to any individual that may be interested in the field.

By Yifei H

•

Jun 20, 2018

This is a good introduction to the basic concepts of blockchain focusing on BTC and ETH. Quiz sessions are well designed and final project is nicely setup and designed. I got nice return on my time spent in this course.The reason that I gave 4/5 stars instead of 5/5 is because I feel the materials can be a little bit more concrete and technical to convey more useful information. For example, there could be more information about mining, to the extent that student can understand Selfish Mining in bitcoin at a high level. While this course is meant to be basics, but we can add some advanced or extension sessions after each week.

By Rajat G

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Jan 23, 2019

Overall the course was very well designed & well paced and the concepts were introduced well. The only gripe I would have is that the final assignment required grappling with setting up VirtualBox and getting the VM started. Not everyone is aware of virtualization so specific primers on how to set this up on Windows etc would be helpful as the current setup pdf / trouble shooting pdfs gloss over some of the common steps or errors.

I faced a couple of issues that got solved only after several tries and restarts and some of this time could have been avoided if only the tips provided were better explained.

By SRUJAN S 2

•

Nov 6, 2021

Good course, but I think the explanations could've been a bit more "sequential". But I get its point of figuring out stuff on your own and tying it up to whatever's being taught currently in a module; so it's not that big of a deal. The quizzes could've been more difficult and it always turned out being way too easy and underwhelming (even for someone who doesn't know a thing about crypto). But ultimately it does a good job of introducing you to the world of crypto and, despite some unusual bumps in the sequence of teaching, it does what it has to do well. Very informative overall. :)

By SAMPATH P

•

Dec 4, 2018

The course is good basic foundation for Blockchain concepts.

1) I think few of the concepts can be elaborated bit more by the instructor instead of directing to reading material. Honestly, I have googled lot of material on blockchain and felt like I was doing the same in this course.

2) There is some confusion on the project and the instructions should be clear to download the ova file from resources and also the naming is not the same as listed in the instruction document

3) Couple of more quizzes on complete course will be good.

Overall enjoyed the course and the project.

By Hetvi S M

•

May 27, 2020

It is a perfect course to get introduced to the blockchain concepts. The course content is compact and on point which makes it easy to understand and grasp. The course provides various guidelines along with curated material that makes the student well versed with the basics of bitcoin as well as ethereum. The course introduces various concepts like smart Contracts, Forks, and Hashing algorithms which inculcate a sense of robustness and security in the blockchain system.

Overall it is an excellent course, to begin with, your journey of understanding blockchains

By James B

•

Jun 9, 2023

getting the last project to work was difficult. i use a MAC and didn't know until the last project came up that the project doesn't work with MAC. some people said they got it to work. I tried it, got it to install, but the VM kept crashing. I had to borrow a friends window box. Make sure you read all the documents for the last project and make sure the box you use has at least 8 GB ram. the VM default is 4 gb and it seems it needs at least 6 to work properly. that leaves 6 or 7 for the vm and 1 for your host machine to keep operating. hope this helps.

By Darren J S

•

Oct 27, 2018

Good introductory course, but in nearly every quiz there are questions that weren’t explicitly discussed in any of the videos beforehand. I have no doubt the information was contained in the additional readiness material but I sense many participants will use those as additional resources, not primary references for the quizzes, just like I did.

Programming assignment at the end was great, needs updated instructions for installing on macOS. I’d be happy to help with that if you’re interested.

On to Course 2!

By Fedor G

•

Apr 8, 2020

The necessity of tx hash root is unclear. What even are receipt root or state root? What is a state in Ethereum — that is not very clear to me after this course.

While speaking of UTXO in Bitcoin, it is not clear what that is. Too formalistic. I could look up the information, that UTXO are smt like chunks of txs and you cannot simply send 100BTC to smb — you need to collect the chunks on your address into 100BTC and direct any excess as a change to your own account to form a new UTXO

By PARTH K

•

Jun 15, 2021

The course is a basic introduction to blockchain and covers a lot of basic concepts. The lectures are not "great", they are very short and cover very less content and that too not in deep. However, the optional links provided after lectures are very informative. They are time consuming but to understand the subject properly, they are necessary. Also, Links should be regularly updated and new links should be added so that if there is any new content, students are aware of it.

