Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies

It's a pleasure for me to write this review. I don't know the author or have any affiliation with him or the businesses that he consults with. I can't say enough good things about this book. I actually got the paper version of this. If you are a technical sort of person, this book is for you. I would say if you do tech support, system admin, programming, system security or anything where you have a baseline knowledge of digital systems, then this book will be good for you. If you know nothing of computer systems, then you may want to work up to this book. This text goes into the nuts and bolts of Bitcoin, the protocol, payment system and crypto-systems. I don't want to scare anyone away, however. This is a very quick read (something like 260 pages). I am not certain if the reason for this is that Andreas is just a great writer and was able to condense a broad topic in very few pages -or- Bitcoin itself just isn't overly complicated and lends itself to a concise text. I do know that I started reading this book with a ton of knowledge about Bitcoin (I thought), yet I still got a ton of information. It was though this book tied a bunch of free-floating ideas that weren't linked before. Instead of endlessly reading the Bitcoin wiki, the Bitcoin Core (formerly Satoshi client) source code, changelogs, bitcointalk forum and attempting to piece all of that together, this book does all that for you. I do think that reading those outlets IS important, but this book is key to jump start your understanding if you aren't a super genius (I'm not). Undoubtedly, you will come away with more questions about cryptocurrencies then when you started the book, but this is what is beautiful about life sometimes. One questions unlocks many more. I feel, after reading this book, that I can have an intelligent discussion with some high level people in the cryptocurrency world. The sorts of questions that I can ask someone like Gavin Andresen go beyond "what wallet would you recommend" to "let's discuss set reconciliation and the its importance to the p2p world at large". I feel like I have the fundamentals down thanks to this book.

This is one of the best technical introductions I have read to Bitcoin and the public ledger. Following Bitcoin, there are many other cryptocurrencies. An understanding of the design goals of these cryptocurrencies necessarily starts with an understanding of Bitcoin.

I just finished reading this after listening to Antonoplouos on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It is excellent and if you want to learn Bitcoin, this is a great place to start. It really shines when he goes into detail of how to use open source code to noodle around with the blockchain and the client. It is not perfect though. The order of it feels reversed. The first few chapters are hard to understand without having a broad understanding of Bitcoin already. Also, the text assumes the graphics are in color but they are not. This makes it hard to follow some of the examples. The online version of the book (free) is actually better for this reason. Finally, it lacks motivation for why the protocol is structured as it is. For instance, it's not really clear here why Proof of Work is necessary. This blog post does a much better job:http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/Otherwise, very well researched and clearly written.

This is definitely the Bitcoin book to get if you are interested in the inner workings of Bitcoin. The later chapters get highly technical and assume you have a programming background. There is a relatively quick transition from the basics of bitcoin into the gritty details.The language is direct and to the point so there is quite a lot of information packed into the 200 pages.A nice balance between code shown, diagrams, and explanations was provided throughout the book. In some cases the explanations could have used a little more depth as author explains some highly techincal ideas quickly. Still, this is the only real substantial Bitcoin book out there for now.

Excellent coverage of bitcoin. The reason for 4 stars rather than five is that the explanations are sometimes not great. The discussion of elliptic curves was particularly poor (fig 4.4 etc) and often security/encryption techniques are left dangling (e.g. RIPEMD160 etc ). A lot of hand waving going on. A lot of discussion of "what" but very sparse on the "why". Anyway, I purchased a few additional references which cover cryptography in detail to fill the gap. Overall, this is probably the best single reference on bitcoin and a great place to start digging deeper ... looking forward to second edition.

Bought this book to get a stronger look in to Bitcoin and its inner workings. It truly is a book for coding, and I don't code so that's why 4 stars. I had hoped/expected more info on Bitcoin that I didn't already know not having to do with coding and didn't find a whole lot (I would say I did go from a some-what beginner Bitcoin enthusiast/knowledgeability to an intermediate user after reading).

This book is a fairly rigorous, detailed and technical introduction to Bitcoin (and by implication Blockchain).This is not a book focused on the econokic, societal, or business implications. Rather, it seems best suited for a technologist seeking a level 200 technical introduction. You won't be,an expert without hands on exposure. You will be able to be technically articulate in Bircoin/Blockchain.

This book has been a joy to work with. It is coherent, well structured, technically accurate, and offers a wealth of external resources that will continue to enhance the reader's understanding of the space. Highly recommended for anyone attempting to understand Bitcoin at a deep level. Also recommended for novices in the space, just skip some of the deeper code stuff. The book is well written enough so that even a novice will gain significant understanding from it.

