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Mastering Bitcoin

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Mastering Bitcoin is essential reading for everyone interested in learning about bitcoin basics, the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer app or business. From using a bitcoin wallet to buy a cup of coffee, to running a bitcoin marketplace with hundreds of thousands of transactions, or collaboratively building new financial innovations that will transform our understanding of currency and credit, this book will help you engineer money. You're about to unlock the API to a new economy. This book is your key.

This book will help you learn everything you need to know about decentralized digital money, which is one of the most exciting technical revolutions in decades. Just as the Internet has transformed dozens of industries - from media and entertainment to retailing, travel and many more - decentralized digital money, in the form of crypto-currencies, has the ability to transform the foundations of money, credit and financial services. It also has the power to transform other social activities and institutions that we don't usually associate directly with money, such as corporations, governance, voting and the law.

As the first successful digital currency, bitcoin is the natural starting point for anyone interested in decentralized digital money, its implications and applications. Mastering Bitcoin describes the technical foundations of bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies, from cryptography basics, such as keys and addresses, to the data structures, network protocols and the consensus mechanism ("mining") that underpin bitcoin. Each technical topic is explained with user stories, elegant analogies and examples, and code snippets illustrating the key concepts. The first two chapters offer a broad and accessible introduction to bitcoin that is intended for all audiences, from new non-technical users to investors and business executives seeking to better understand bitcoin. The remainder of the book dives into the technical details of bitcoin's operation and is aimed at professional developers, engineers, software and systems architects, systems administrators and technically-minded people interested in the inner workings of bitcoin and comparable crypto-currencies. Mastering Bitcoin is intended to be used as a reference book for technical professionals, as a self-study guide for bitcoin entrepreneurs, and as a textbook for university courses on bitcoin and digital currencies.

Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and yet it has already spawned a multi-billion dollar, global economy that is growing exponentially. Both new and established companies are adding bitcoin as a payment method, and investors are funding a flurry of new bitcoin and related startups. Mastering Bitcoin can help you become part of this vibrant new economy. The time to get started is now.

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2014

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About the author

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

18 books624 followers
Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and well-respected figures in bitcoin. He is the author of two books: “Mastering Bitcoin”, published by O’Reilly Media and considered the best technical guide to bitcoin and “The Internet of Money”, a book about why bitcoin matters.

As an engaging public speaker, teacher and writer, Andreas makes complex subjects accessible and easy to understand. As an advisor, he helps startups recognize, evaluate, and navigate security and business risks. Andreas was also one of the first to use the phrase “The Internet of Money”, as early as 2013, to describe bitcoin as part of his speaking business.

As a bitcoin entrepreneur, Andreas has founded a number of bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He is a widely published author of articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on the popular Let’s Talk Bitcoin Podcast, and a frequent speaker at technology and security conferences worldwide.

Andreas offers strategic consulting to a small number of crypto-currency companies that are aligned with his interests. He also offers expert witness testimony as an expert in the security, technical details and use of crypto-currencies, worldwide.

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5 stars
1,351 (51%)
4 stars
892 (33%)
3 stars
309 (11%)
2 stars
66 (2%)
1 star
29 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 251 reviews
Profile Image for Athan Tolis.
313 reviews659 followers
November 11, 2016
I read Cryptocurrency by Paul Vigna and Michael Casey and I loved it. I was so mesmerized that I immediately sat down and wrote an eight page stream-of-consciousness account of what it left me thinking Bitcoin was. And in doing so I realized that I did not have a full grasp of the detail. Worse still, I also realized that when it comes to cryptocurrency the devil truly is in the detail.

My friends all said “buy some and you’ll soon understand better”

I’m a loser, so I read another book instead. This book.

I am beyond satisfied with my choice. Immensely satisfied. I say I loved Vigna and Casey’s book, but I liked Mastering Bitcoin more. It went through all the little nagging issues I had and one by one gave me the answers. And it gave answers to questions that had never occurred to me but in retrospect are very relevant.

So if you were wondering
• where exactly the public key is used
• what the difference is between the public key and the wallet address
• why a transaction hash is double the size of a bitcoin hash
• what exact puzzle the proof of work solves
• who awards Bitcoin to the successful miner
• what a 51% attack is
this book not only supplies the necessary computer code (and I could not possibly comment on whether it’s correct or not, I can’t code to save my life) but also fully motivates the reader to understand. And it takes you to places you’ve never been before, from Elliptic Curves all the way to Alt Coins.

Much as I don’t think it would cut it as a first introduction, I can’t recommend this book enough. Now I feel ready to go get my hands on some Bitcoin
Profile Image for Juvoni.
98 reviews101 followers
November 6, 2017
As a technologist and investor in Bitcoin, coming from a value investing background, I felt uncomfortable getting lucky investing in Bitcoin based on speculation as it was hard to wrap my mind around the utility and potential of Bitcoin.
Reading Mastering Bitcoin has significantly improved my understanding of the Protocol where I finally feel like I’m starting to get it. The book goes over the technicals of how Bitcoin works from keys, addresses, wallets & transactions, the scripting language, the blockchain, the bitcoin network, mining, bitcoin security and more. This is a technical book, and the examples take some understanding of Computer Science, high-level cryptography, Networking, statistics, and mathematics to follow through as Andreas drills down into the underlying technical implementations behind the core features of the protocol.
The book is still approachable if you don’t know how to code, but can understand technical abstractions. It was fascinating to journey through the layering of the technology and evolution to solve complex decentralization and security problems. The book has a lot of additional references and graphs to bring additional context to the what, where, how and why certain things are done in Bitcoin which made the material easier to absorb
Profile Image for Shannon Appelcline.
Author 25 books145 followers
October 30, 2015
An excellent overview of Bitcoin that simultaneously presents the big picture in a very readable way while also providing very specific details of how the protocol works, complete with examples. Technical writing, as it should be.
Profile Image for Dalan Mendonca.
150 reviews53 followers
July 27, 2017
Great peek into the technical aspects of bitcoin/the blockchain. Having read more high level descriptions, I was always curious about the implementation details. This book provides quite a satisfactory introduction to this universe.
Profile Image for Tadas Talaikis.
Author 7 books74 followers
April 24, 2018
This one

