Blockchain Council: Not Worth It

Introduction

Some time last year, I was seeing a lot of people talking about blockchain certification and others claiming to be certified experts. Being someone who's seen the start of it all since 2008, almost all these certifications smelled like scam.

I looked around and saw Blockchain Council being touted. I paid them to see what they're actually offering.

TL;DR Summary

The site is run by a single person who's showing off as an entrepreneur, but has no real product to show. The study material is very basic, filled with typos and mistakes, and the final exam has almost no relationship to the material and many of the questions weren't even part of the material; a trick to have you take the exam multiple times (and pay more).

Additionally, the site owner shoves his own product into the material to promote it, but doesn't include other competing products. That's quite unprofessional.

Even though the certificate says "Certified Blockchain Expert", the end result is that you're not an expert in any form. You'd only learn basics, that are available for free on the internet already.

Registration and Education Sites

The main site used to register is www.blockchain-council.org but after registration, you're redirected to another one www.toshacademy.com -- What is Tosh? Or better yet, Who is Tosh?

Self-Promotion and Ownership

Looking around for what and who owns the site, I found this: www.toshendra.com

Looking around for who Toshendra Sharma is, I found this article on Forbes India promoting him, even though there was no product to show for at the time, so what was the promotion and hyping the person for?!

Link: http://www.forbesindia.com/article/30-under-30/30-under-30-toshendra-sharma-a-messiah-for-cyber-security/42329/1

Link: https://www.forbes.com/profile/toshendra-kumar-sharma/

So what are his companies to deserve a mention on Forbes? The companies are defunct and dead. 2 sites are dead and no product was actually delivered and finished.

Link: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wegilant#section-overview

Typos

The typos are scattered across many slides, that it looks obvious the whole thing was cooked on a haste and not taken seriously nor professionally.

"Sierra Leone was among the first country" should've been "Sierra Leon was among the first countries"

"to conduct the same" -- the phrase "the same" is often used by people from from India. Not that there's anything wrong with Indians, but shows that the content was made by one individual, and he's likely to be Indian.

Notice the bullet points. The first one ends with a full-stop, but the others are left without one. No consistency.

"minor node" should've been "miner node."

"%tage" should've been written as "percentage" -- the fact it was written that way shows the level of unprofessional work.

"RecordsKeeper" is the product the creator of the site is trying to promote throughout the material.

In the blockchain architecture, one layer is shown as "insensitive layer" where it should be "incentive layer" -- I wasn't whether to laugh or cry when I was going over the material.

Worthless Certificate

I totally do not recommend wasting money on this nor fueling this terrible "business." -- I wouldn't label it as scam, but it's certainly not an "expert" body to judge people, and definitely not teach them.

Event: BarCamp Kuwait 7

Looks like we're able to bring you another barcamp event this year, and we're very excited as we already have speakers lining up!

Barcamp is an "unconference" where people gather and share projects/talks at no prior specific times. First come, first serve, time slots and each talk is limited to 10 minutes followed by 5 minutes of Questions and Answers.

Join us in this open community event: https://barcampkw.wordpress.com/2019/08/30/barcamp-kuwait-seven-registration/

This event is hosted by and at Coded's place. They're an awesome company providing programming bootcamps, and host many talks with startup founders over the years.

KOC Cyber Security Summit

Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has announced a 2-day event around online security with awesome speakers who are well known in the industry:

• Mohammad Al-Doub (a.k.a Voulnet)
• Chris Roberts of Attivo
• Robert M. Lee of Dragos
• Maher Yamout of Kaspersky

The event will be on August 24th and 25th (Saturday and Sunday), and consists of 2 talks per day followed by a Capture The Flag (CTF) competition. Event details here.

The talks and the CTF competition are free and open to the public, and I highly encourage every student, fresh graduate, and employee to attend. The talks will not be too technical, and should appeal to the general public.

The CTF is open to everyone, both locals and expats, as long as they're already in Kuwait. Winners of the CTF will qualify to compete in the regional competition in Egypt later, and winners will qualify for the international CTF competition in Japan.

If you're trying to register and your school or educational organization isn't listed, pick anything, then email support "at" cybertalents.com and tell them which school your chose, and the name of your actual school for them to add it to the list.

Location: KOC Tent, Ahmadi. Don't let the name fool you. The tent is massive and is well ventilated.


Updates:

• Update 0 - Aug 3: Added email contact for CTF.