Introduction to the book
There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. We hear about startups, investments, meetups, and even buying pizza with Bitcoin. Optimists claim that Bitcoin will fundamentally alter payments, economics, and even politics around the world. Pessimists claim Bitcoin is inherently broken and will suffer an inevitable and spectacular collapse.
Underlying these differing views is significant confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We wrote this book to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique.
To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. Bitcoin truly is a new technology and we can only get so far by explaining it through simple analogies to past technologies.
We’ll assume that you have a basic understanding of computer science — how computers work, data structures and algorithms, and some programming experience. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student of computer science, a software developer, an entrepreneur, or a technology hobbyist, this textbook is for you.
In this series of eleven chapters, we’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin. How does Bitcoin work? What makes it different? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What applications can we build using Bitcoin as a platform? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? If we were designing a new cryptocurrency today, what would we change? What might the future hold?
Each chapter has a series of homework questions to help you understand these questions at a deeper level. We highly recommend you work through them. In addition, there is a series of five programming assignments in which you’ll implement various components of Bitcoin in simplified models. If you’re an auditory learner, most of the material of this book is also available as a series of video lectures. You should also supplement your learning with information you can find online including the Bitcoin wiki, forums, and research papers, and by interacting with your peers and the Bitcoin community.