CSE234: Introduction to Blockchain

students attending Bina Ramamurthy's introduction to Blockchain class.

Business executives and university students together learned more about blockchain technologies in introductory course taught by Bina Ramamurthy.

Blockchain courses bring interest from university students and industry. The Winter Session class was the first in a series of courses, presentations, workshops, events and buildathons designed for multiple audiences. 

Watch for your next opportunity to learn more about blockchain and related technologies.

Bina Ramamurthy instructed the initial class, which had 34 participants, split evenly between SUNY students and industry executives. The UBWinter class was six sessions over three weeks. The first three sessions included the basic concepts, the rest covered the design and hands-on development of blockchain applications.

The test environments for hands-on labs were geth (go Ethereum), Solidity and Remix, and Truffle. 

  • Session 1: Introduction to Blockchain: Decentralized, peer-to-peer network, with immutable recording of transactions, that operates without any intermediaries.
  • Session 2: Bitcoin: first viable digital currency, introduced the concept of blockchain. UTXO model.UTXOàTransactionsàBlockàBlockchain. Trust model: validation, consensus, verification, confirmation. Strong foundation is hashing and cryptographic algo​rithm.
  • Session 3: Ethereum: Introduced Smart contract or computation layer for encoding business logic and rules.AccountàTxàBlockàBlockchain model.
  • Session 4: Introduction to smart contract, the basic structure and use of Solidity and Remix development environment.
  • Session 5: Introduction of access modifiers as a means for implementing rules and policies.
  • Session 6: Dapp design and development. Advanced features positioning blockchain as the next big technology innovation.