Hello,
Anyone has tried this platform?
It’s based upon the blockchain network and gives you rewards for learning !!!
It doesn’t exist, that’s an ICO, a way to raise money. Like an initial stock offering, just much, much more dodgy (to the extent that China & South Korea banned ICOs last month). Someone has had an idea that will make them very large amounts of pretend money very quickly; their aim is likely to turn that into real money as fast as they possibly can. In all likelihood they’re serious about thinking it’s game-changing, but it’s vapour at the minute. It might go from being a landing page with badly-written copy to an actual thing, but more likely it will vanish and someone will be driving around SF in a nice new Lamborghini thinking of new ways to turn pretend stuff into cash
lets avoid cryptocurrency mania here and just focus on learning web development.
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in hindsight, I agree. I thought they were consolidated and a good learning platform, but the more I learn what ICO is, yeah, let’s just drop the crypto nonsense
Hi,
Andrius from BitDegree here. Thanks for finding out about BitDegree. We are still in the early stages of the project. But the team is working to make it a success. Also BitDegree is looking for partnership with freecodecamp. If someone from this forum can contact me regarding partnership i would love to hear it.
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Heya, I’ve been digging into BitDegree courses for few months. One of my last engagements was ultimate PHP & SQL classes. Presently I’m on separate ones. So my thoughts are that as long as they’re not charging any penny from my pockets, I see them as a top-notch platform to educate myself. I saved 60$+ in past month since I stopped attending Codeacademy and Udemy courses.
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In massively surprising news of the day, BitDegree is offering courses, for free! And they seem to be the same ones that you have to pay for on Udemy! That’s awfully generous of them. If you were of a suspicious bent, you might think the courses had been ripped from Udemy 
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I am sorry I posted this.
This looks and smells like another ICO scam
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Whaaat? Why do you consider it being a scam? Their ICO already ended and the team didn’t disappear anywhere, they’re working on developing the platform, introducing interactive coding courses, attending various conferences and, most importantly, engaging with the community in an active and transparent way! For me, it seems opposite from a scam (tell me if I’m wrong)
Why are the courses free whereas you have to pay for them on Udemy? How are they making money here? There is no information on the site, so it’s not really active and transparent - the sequence of events has been:
- ICO backed with a flashy website
- Website now has courses [that are all free] that you have to pay for elsewhere.
Sorry for being cynical, but it looks like they created some pretend money, cashed out, then dumped a set of ripped courses on the site so it looks like there is actual content.
They have to attract users somehow, so how they would do that if they would offer the same courses as anywhere else for a price? No value offer here, that’s why their courses are free at the moment. And this explains why the ICO was organized - to have funds for developing the project until they will start raising profits (which will happen once the token will be implemented and courses won’t be free anymore)
I decided to put my 2 cents in here as the uproar is too harsh here.
You people here are being stereotypical and forget the whole concept of ICO.
The way I see ICOs, it is evolutionary crowdfunding (ex. Kickstarter) either p2p fundraising mechanism where you come to express your material interest, as you believe in a project idea.
The main difference of participation in ICOs economy is natural expectations of yielding some sort of utility value that is expressed on the companies tokens. A parallel to IPO. In contrast, Crowdfunding/Fundraising is done just for the mental image, while supporting the creative either inspiring idea and getting nothing financially material in return.
Again, no ICO is not a way to gather the money as fast as possible and in a meantime vanish with Lambo. However, a fundamental issue with ICOs that some of them raise money in a pre-product stage. As a result, it makes the market a bit speculative and risky.
Bitdegree.org is a project which already passed pre-product phase, and I don’t see a need to hypothesize about them being a scam without any proofs or facts.
I hold some BDG token myself, as they deliver the experience in the game. Token is released, and implementation into the web is coming soon, new exchanges question is on the table.
Moreover, Bitdegree is creating authentic content on interactive courses list, and everything is free, for sure for a limited time. Don’t forget it’s a first blockchain-powered online education platform with token scholarships and tech talent acquisition. Definitely a game changer.
No, I understand what an ICO is. I am extremely cynical w/r/t bitcoin/Blockchain branded stuff, with very good reason I think. For example, in this case:
a. There is no learning product.
b. The stated aim of the company is to allow other companies to produce and host learning content on their platform.
c. Blockchain has certain, very specific uses. None of these uses have anything to do with actual education (vs the business of providing supporting services for education).
d. One of these uses is to do with digital identify (and specifically easy revoking of). If you are selling a platform that is going to be used to manage big chunks of personal staff data, an ability to do that is a massive plus, particularly if you’re targeting the EU.
e. Another use is having a fully traceable sequence of records. Again useful if you’re a big company and you want to test people and you want to compare how they did before and make sure they aren’t visibly cheating etc.
f. Both of those things are useful from a corporate PoV.
