CMU and other schools with blockchain courses should be teaching about the ethics and legal penalties and ecological consequences of running blockchain pyramid schemes and scams, instead of teaching students how to hype, evangelize, and retroactively contrive use cases for existing Ponzi schemes like CMU Coin. The world already has more than enough Bitcoin shills. Universities don't need to be pumping and dumping more of them out.

David Gerard's book "Attack of the 50 Foot BlockChain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts" would be an excellent down-to-earth textbook for a realistic course about blockchain.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/book/

>Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: The Book

>“A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency” — New York Review of Books

>“A very convincing takedown of the whole phenomenon” — BBC News

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3165196

>An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. A young physics student starts a revolutionary new marketplace immune to State coercion; he ends up ordering hits on people because they might threaten his great experiment, and is jailed for life without parole. Fully automated contractual systems are proposed to make business and the law work better; the contracts people actually write are unregulated penny stock offerings whose fine print literally states that you are buying nothing of any value. The biggest crowdfunding in history attracts $150 million on the promise that it will embody the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code; upon release it is immediately hacked, and $50 million is stolen. How did we get here? David Gerard covers the origins and history of Bitcoin to the present day, the other cryptocurrencies it spawned including Ethereum, the ICO craze and the 2017 crypto bubble, and the attempts to apply blockchains and smart contracts to business. Plus a case study on blockchains in the music industry. Bitcoin and blockchains are not a technology story, but a psychology story. Remember: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/Attack-50ft-Blockchain-Review...

>Key Takeaways

>The book discusses Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies in economic and social terms, rather than purely technical

>It discusses various Bitcoin case studies, including Mt Gox and the Silk Road

>Bitcoin mining is no longer decentralised but is instead controlled by a small group of miners that control a large majority of the hash power

>The book concludes with a detailed examination of the possible use of blockchain for rights management in the music industry

>David Gerard's 2017 book, "Attack of the 50ft Blockchain" is an in-depth look at the cryptocurrency space.

>The book takes a straightforwardly skeptical angle, and is explicitly intended as a non-technical overview. Rather than focus on details of cryptography and code that describe how a cryptocurrency or a blockchain works, the book discusses the phenomena that have emerged as part of the rise of Bitcoin and blockchain. This includes things such as the anonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, the multiple high-profile failures of Bitcoin exchanges, as well as clear examples of human folly, fraud and unconstrained greed.

https://cmichel.io/book-review-attack-of-the-50-ft-blockchai...

>Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard is a book that summarizes every important event around bitcoin, including the dozens of scams, hacked exchanges, and the false promises of blockchain technology. Everyone that is hyped about this technology should read this book to get his excitement levels back to normal. It’s written really well and understandable while still being technically correct. It’s unintentionally funny most of the time and explains things in a dry humor that I really enjoyed.

>However, it sometimes reads too negative and is too bitcoin and smart contract coins specific, therefore ignoring other aspects of cryptocurrencies which often have a real use case. For example, it doesn’t talk at all about privacy coins (Monero / ZCash), Storage Coins (STORJ / Siacoin / Filecoin), social communities with rewards (STEEM), RIPPLE, etc. That being said, I agree with the sentiment that for most of the projects nowadays the blockchain isn’t even needed, and would arguably work better in a centralized way. Blockchain has just become a new buzzword to get investors interested.