Last week I attended a Bitcoin Advanced Course that was hosted by 21lectures. Lucas who is also the president of the Bitcoin Association Switzerland initially wanted Jimmy Song to teach his Bitcoin courses also in Switzerland. But when that didn’t work out, he decided to build the classes himself, with the help of great quality teachers and developers from the local community.
To guarantee fruitful interaction, the groups are kept small. But when I arrived, the group was even smaller than I expected. What surprised me even more, was that a good portion of the students came to Zurich from other countries especially for this course.
The biggest part of the course was taught by James Chiang. He is preparing a bigger course that he will host online. It consisted of theory and practical exercises.
Setting up the environment for the exercises proved to be almost as challenging as the hardcore crypto theory.
For me, the most interesting part was the last day, which was about the Lightning Network. As it is still new technology that is in heavy development, there is not a lot of learning material around. All the more valuable was the first hand information we received from Christian Decker.
An important part of the whole experience were the lunches. Most of the times, the teachers joined, so that we could ask additional questions and have interesting discussions.
If you are interested in Bitcoin and programming, I can definitely recommend this course.
A somewhat interesting aspect was also how to get to Zurich. Downtown parking during office hours is really expensive, and there can be traffic jams. The venue was very close to the main train station. So it would appear to be reasonable to get there by train. But a return ticket for one day costs CHF 56. Lots of Swiss people have a half price card for public transport. They changed their terms a couple of years ago. I made the mistake of reading the new terms and discovered that they are really not acceptable. So I drove there by car, which cost CHF 4.15 for the electricity and CHF 36 for the parking. Still a lot, but also a lot cheaper then by train.
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