Don’t describe it as “revolutionary” or a “game changer”, it’s not, it’s just B2B corporate services (it’s very similar looking to Pluralsight except they’re offloading the production of the courses to the companies using it [aiming to have cake and eat it] + advertising that it remains free [I assume only at point of entry, but we’ll see] for learners). But it has “Blockchain” branding attached to it, so that makes it easier to extract money from people it is easy to extract money from, opening up the possibility of avoiding standard funding channels (eg loans) and delaying having any actual product beyond a a shiny site and a vague description of an idea.
All above does not mean that there is not great value in (what I assume reading udemy licensing material) are white-label courses being given away for free, or courses that may come in future. At the minute, there are those white label courses (with pretend discount!), a very sketchy (but sensible) outline of their actual business, and some buzzwords. I’m sure that if you’ve invested in it you’re sure it’s a super great wizzo guaranteed success (or you’d like a few more people to invest as well before you get out), but from outside it looks slightly suspect.
The pretend discount is tbh the most sketchy part. If it was free to start off with why say there’s a discount unless the bit that says the courses are free isn’t going to remain true. Maybe consumer protection laws are more lax in the US, but it sure looks like something that falls well into that area.
I’m not much into ICO or cryptocurrencies and what not but a couple of things in the actual website seem very suspicious:
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You cannot access the Terms of service at sign un time ( so I didn’t sign up obviously). It is not that the link to them is broken, the whole sentence is hardcoded in a
<p>tag. Although nobody really reads them, companies are generally required by their countries law to explain their users what they do with their data before you sign up. If they don’t give you the option to review the terms of agreement they might be breaching the law and your data such as your email can be used in any way they please. -
There is no accessible reviews within the page, you can’t click them anywhere, for the particular courses or the website in general. They do tell you they have such many reviews for such course but there is no way to prove it.
-The facebook reviews, the only ones I could find, are really polarized. Very few bad reviews of 1 star and everything else is 5 stars, no middle ground, and that’s always worrying. Also nearly all reviews have big grandiose keywords like ‘revolutionise’.
- There is also a section with HTML CSS and Javascript text course that is exactly like the one in w3School. The HTML has been clearly copied as the whole structure is the same although the text and explanations has been changed.
For the type of introductory courses, they offer I’d rather go with websites like Udemy or Udacity that offer similar free courses and are a lot more reliable.
Well, you both made good points.
MarioLema, I assume you are clever guy, I couldn’t agree to disagree and I believe we are both right here. You represent position where brand is your value thus consequently you pay money, whilst I prefer to leave bucks in my pocket instead of nitpicking.
Thank you, guys, for your comments!
I would agree that their website may look suspicious or scamy due to the fact that a lot of content looks ‘copied’ from other sites. I think this is because they organized the ICO - by involving themselves into this whole blockchain and cryptocurrency field they were forced to deliver the product asap as all token holders always require for quick development, quick token price raise and quick profits… So they just wanted to deliver something for the community so that they would be satisfied.
However, in all cases project and business development takes a lot of time. I have been deeply interested into Bitdegree and am following their progress already for some time. From all that I have seen I strongly believe that the team is really trying to deliver something good and valuable rather than just disappearing with their quick gains. Step by step their improving their website and working hard in developing the project and if you’re really interested in what they’re doing you can notice it. Of course, all businesses’ main goal is to raise profit and earn money, however, Bitdegree is not another scamy ico project but a website that really brings value to people.
Finished their ICO, gathered the funds they needed to make the project and now they’re offering free courses. I’ve talked with the team on Telegram ( they’re very active there) and they said that some of the courses are the same courses as on Udemy because they contacted the instructors and paid them upfront to license their content. So, they can offer it for free. Honestly it’s a win/win for students and teachers.
The project is doing great and they even released like 10 courses on their own. The team shows no signs of dissapearin with the money because they publicly show their names/faces and office location. In just 6 months they did what most platforms weren’t able to accomplish in several years. As a learning resource BitDegree is phenomenal even though it’s still in beta. But if you find bugs, you can always contact the team and they’ll fix it asap.
Nearly minus 80% since ICO, what has happened?
nah.
still looks, smells and feels like a gigantic SCAM!