Despite the fact that the price of Bitcoin has been falling since the beginning of the year, the excitement around cryptocurrency in large educational institutions in America has not subsided. Several major universities have started or will soon begin teaching courses on Bitcoin and the revolutionary blockchain technology.
“At first, my colleagues laughed at me when I started talking about Bitcoin,” said David Yermack, a professor of business and law at New York University who was one of the first to seriously suggest studying cryptocurrencies in 2014. “But after a couple of months, after I was invited to Basel to talk to central bank officials, their jokes stopped.”
Professor Yermak initially booked a lecture hall that could accommodate 180 people, but the course became so popular that he had to move his classes to the largest class at New York University, which can accommodate 225 students at a time.
A course on virtual currencies, created by Princeton University computer science professor Arvin Narayanan, has become the fifth most popular course on the distance learning site Coursera. And last month at the University of California, Berkeley, students stood under walls and sat in aisles just to get to the first lecture on “Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics, and the Future of Technology, Business, Law.”
“I hope you understand that you should appreciate the opportunity to be here,” the computer science professor began her lecture, “After all, there are a huge number of students who want to be in your place.”
Business School Professor Sin La Blanc says that because the industry is so new and so fast-paced, teachers need time to perfect how they teach the course, so students need to be sensitive to teachers' mistakes: “We're not waiting to deliver a perfect blockchain course. Don't compare this to the perfect cryptocurrency and blockchain training program. Compare this with the absence of such courses at all.”
Interest in learning blockchain is associated with the rise in the price of cryptocurrencies last year. However, this has caused several problems worthy of separate study, say professors from various departments.
For lawyers, projects created on the basis of virtual currency challenge traditional legal concepts and categories, for example, what is a product..
For regulators, this has become a problem because of the many entrepreneurs who have made billions of dollars without using traditional fundraising channels, but using legal uncertainty to their advantage.
For economists and financiers, Bitcoin and other digital currencies have raised questions about the very nature of money. At the first lecture in Berkeley, for example, the development of Bitcoin was viewed through the prism of the development of money.
Some business schools are currently focused on exploring decentralized forms of information storage that are possible thanks to blockchain. Many large corporations are considering blockchain technology separately from Bitcoin and believe that it can help them solve many problems, such as tracking the copyright of a song or cargo containers.
“My classes are attended by students from many different fields,” says Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke Business School whose lectures are attended by 231 students. “They understand that this will impact many industries and want to become experts in this field.”
Last week, Stanford University hosted a three-day conference on the architecture and software security of blockchain technology, a topic that has recently been raised frequently in academic papers and journals.
“Suppose the price of Bitcoin falls to $2 tomorrow. I'm sure it won't change anything from a technical point of view,” said Nicholas Christin, a computer science professor who teaches a course called “Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain and Applications.”
Students seem to miss these courses. On one of the Berkeley campuses, students created their own club, which invites everyone to study blockchain technology, taught by the students themselves. MIT director Neha Narula said she had not planned a course on blockchain this semester, but had received constant requests from students about it. The Massachusetts Institute now teaches this course.
“Students are very passionate about this area and are desperate to explore it as deeply as possible,” she says..
Professors, teachers and students agree that beyond academic opportunities, learning and knowledge of blockchain technology will be a huge advantage in the job market. Job site Indeed.com reported a rapid increase in the number of vacancies in fields related to this technology. The site even has a separate tab “List of crypto vacancies” dedicated to offers in this area.
Subscribe to our channel in Telegram
According to https://www.cnbc.com
You May Also Like
I sent litecoin to a bitcoin address! What to do?
Don't panic, first of all. And read our advice, secondly.
How much can a novice investor earn from trading? Part thirteen. Trading (continued)
We continue the series of publications about trading in order to understand in practice how much a novice investor can earn using only the forecasts published on our website. To understand how useful they are, we decided to conduct an experiment and simulate a situation in which a person who only knows about trading that he needs to “buy cheaper and sell more expensive” tries to earn additional income in his free time from work by investing part of his funds in cryptocurrency trading.