By Michael S

•

Mar 29, 2022

It's a good overall course going over the basics so that someone can understand. I would like to see more on how the nodes work. Seems like there needs to be some review of the videos and the quizzes since the quizzes will sometimes ask things that were not really covered in the videos. It maybe something mentioned once but not something in depth that one would think would be covered and then included in a quiz. This only occured a couple of times.

By John E

•

Aug 5, 2019

It was an OK class. In terms of content I think that the Blockchain Basics offered by LinkedIn was a bit better and more informative. The assignment at the end needs to be better maintained. I would swap out the old files in the project page for the newer ones in the resources page. I will say though that the assignment at the end really brought it together for me as I got to see how a blockchain interface behaved. So overall I still learned a lot.

By Praveen S

•

May 17, 2020

Course was well structured, however, some of the key concepts could've been better explained. Especially the chain split concept for Ethereum. Videos in week 1 felt a little rushed, but the other modules were well paced. Nice collection of resources, but some of the links were dead (in Week 4) and links had resources that spanned other modules. Which isn't a bad thing, just caused a little bit of confusion when I organized my work.

By Deleted A

•

May 11, 2020

Very well designed course. Teaches all the foundational knowledge of Blockchain needed to help you understand and navigate through the complex world of Blockchain. The jargon in blockchain doesn't feel alien to you after taking this course. If you want to explore the world of Blockchain, then this is the place to start. The only problem though is that the course is not up-to-date with the blockchain technology of the current day.

By Vivek P

•

Aug 8, 2020

Decent beginning to your blockchain basics and to brush up fundamentals in case you have been reading up on blockchain projects. The last assignment is really what makes spend you a lot of time troubleshooting. Unless you are good at basic troubleshooting, you will struggle at the last step. The problem is not the difficulty of programming assignments, but the setup notes are insufficient to get a straight forward result!

By Vangara B R

•

Jun 8, 2020

This is a great course for blockchain beginners. The concepts are very clear and the references for understanding the concepts are exceptional. Even though there are miss calculations in the final project regarding the time required including the errors and delays for low-end laptops for the final project, the solutions are mentioned. And it also gave me an opportunity to understand even better while looking at the code.

By Alejandro V

•

Jul 13, 2021

I think the introductory part to this technology is great. So many misconceptions can arise when street people who think they know enough about bitcoin or ethereum advise peers about what they shoul be doing. I think this introductory course should be a must take for anyone dealing with anything about blockchain. Having said that, I would like more practice quizzes instead of some of the academic ones.

By Douglas F

•

Mar 18, 2022

The course taught me much, but the Project was not clearly defined as to what is going on. I found I missed an entire step in loading the Virtual Machine because I thought that section was for Mac Pc only. I eventually figured it out. I would have like to have a better explanation of the Oracle VM and what EXACTLY was goin on. Perhaps the other courses in the specialization will help clearify.

By Ivan M

•

Feb 14, 2020

This is a great way to get started with Block Chain. The extra materials of the course will give you a more deep sense of the concepts that the course touches and they are several. Some of the transcriptions are inaccurate, but they are minor type-os. In general this course will give you the sufficient tools for you to understand and comprehend what Block Chains are all about. My score is 4.5

By Marcus D

•

Jan 27, 2020

The lecture videos and additional material e.g. like white papers from Satoshi Nakamoto that are provided in the course give students the possibility to directly deep-dive into the most important publications of blockchain. Even though the lecture videos are quite short, it is a very good starting point for students who want to fully understand what's happing in the blockchain.

By Valin M

•

Nov 30, 2022

The content is very interesting and adapted to beginners. The quizzes and extra materials are well chosen. However, it should have been very interesting to manually set up the block chain used in the final assignment (or explain the steps). It would be also very useful to provide an Ubuntu version of the final achievement. I recommend the course and hop into the second one.

By James M

•

Mar 26, 2020

Interesting and informative, but a bit out of date. If the technology is as constantly changing as the course claims, then there shouldn't be articles and videos from 2017. Instructions for the set up of the final project seemed out of date as well, as many of the files I was expected to download and set up were not labeled the same as they were in the instruction document.

By Maja L

•

May 12, 2021

Good course for introduction but I guess not for total beginners, without any technical background.

1 star less for final task - except installing software (which could be difficult for sb who never done it before) task was pretty easy - just clicking according to instruction. Schema of working was shown but nothing else.

Also some external links do not work actually.