Bitcoin enters the curriculum in US universities

A Texas university is the latest to offer a Bitcoin course for students. The course will teach Bitcoin programming.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency courses are becoming increasingly popular in colleges and universities across the United States. The latest institution to join the trend is Texas A&M University, which has announced that it will be offering a course on the “Bitcoin Protocol” to its students starting from January 17th. 

The course will be taught by Associate Professor Korok Ray of Mays Business School at Texas A&M and will be followed by a course on “Programming Bitcoin” where students will learn to “build a Bitcoin library from scratch.”

Professor Korok was obviously delighted with the new course and tweeted out: “I will be teaching the first ever Bitcoin class at Texas A&M this spring”. He went on to say that it had taken months to get the course approved. In another tweet he stated that the course would be based on Jimmy Song’s “Programming Bitcoin”.

We will follow Programming Bitcoin by @jimmysong, and build a Bitcoin library from scratch.

— Korok Ray (@KorokRay) January 12, 2023

The adoption of bitcoin and cryptocurrency courses in universities is seen as a positive step towards improving financial literacy and understanding the potential of this revolutionary technology. In an article first published on the story by CoinTelegraph, crypto researcher Josh Cowell was quoted as saying that a lack of high-quality crypto education has been a key roadblock in taking adoption to the next level.

It’s not just technical aspects of bitcoin and cryptocurrency that are being taught in US colleges, legal and regulatory implications of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are also becoming a part of the curriculum. 

Other universities that now offer cryptocurrency courses include Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University, National University of Singapore, Cornell University and University of California Berkeley. 

As the popularity of bitcoin and cryptocurrency continues to grow, it is likely that more and more educational institutions will recognize the importance of providing students with a solid understanding of the underlying principles and potential applications of this technology.