I'm the lead instructor. Let me know if there are any topics you'd like to see in particular. Here's the syllabus from the version of the class I taught at Princeton:
I'd very much like to see Counterparty discussed in that curriculum. I'm the community director of this open source platform, so let me know if you'd like me to skype in and guest lecture!
Ethereum and other similar projects that intend to "recreate the Internet" or at the very least be some sort of much more capable "Bitcoin 2.0" networks.
This probably belongs here. It's pretty close to what you're looking for, and it won me the Miami Bitcoin hackathon a few weeks ago. Source code is in the youtube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlmk5tnoKBQ
Could you please add more information about programming assignments to course description? The level of programming proficiency, what programming language are you going to use, etc.
In my opinion it would be also helpful to add info about background expectations and expected workload (e.g. ~5h/week).
Code examples were mentioned. What's the tech-stack going to be? eg is it going to be the bitcoind C code, any of the javascript ports (there's some native JS crypto stuff, as well as I think it's bitpay made node bindings for bitcoind), or all of the above?
Piazza is asking me for a princeton.edu email address (I tried to sign up through the link you gave above).
Can I sign up for the course if I am not a Princeton student (or any student of a university, for that matter)?
Ah, you can't sign up directly on Piazza without a Princeton email, but if you sign up using the Google form link, we'll enroll you on Piazza. (We do this manually; about once a day.)
To limit enrollment in your class, by default a school
email ___domain is required to self-enroll. If your school
does not provide students with school email addresses,
instead a class access code is automatically set to
limit enrollment in your class.
Blockchain - what types of contracts work well and what kind don't? Could you share a Devils Advocate viewpoint of the blockchain -- major assumptions, pitfalls, etc?
I took the course this semester (and loved it--hope the materials can be helpful to all).
We had one assignment that focused on achieving consensus in the face of adversarial nodes, similar to the systems used in Stellar and Ripple, so those were included in the course, to a degree.
Thanks for the suggestion. We discuss it briefly, and one of the programming assignments is based on Ripple. It could use a deeper discussion, I'll work on that.
Don't forget to mention that their consensus algorithm simply doesn't work. That's why they made it 100% centralized "temporarily" (without even asking, so apparently it was 100% centralized even before that). They themselves said exactly that in a blog post. Also, the creator of Ripple dumped all his coins before joining Stellar.
Here's the Stellar team's blog post about this. While there's no attempt to conceal this, it's also not being spelled out clearly enough: the Ripple/Stellar "consensus" model is a centralized and does NOT provide the guarantees which Proof-of-Work does in Bitcoin.
Why didn't you use Coursera for this MOOC? Roughly 5% of students registered for a MOOC actually complete the course. If you'd like to educate the world, do it through a platform that could actually make it possible.
http://randomwalker.info/teaching/fall-2014-bitcoin/
(P.S. about 200 students enrolled in the first couple of hours. Great to see the level of interest.)