All lecture and teaching material is developed by Patrick McCorry. All material is open-source and it is free to access, use modify or share.
The field of cryptocurrency is trust engineering. It applies cryptography, distributed systems and mechanism design as the foundation for a global and self-sustaining peer-to-peer network.
This course is taught in the style of an MSc module. We'll study how something like Bitcoin can work, the implications and beauty of self-enforcing smart contracts, and focus on bringing all students up to date with state-of-the-art research in this emerging area. There is a special focus for off-chain protocols. This includes the history of payment channels (the lightning network) and validating bridges (rollups).
Our goal is to provide educational material (and the correct mental model) to allow bystanders to join the cryptocurrency community. Anyone with a slight technical background can benefit from this course. No programming experience required, but it will be helpful for some of the exercises.
We plan to conduct one lecture a week and eight lectures in total. All classes are streamed over Crowdcast (immediate replay available) and a chatroom is available is ask questions on the fly.
While the prepared content should benefit the audience, the lecture-style supports the audience to ask questions and diverge from the content to aid the learning experience. Typically, 1 hour of lecture material is planned for a 2 hour session.
There is no explicit or graded assessment. We encourage participants to build a portfolio of work and experiment with different aspects of cryptocurrency.
Unlike other events, it is ideal for sponsors to approach us after the class has concluded. Assuming it is successful, we want sponsors to focus on how we can make it sustainable in the future.
There will be no additional lectures or workshops from external companies during the 8 week course. This is to avoid over-exhausting the participants or presenting content in a way that confuses the participants. We may include some interactive panel sessions with industry experts to discuss some of the material presented.
There is no fee to participate. Our goal is to help bystanders join the cryptocurrency community and provide a level playing field for all. It is very possible this venture makes no money, but who cares when we are all having fun.
Patrick McCorry is an intern engineer at Infura after Infura acquired his startup, any.sender. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at King’s College London and an accomplished researcher at University College London, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Newcastle University. His expertise is cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, applied cryptography and decentralised systems. Patrick is the United Kingdom’s first PhD graduate in cryptocurrencies. His work has appeared at Devcon, Scaling Bitcoin, Breaking Bitcoin, CESC, BPASE and SBC alongside numerous academic events.
We hope our material helps kick-start your crypto career. To the moon.