Mastering Bitcoin is not a consumer book. If you are a programmer or cryptographer it seems pretty good.I am neither. I am an IT Pro with an interest in technology, how it might change society and an interest in improving the way we carry out financial transactions. Electronic payment, and more broadly the exchange of value, has never been a technology problem but has always been about vested interests such as Government, banks, technology companies, and payment processors. Disruptive technology often (but not always) clears the logjam and is absorbed into the mainstream.So I come to Bitcoin needing an understanding of the network, how it works and what are the benefits of using it. For me the code in the book is not something I am personally going to dive into but seeing some of the code does help explain to me what a transaction is, how it processed on the blockchain and the challenges of the programmers involved.The non-technical reader should avoid this book except for the first chapter that uses real-world examples of Bitcoin use. Programmers who want to learn to develop applications should read it. IT Pros that want a broad understanding of the technology will find about 50% useful.This would be 5 stars if I was a programmer but I am not so the code was a little above me.One final comment is that I ordered this book on a Kindle and a printed version for a friend. My only disappointment is that you can't pay by Bitcoin on Amazon....

As a relative newcomer to Bitcoin & blockchain technology, but a veteran programmer, this was exactly what I needed. From installing and running bitcoind through to constructing scripts using the "Script" virtual machine, this book answered every question I had.The book is very new and up to date; the publication date is December 2014.It examines the various tools and libraries available for developing Bitcoin software, before diving into the concepts. It explains the maths of elliptic curve cryptography, the various hashing and encoding algorithms such as SHA256, Base58 encoding, etc. It explains the various kinds of wallet implementations, including HD and SPV. As you'd expect, it spends a long time on transactions, covering inputs, outputs, fees, scripts, etc.There is quite a detailed explanation of SPV nodes, covering the implementations of Bloom filters and Merkle trees. The structure of the blockchain itself is covered in depth, showing block structure and header fields in detail. Mining is covered in detail. Towards the end there's a chapter on alternative currencies and blockchains. There is an Appendix listing all the Script opcodes.After reading most of this book, I was able to make RPC calls to the bitcoind, create transactions, extract scripts from them and insert modified scripts before submitting them to the network.

Anything digital can be copied, indeed duplicated endlessly, while the Internet is full of bad people. It's clear that designing digital money to be exchanged anonymously over the public Internet was never going to be easy.Bitcoin (and similar digital cryptocurrencies) have to solve a number of problems: security of the contents of your 'wallet', trust between buyer and seller, the integrity of the currency itself. Any robust solution is plainly going to be both complex and counterintuitive.Bitcoin's key architectural innovation is the blockchain: a list of every transaction which has ever occurred. Transactions - as they occur - are broadcast across the peer-to-peer network, validated by each node, assembled (for a fee) by 'bitcoin miners' into a new block which is then rebroadcast (there's a kind of race to finish a new one), the new block being finally stacked by each full node onto its local copy of the ever-growing blockchain. The protocol provides mechanisms to ensure global consistency as divergences (forks) are quickly damped out.Transactions are protected (signed) by private keys (permitting you to spend your own coins) and public keys - used to construct bitcoin addresses (like bank account numbers) to which payments are addressed, and also serving to validate signatures.There are endless overviews of bitcoin which hand wave about how it works. You will never understand bitcoin that way, because the reason it works is in the detail. Andreas M. Antonopoulos's book contains that detail and is accessible if you already know about public key cryptography, cryptographic hashing and digital signatures.The book itself is focused on developers - plenty of code examples - and is weaker on the overall architecture and those essential usage models. However, if you read it alongside Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper and the Wikipedia article on bitcoin, then you will get there -- and be both amazed and impressed.

Primarily aimed at developers, this book is a superb introduction to the inner workings of bitcoin. The complex mathematical concepts behind the cryptographic underpinnings of bitcoin are discussed in an illustrative manner which make it easy for any technical person to understand. Plenty of example code is given when explaining implementation level specifics, which are more than enough to get you on your feet. I would recommend anyone with an interest in bitcoin to get a copy of this book.

A good starting point if you want to find out what Bitcoin is all about. And if you're not interested in Bitcoin, read it for the information about the Blockchain, which is the underlying secure and distributed database technology that is stirring the imagination of banks and governments, and will probably outlast Bitcoin.