This crypto space moves fast 🚀 and so this is a work in progress 🚧
The course website is hosted on Canvas (https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/153071), however you need to be an enrolled student to login. This site serves as the open-source version. (You will still need to login to Canvas to view the assessment criteria and participate in the course discussion.)
Lecture on Tuesdays at 08:30 beginning July 01, 2025. Tutorial on Thursdays at 12:30 beginning July 03, 2025.
Blockchain and Cryptocurency Technology intends to introduce you to the technology, beginning with Bitcoin, that makes peer-to-peer decentralised cash possible. Most of the topics will be applied to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and look into the solutions engineers are coming up with to build out these distributed systems. We will focus on the technological, but none of it is possible without the social and thus many topics have deep roots in the human societies we have constructed.
Students are expected to create, and as such there is a large emphasis on the project which is wide-ranging and open-ended. You are expected to show what you've done at the end of semester, this is via mixed methods of presentation/ video/ demonstration/ discussion/ and written reporting. To get credit, You 👏 Must 👏 SHOW 👏 What 👏 You've 👏 Done. Assignment structure and details are on Canvas.
| Week | Topic | Tutorial | Case Study |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Money & Bitcoin | T01 | |
| 02 | Cryptographic Foundations | T02 | |
| 03 | Anatomy of a Block and Transaction Flow | T03 | |
| 04 | Consensus Mechanisms - Proof of Work | T04 | |
| 05 | Consensus Mechanisms - Proof of Other | T05 | |
| 06 | Guest Lecture 1 | T06 | |
| 07 | Personal Development Week | ||
| 08 | Smart Contracts and Ethereum | T08 | |
| 09 | Guest Lecture 2 | T09 | |
| 10 | Scaling | T10 | |
| 11 | Privacy | T11 | |
| 12 | Security & Future Trends | T12 |
- Course Discussion forum
- Gemini/Perplexity/Grok etc. - Get an account! RMIT Students have access to ChatGPT-4o through Val (https://val.rmit.edu.au/)
- Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos - A foundational technical guide to Bitcoin.
See the list here
(Open Source only, of course [and I hesitate to include Coursera links])
- Cryptocurrency Engineering And Design (MIT)
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (Princeton)
- CS251: Blockchain Technologies (Stanford)
- Resistance Money (Wyoming)
- RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub (Melbourne)
- Decentralized Systems Lab (Illinois)
- digital currency initiative (MIT)
- UZH Blockchain Center (Zurich)
- ETH Blockchain Initiative (ETH Zurich)
- UNIC Blockchain (Nicosia)
This course was started in 2018 in Auckland, New Zealand. I knocked on my colleague's door (later my PhD supervisor) and asked why we -- as a computer science department -- don't teach blockchains? He said, "I'm not sure, maybe we can do something about that." This spawned the first blockchain specific course in New Zealand which is still running at Auckland University of Technology. In 2024, I moved from Auckland to Hanoi. This is the first instance of the course running at RMIT University, Vietnam. My github has archived older versions of the course, which I actually first wrote as a module in a computer security course. I believe I swapped out smart card security in place of blockchain protocols at that time.
In all these years, I've never felt like the course has been 'finished'. There's always something that I don't get to, or there's always some branch that I want to spend more time talking about in class. I think this is how university courses should be, particularly with topics involving modern computing and development.
I always look forward to what the students can teach me, and this year is no different.
Notice something that doesn't seem right? Could be explained better? Have an analogy that helps with your understanding? Want to include something new that I haven't? Feel free to fork and submit a pull-request. It can also be good practise (and an easy way) to build your contributions.
Licensed under a highly permissive CC-zero to promote the widest distribution possible. Please do as you may with the course content. If you feel attribution is beneficial you may link back here. The Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication waives copyright interest in a work you've created and dedicates it to the world-wide public domain. Use CC0 to opt out of copyright entirely and ensure your work has the widest reach. As with the Unlicense and typical software licenses, CC0 disclaims warranties. CC0 is very similar to the Unlicense.