How Do I Learn Basic Blockchain

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Some interesting facts:

Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency, has over 8 million accounts and grew by more than 100% per year since its inception in 2010.

77 billion people use the internet, and 0.5% of them use blockchain in some form in the present time.

Tech giants like IBM, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft are investing heavily in Blockchain technology. IBM alone has invested $200 million and 1,000 employees in blockchain-powered projects.

86% of top global executives believe blockchain will make it to mainstream eventually.

90% of major European and North American banks are exploring blockchain solutions.

Indeed, Blockchain technology has gained a lot of traction in the past few years due to its most popular application, Bitcoin. However, the use of blockchain goes far beyond the financial industry. The IT industry, government agencies, healthcare, and other sectors are using this powerful technology to improve existing business processes and promote new business models. Blockchain offers a number of unique features like immutability, security, traceability, and transparency across a distributed network.

In simple terms, Blockchain is a kind of database used for recording transactions (a record-keeping system) that doesn’t require a third party to validate each one. These transactions are distributed among a network of computers known as peer-to-peer networks. The block in the term ‘blockchain’ means that such transactions are grouped into blocks, and chain means that these blocks are added to the chain rather than stored separately. This is in contrast to traditional databases, where the data is stored in rows, columns, and files.

Proper knowledge of blockchain basics is a highly sought-after skill these days. The growing automation and penetration of artificial intelligence are already causing the replacement of many manual jobs, and people need to learn digital skills to remain relevant in this dynamic job market. Blockchain is one such futuristic technology whose popularity doesn’t seem to reduce any time soon.

This article discusses what all concepts are covered in blockchain basics and how you can learn them for a bright career.

Blockchain Basics

Now that you have got some idea about blockchain technology, you should know what topics to cover to have a clear understanding of the fundamentals of this technology. Firstly, you should explore the challenges of storing data over the internet, the risks involved, and security issues that crop up. Then, you should try to understand how traditional online databases function. Knowing about the limitations of traditional databases will help you compare how blockchain redesigns this function, solves the problem, and offers built-in privacy, data integrity, security, and transparency.

After knowing about the need for the technology, you can now begin learning what blockchain actually is and how it works. You will come across terms like distributed ledger, cryptography, verification, validation, consensus algorithms, hashing, and bitcoin mining. These obscure-sounding concepts are indeed difficult to follow, and you may be confused in the beginning. However, one should know that these concepts aren’t something that only technical people would have to deal with. These topics are the very thing that determines why a business should adopt blockchain and reap its various benefits.

Blockchain basics also cover the topic of Bitcoin and Ethereum protocols. Knowledge of these two topics will lay the foundation necessary for developing blockchain applications and programming. However, at this stage, you don’t need to move on and learn how to create decentralized applications, something for which blockchain developers are responsible. You just need to have a basic idea of how Bitcoin and Ethereum use blockchain technology.

How to Learn Blockchain Fundamentals?

Going through the above information, you can infer that learning blockchain isn’t easy. The concepts associated with it are quite technical, and one cannot gain expertise in it through independent study only. So, we recommend you take an online blockchain fundamentals course and begin your learning journey. The benefit of enrolling in such a course is that you would not need to research what topics to go through step-by-step. All the study materials will be provided to you in advance, and you just need to follow the curriculum as designed.

Moreover, the instructors for such online courses are usually industry experts who have rich industry experience and they know what skills are actually required to become job-ready. You will also be surprised to know that some of the courses aren’t even paid ones. One can simply register on the training platform and gain access to the video modules for free. Upon completion, you will also get a course completion certificate that you can share with prospective employers on professional networking sites like LinkedIn.

One such free course is the Blockchain Developer program offered by Simplilearn through its SkillUp initiative. Apart from becoming familiar with the common blockchain terms, you will also learn how to use tools like Ganache, Geth, MetaMask, and Truffle. Through 6-hours of in-depth video modules, you will gain a number of important skills like Bitcoin, Ethereum deployment tools, smart contracts on Ethereum, hyperledger composer, and more. So, what are you waiting for? Explore this course today and start an exciting career in blockchain.