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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
7,501 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

U

Dec 31, 2019

One of the Best course for Absolutely Beginners :-) Discussed Core Fundamental Factors of Blockchain of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Amazing Resources & Really Helpful Content. Thanks Bina Ramamurthy Ma'am.

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1351 - 1375 of 1,877 Reviews for Blockchain Basics

By Jason W

•

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 Muhammad U 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

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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 O

•

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

•

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.

By Warren W

•

Sep 5, 2021

This course did a great job of helping me understand the basics of blockchain technology. The course is a bit dated, which caused difficulty at the end with the project assignment. It took me days to figure out that my virtual machine issues required downloading an older version of VirtualBox that is no longer even supported.

By Momil I

•

Aug 20, 2019

This was a good course to get started with Blockchains, Though I had some difficulty in grasping the core concepts at start and still have a lot of questions that are unanswered, I guess the upcoming specialisation courses are going to answer them, Overall! a good high-level review course for beginners.Definitely recommended!

By Ajay B

•

Aug 1, 2020

The final assignment was really useful to understand the block-chain system. However it is disadvantageous to those with weaker laptops or poor internet connectivity. The major concepts were explained well and the pace and structure of teaching was good. However some concepts could have been explained in detail.

By Aziz D

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Jun 1, 2020

Now i understand and can feel what blockchain is all about. The use of Ethereum blockchain as an example for the course has given extra motivation to learn more about blockchain other than just as a cryptocurrency token. however, i still have a lot of questions to ask in future quest for blockchain knowledge.

By Daniel F

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Jan 28, 2019

An easy course. The difficulty of getting to the point of starting the final assignment is an unpleasant shock, and a trial all by itself. The actual final assignment was a breeze. Allot the most time to getting the set up done, consult the forums for possible answers, and keep trying until something works.

By Jigar A

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May 23, 2020

Really a good course to take up for beginners. Concept explanation & understanding is pretty good. It really helped me a lot. Just a few suggestion to improve your manual for the final programming project regarding the setup. because i faced many issues but i'm good at debugging so i could get through it.

By YASHVANTH K J S

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May 14, 2020

Excellent course for beginners , simple lessons made way more easier with a few minutes of video and quiz session helps to recollect everything . Had a few issues while doing last programming project but the people in discussion forum usually respond within an hour , which solved my problems...#must_try.

By DHEERAJ S J

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Jul 7, 2020

Excellent course! for beginners looking to understand Blockchain. However, there's one thing that caused few problems, that is, I have 4GB RAM but it stills took me a lot and lots of restarting my laptop to complete the final assignment, as my laptop hanged whenever I perform some of the steps.

By RIPUDAMAN S

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Jun 17, 2020

This is a good enough for initial, but the learner have to depended on the outer source to get full understanding. But I must say great afforts are made in content of course, to make good understanding to learner, Course is overall good looking forward to take its course 2 from specification

By Anjali P C

•

Jul 14, 2020

Respected Ma'am, I could complete this course only after changing my laptop..so I humbly request the team to include the configuration details of the laptop on which the specified assignment programs can be executed...

Yours Faithfully,

Anjali P C,

Engineering Student

Kerala, India.

By Subangkar K

•

May 16, 2020

Would have been convenient if summary points for each video were put in a single or two written slides along with existing speech.

And there are some practice quizzes with a single question which could be included in the video like Machine Learning course of Andrew Ng. has.