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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
7,614 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

LR

Jul 29, 2019

Comprehensive and clear course that summarize the basic concepts to understand the blockchain technology. Also the resources and contents included are very valuables. I totally recommend this course.

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1351 - 1375 of 1,897 Reviews for Blockchain Basics

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

By Jason W

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Jan 20, 2021

The final project of this course is not difficult once you get the environment setup. Some one from the uinversity needs to review the current status of the final project and make edits to the supplied setup files so fewer people have an issue. Also, there is definitely a RAM requirement which is not highlighted or stressed enough in the description of the course.

By Priyansh J

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Oct 1, 2021

The reading material provided is good but the content in the videos is less and hence to get a better understanding reading material provided is a must. The explanation is decent but sometimes the words used have to searched up. The quiz's and final assessment are pretty easy. Only setting up the environment can be a issue depending on the system you are using.

By Pedro S

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Jan 26, 2021

The content essenciatially is very informative, although there are multiple broken links to access complementary material (and even exercises), which is very disappointing. However, I still recommend this course for those who are interested in learning a little more about this subject, I hope this course gets more (the deserved) attention from its maintainers.

By Deleted A

•

Jun 8, 2021

The course is amazing. The content covered is good as well. But I feel as if they could have explained some topics more clearly and in a little ore depth, or they shouldn't have introduced them in the first place. I do recommend this course, but remember, you will have to do a lot of googling alongside watching the course videos. The course is great, though!

By ADITYA S P

•

May 26, 2022

This is a very well structured course that will help any begineer like me to build solid foundation on this block chain technology.

It starts from the very basics and smoothly moves forward increasing the difficulty.

Overall this course really helped me to understand how this technology works internally and to get a better understanding of this technology.

By Jay L

•

Dec 8, 2021

Great foundational information and practical application.

The only reason for the lack of a fifth star is that the majority of the articles and videos are based on information from 2016. So it is a little outdated yet completely useful and I would recommend it. I wasn't aware that we would be using VM software so that was a pleasant surprise. Thank you.

By Shreyaans M N

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Jun 13, 2020

Really liked the course a lot! had difficulty in the final project due to the huge download size. Instead of using a local VM, it would have been batter to use a Cloud VM, such as QwikLabs which ensure that the process is speedy and less time consuming.

I hope that this will be taken into consideration.

Nonetheless, the course was great! Thanks a lot!

By D S S

•

Oct 28, 2019

The whole course was very informative. But the time i took to complete the quiz' in all the weeks is half of that i took to complete the programming assignment. The instructions should be modified and a video must be uploaded as a minimum requirement to provide us enough clarity. i am eagerly looking forward to continue with this specialization!

By OMKAR P B

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Apr 23, 2020

A nicely planned course, that helps beginners to learn and explore the basics of Block-Chain which in itself is quite a complex technology. For the project I would recommend following ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY and also use the discussion forum to get rid of Errors. In the end, these Errors also teach you a lot of things. All the best.

By Jon S

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Oct 8, 2021

This course is a good intro to the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. The biggest negative was having to install VirtualBox and an Ubuntu VM to basically just push buttons in a web interface. I get that it was actually setting up nodes and running commands in the background but it still seemed like a lot of effort for very little payoff.

By Gentur W

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Jul 22, 2018

This course provided knowledge about blockchain in a broad way. The whole technical concepts of blockchain wasn't fully covered and I had to google some things to fully understand it. I'd recommend people to read the white paper from Satoshi Nakamura (provided in week 1 of this course) as it helps you tremendously in learning blockchain

By Aditya G K

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May 9, 2021

I would give this course a 5 star but the final assignment setup is confusing and there is hardly any clear guidelines on hoe to properly setup the environment to complete the assignment. Also the few tips that the TA provided are from a couple of years ago. Otherwise the content is a really great introduction to the world of crypto.

By Gema M H

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May 5, 2020

I enjoyed this course very much but at times it was very difficult to understand the teacher. I am dyslexic and this was a challenge at times. I did use a combination of reading and listening but sometimes it was not clear. I also enjoyed the extra resources provided by the course. Ill definitely continue my studies in this area.

By Shreyansh V

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Mar 12, 2019

This is surely one of the course which makes your fundamentals clear about blockchain, its working. I would like to say thanks to Coursera and Bina Ramamurthy. Content and speed is just perfect. Little knowledge checks on each chapter surely boost individuals confidence. and Last project assignment is just perfect nice finish.