Learner Reviews & Feedback for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Princeton University

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The video lectures were perfect. I got a comprehensive insight into the facinating world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I also liked the assignments. I am a professional software developer/engineer. They were very challenging and really make you dig deep into the topic and get a practical feeling for the whole thing. However I didnt like the way the programming assignments were structured and the way they were explained. There is 3 assignments scattered over the course, with completely different skill levels. First assignment is very long complex and covers way too much for one assignment. If I didnt have much experience as software developer in Java it wouldve been impossible to get anything done I think. However with my background I liked the challenge. Also the assignments should have basic tests included in junit. I had to write those myself to get a descent feedback loop. There is some repo by the mentors but it lacks a lot of parts. The second assignment is way to short and simple compared to the first one. The third one is ok in length. However I think it wouldve been better to have more asignments with smaller steps but digging more into one specific topic. As I said I personally had fun doing them. Would be cool if you guys made a follow up course maybe digging deeper into the topics. THanks for doing this. Also I think there is no certificate, there should be some kind of certificate to grade the work that the strudents put in.

The videos are very informative and I learned a lot from it. The information in the later weeks is outdated. An update about legislation, altcoins and the future of Bitcoin is needed. I would have given this course 5 stars, if it wasn't for the difficult programming exercises. There is very little feedback on these exercises. If I didn't have a friend who had done the course already and knows Java very well, it would have been very difficult to pass this course. That's why I deduct 1 star. I say again, the course is excellent to get in-dept understanding of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Thank you for making this course. Too bad I can't get a certificate.

I have attended 3 video sessions in total of ~25 minutes.

I feel that the course was quite technical from the very beginning.

I believe the target audience for such a course maybe people with computer science or EE backgrounds.

Despite me being an engineer I could not understand much as the language used was quite technical with too many advanced formulas and terminologies.

Thank you very much though for the opportunity to have an initial overview. As the topic is of high interest, I will search for a course on same topic more "business-oriented".

As an introduction to cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin in particular the lectures were top quality, and I returned a number of times to watch certain parts again. Thank you for well prepared lectures and material. The java exercises I found a bit laborous and not exactly matching with the content of the lectures; for someone with a lot of experience in java probably easier, but as I saw in the forum discussions, many java programmers had difficulty finding their way to the solution as well.

Great introductory class. It is very clear, and teacher was wise to give his opinion only in the last lecture. Even though this class took place in 2015, it already spoke about Ethereum and Ripple which are now widely used and recognized, strengthening trust in the opinion and skills of the teachers.

Programming exercices could be redone because a lot of time is passed trying to guess the logic of the code instead of having a practical understanding of blockchain technologies.

I enjoyed this course. The point, is that I think this course could use a different environment, like datacamp, to receive the answers. In my situation, I have some difficulties, such as upload my class course assignment files and, if I was at datacamp, I wouldn't need to setup a java at my notebook and this is another point. I think the course could be in Python language, this is most common and we could be have an alternative languages instead only one.

The course is a good introduction to cryptocurrency technologies. Most of its material is still relevant today, despite the fact that it was recorded in 2014. I gave only 4 stars because of the auto-grader. Testing the code on a local computer is tedious with few resources available for guidance. There was also a bug in the grader at Assignment 2, which hasn't been fixed for some time.

The instructor teaches with ample examples. The pace is appropriate.

A few more illustrated examples or sample hash functions (in java) or other that we could run to check the verify functions for instance can greatly help as well.

Sure, we can do those on our own. But the best practices or some logical errors that we are unaware of may creep in and can be avoided.

Great course for understanding bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The assignment instructions could be more clear. It would be helpful if there was some way to debug code locally before submitting it to prevent wasting time on trivial problems. Otherwise it covers a lot of ground, and I feel I understand the topic at hand from a technical perspective very well now.

This course is a very good introduction to blockchain technology and popular in nowadays Bitcoin currency. However the main disadvantages are assigments which are hard to accomplished because there aren't any tests attached, so you cannot check on your computer whether your solution is good or not and you cannot debug your code to find an issue if it isn't ;)

Course has very good content and well structured. However it lacks more details on the mechanics, under the hood functioning of Blockchains.

The practical assignments are not adequate. Propose more exercises that goes up in incremental content and difficulties and allow students to get more practical insight upon how a blockchain really works.

Excellent course overall. A little out of date (hard to remain totally timely given how fast the space is moving) but the fundamentals are there. The problem sets are not the best thought through in my opinion. If you want to learn the fundamentals of blockchain technology and bitcoin, however, I heartily recommend.

This is a good course if you are an intermediate-level investor. This course will be at a novice level if you have a computer science or cryptography background. Nevertheless, this course should be updated, as many events have happened since this course has been created. This is why I am giving 4/5 stars.

Love this course! The lectures were outstanding. I took one star off for the programming assignments. There is much wasted time required. No test framework is given that allows developing code outside of the grader. And trying to debug code by submitting to the grader is difficult and time consuming.

Very good course. T​he lectures are excellent! Thank-you to the instructors: Andrew, Arvind, Ed and Joseph!

The three assignments are quite challenging, especially assignment #2. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the on-line grader for assignment #2 (see the discussion in the forums).

The only reason I do not give a better grade, is that assignments should have a better documentation and also more context should be provided to the student (at least on the first assignment, where the terms used on the description and in the code weren't yet discussed in the video lessons).