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Cryptocurrency Classes Are Coming To Campus (nytimes.com)
While the price of Bitcoin has dropped since Christmas, the virtual currency boom has shown no signs of cooling off in the more august precincts of America's elite universities. The New York Times: Several top schools have added or are rushing to add classes about Bitcoin and the record-keeping technology that it introduced, known as the blockchain. Graduate-level classes this semester at Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, among other places, illustrate the fascination with the technology across several academic fields, and the assumption that it will outlast the current speculative price bubble. "There was some gentle ribbing from my colleagues when I began giving talks on Bitcoin," said David Yermack, a business and law professor at New York University who offered one of the first for-credit courses on the topic back in 2014. "But within a few months, I was being invited to Basel to talk with central bankers, and the joking from my colleagues stopped after that." For a class this semester, Mr. Yermack originally booked a lecture hall that could fit 180 students, but he had to move the course to the largest lecture hall at N.Y.U. when enrollment kept going up. He now has 225 people signed up for the class.
It seems likely on the order of tomorrow's sunrise that educating the public about the Bitcoin would certainly not lead to more folks purchasing it.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
For a class this semester, Mr. Yermack originally booked a lecture hall that could fit 180 students, but he had to move the course to the largest lecture hall at N.Y.U. when enrollment kept going up. He now has 225 people signed up for the class.
If only there were some means by which colleges could limit the number of students allowed to sign up for a particular course offering... perhaps, someday, they'll come up with one.
Well you could obtain a network of computers and have them all race to solve a mathematical problem, those computers that win the race would be rewarded a seat in the lecture hall. To make sure that the process was transparent, every computer should have a copy of the ledger containing what seats were assigned. You would have to use strong cryptography to ensure that nobody cheated. Since people might want to trade or sell their seats, the ledger would allow transfers of seats from one holder to another. To ensure that a limited number of seats were assigned you would want to have the algorithms stop assigning seats when the limit was hit. As an incentive to continue processing the seat ledger after all the seats are assigned, the system should allow people to offer a transaction incentive to sell a seat...
I have an idea! What if everyone had a unique number, and they kept it secret, in something we can call a wallet. Then when they want to go to a class, they can add their number to a list of other numbers signing up for that class, and it will be hashed so that everyone can verify that they were added, but because it's done with secret unique identifiers it won't really be public, but kind of anonymous! Then groups of classes - we'd call them "blocks" - could be strung together for your entire scholastic career, like a "chain". I call it "BlockClassChain". And we can fund your education with special money that is pegged to this BlockClassChain, so it would be BlockClassChainCoin!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Obama would literally wipe the floor intellectually and physically with any Republican contender. He fucking owns you bitches and you know it.
That's why you really hate him. The black man made you look like inbred retarded yokels who turn out to be frauds, actual traitors, as you die in prison.
Enjoy bitch. You earned it.
If you really want to understand this topic, start by watching Andreas Antonopoulos, a computer scientist who specializes in Data Communications and Distributed Systems. If you care to go further, he has 2 books Mastering Bitcoin (very technical), and The Internet of Money (for the layman).
I would recommend starting with Blockchain vs. Bitcoin in front of Consultants. You can watch his videos on x2 speed because he enunciates well.
Don't believe anything in the Slashdot comments. On every article about Bitcoin / Crypto, so many comments are factually inaccurate, even when they sound intelligent, plausible, and are modded +5. In the words of Andreas, "(Bitcoin) isn't what it appears to be at first glance."
Finally, Princeton has a series of free lectures here: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
I take it that if you manage to enrol, you've automatically passed?
A bit like underwater Klingon dance studies.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."