My Year Teaching Bitcoin

Insights and lessons from teaching three Bitcoin classes at Texas A&M

In 2023, I taught three Bitcoin classes at Texas A&M. Twice, I taught the Bitcoin protocol to computer science undergraduates, and once, I taught a Bitcoin fundamentals class to business students. The engineering class was technical, coding parts of the Bitcoin protocol in Python. The business class had a broader scope, covering the industry around Bitcoin, as well as tax, policy, and regulation. It was a joy to teach all three classes, and I’m thankful that Texas A&M supported this initiative. Here are my chief insights and lessons from the year:

1. Engineering students will learn economics through Bitcoin.

Texas A&M has the most undergraduate engineering students in the country, and they face no requirements to take any formal business or economics classes. I found my students knew almost no economics aside from the few that took economics in high school; most of the time, they would repeat what they heard off the internet. For example, few could draw a supply and demand curve. And there is no movement right now to include economics in their education. Bitcoin fixes this by providing the opportunity to incorporate the best of economics into the class.

I spent about three weeks covering the necessary economics in both classes: the supply and demand for money in a competitive market, how the Federal Reserve creates new money in a fiat system, accounting transactions on bank and central bank balance sheets, and the game theory of Bitcoin mining. Some of the students liked this content the most, partly because it was so new. But also seeing the connection to technology was cool. Looking ahead, Bitcoin’s great educational opportunity is to educate engineering students on economics. And it’s the right kind of economics; not all economics has value (I know, I have a PhD in economics). Bitcoin selects the most relevant material, leaving some of the older economic theories, like Keynesian economics, in the dust, where it belongs.

2. Signing a transaction is the most conceptually demanding moment in the class.

Halfway through my technical class, we covered how a Bitcoin wallet signs a transaction. There is a lot of material that led up to this point. We needed to define finite fields, then elliptic curves over those finite fields, then private and public keys, then digital signatures using private and public keys, and finally, forming a digital signature of a Bitcoin transaction.

This is not a small achievement. It is a major intellectual advance. All of these steps are needed, and if you miss any one of them, the whole thing doesn’t work. Not only is this the most conceptually demanding part of the class, but it also is one of Bitcoin’s innovations. Some of the most subtle steps involve understanding how nodes both sign and verify a transaction. I initially would have thought that the mechanism design of mining would be the most challenging. But it turns out that understanding Bitcoin at the block level is relatively easy. Understanding it at the transaction level is more challenging but also more rewarding.

3. Bitcoiners freely devoted their time to the class.

I asked a dozen professional Bitcoiners to speak to the class in person, and none turned me down. They traveled from as far as Colorado to talk in person about Bitcoin entrepreneurship, sound money, the Lightning Network, Schnorr signatures, multisig security, Bitcoin taxation, and both on-grid and off-grid Bitcoin mining. The format that worked the best was the fireside chat, where I asked most of the opening questions, and the students finished it out with their own questions at the end.

4. For the technical class, the biggest opportunity is teaching the evolution of consensus.

Bitcoin differs from most computer science because it is a social system. Though it operates on top of cryptography, computer hardware, and computer networks, at the end of the day, money is a social construct, and so too is Bitcoin. More than this, the evolution of and upgrades to Bitcoin are a social process defined by consensus. For example, I explain some recent innovations in Bitcoin, such as p2sh, SegWit, Taproot, and the current debate on inscriptions and ordinals. Developing a deep intuition for these topics that fairly and accurately portray the core ideas requires a unique blend of hard science and social science. Determining whether ordinals are an attack on Bitcoin or not requires mixing the game theory of mining with an understanding of how SegWit and Taproot change the transaction layer of Bitcoin. This is an exciting intellectual area and one that deserves more academic attention. It’s also the area I will invest in more the next time I teach this.

5. The greatest opportunity in Bitcoin business education is to explain technical concepts.

Today, there is a wide gulf between Bitcoin discussed at technical Bitcoin developers meet up (like BitDevs) and mainstream media (like CNN). As Bitcoin adoption grows, it is imperative to close this gap. It is possible to explain how Bitcoin works without revealing any of the underlying code base. That was my chief innovation with my students this semester. I found that smart business students can understand the internal mechanics of Bitcoin from reasoning and images alone. Of course, verifying the code is better, but realistically, some education on Bitcoin fundamentals is better than none. Every business student can understand signatures and transactions. My chief intellectual project this next year will be to spread this technical curriculum for a non-technical audience.

6. Next time: discuss more innovation in Bitcoin.

The protocol is complex, and it takes time to explain all the ideas. Next year, however, I will focus more on innovation and entrepreneurship in Bitcoin.

On the technical side, there are open questions about Bitcoin security that are technical and subtle, like a pinning attack on the mempool. On the business side, are a whole host of new financial services that are growing up around this new technology. A focus on entrepreneurship can also give students more of a call to action.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to email me at korok@tamu.edu if you have any questions that you would like answered about Bitcoin; I generally answer those in my paid posts.

Korok