Side note. Andreas is too much in love with bitcoin and there were so much hype in the area that everyone forgot 1) this technology is free to access and improve for anyone, and 2) that Bitcoin economic concepts are amateurish and as a consequence - creating procyclical behavior. Way better and useful in practice things for me currently are smart contracts, DApps and private blockchains. And bitcoin... bitcoin is dead here, too slow to move to the next (censorship resistant, like Andreas says, and user friendly) level.

As example, few days ago in one morning created a simple image uploader to Interplanetary File System (IPFS) app that demonstrates how such solutions should work on the user side without various cumbersome half disk taking and slow blockchain downloads, registrations and human processing times. Add payment here and you get new hosting company that achieves 100% uptime w/o much cheaper than you can buy on Amazon on Google cloud. Not including, no one knows where your fiels are. Sorry, but technology is somewhat better than bitcoin's.
11 reviews6 followers
November 17, 2014
A good overview. I was already quite familiar with the architecture of the Bitcoin system but still picked up quite a few new concepts, terms, and mental models. Especially interesting to me were the sections on transaction structure, standard transaction types, merkle trees, bloom filters, the proof-of-work algorithm in the mining process and hierarchical deterministic wallets. Andreas writes clearly (most of the time) and with a readable cadence. That said, pretty much all the info is available in the official Bitcoin documentation. If you care more about doing and less about reading perhaps you'd rather simply install bitcoin core and start messing around with the documentation by your side.
Profile Image for Eugene.
158 reviews15 followers
Read
August 20, 2018
History of bitcoin and a very detailed description of bitcoin and blockchain functionality accompanied with source code snippets to see how it is coded in real life applications. Good introduction into blockchgain for techie people.
Profile Image for Nikki.
7 reviews8 followers
February 21, 2015
First couple chapters are a nice, basic description of Bitcoin protocol, how it works. The rest is technical. Clear.
Profile Image for Makmild.
591 reviews141 followers
August 27, 2021
หนังสือบอกราก (วิธีการทำงาน) ของบิทคอยน์แบบละเอียด และวิธีการเล่าก็ง่าย เห็นภาพ แอนเดรียสอธิบายการทำงานนามธรรมให้เป็นรูปธรรมได้เข้าใจง่ายสุดๆ ไปเลย
Profile Image for Akbar Madan.
171 reviews32 followers
February 9, 2022
This book discusses the formation of this virtual world, and in a beautiful and simple language, you will understand all the processes related to cryptocurrency, some of which are specialized and difficult to understand, but will surround these modern formations and their relationship to the virtual world, which gives us many models. Bitcoin has a history that we must understand in order to understand how it works and understand transfers. The financial situation that occurs based on very modern applications that are based mainly on the decentralization standard in all operations, including Mining, and the blockchain system, which is one of the most wonderful systems that has a very high level of security, international financial policies are trying to keep pace with this world and engage in it in a very cautious way because it will It is shifting from centralization to decentralization, which is the most dangerous idea that politicians can imagine as a real reality that includes the global financial system.
Profile Image for Bilal.
113 reviews7 followers
April 28, 2020
The first book I read on the subject was Antony Lewis' The basics of bitcoins and blockchains, which is an excellent book, and one that I highly recommend. Next, I wanted to read something with more technical details about the various constructs and operations (transaction, block, blockchain formats, hashes, Merkel trees, Bloom filters, etc.), with a view towards acquiring a working skill set for related applications, and I found Imran Bashir's Mastering Blockchain. I went over half of Imran's book, but felt that that is not quite the right technical book to start with. It is better as a reference book as Imran has tried to be fairly comprehensive about the main constructs and operations and other options and alternatives. Then I stumbled upon Anrdreas' two books: this one, and Mastering Ethereum.

This book is a delight to read. The level of depth is just appropriate: neither too much, nor too little. The code examples are few and can be skipped, if so desired. Most of all I liked it for clarity of presentation.
Profile Image for Sebastian Gebski.
1,036 reviews996 followers
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May 16, 2014
Hardly a review (no rating), because what I've read is just an alpha (raw & unedited) version of this book, but it already looks quite promising:
* there's quite a reasonable description of what bitcoin is and how do you cope with it (in functional terms)
* everything has its example
* there's a brief (but reasonably sufficient) description of bitcoin tooling

What do I miss for now?
1.) Mathematical model is completely put aside - treated like magic noone would understand
2.) Book clearly is missing editor's hand :) But it's understandable at this stage
3.) I had several moments when I started to doubt - how will this particular thingie work in future, won't it cause a problem when bitcoin gains more popularity, etc. - unfortunately author doesn't perform any deep analysis on his own, he doesn't consider any risks - hopefully this will get fixed as the book gets completed

Quite a promising start.
Profile Image for Dalton Sweeney.
25 reviews2 followers
March 5, 2021
A must read for anyone with a STEM background who wants to do their due diligence on bitcoin and understand its technical underpinnings. The book does an excellent job of dispelling the vast majority of FUD seen in the media. That being said, there is valid criticism against the underlying technology (e.g. 51% attack, slow transaction confirmation, etc.) and the book doesn't shy away from discussing that either, so I would say it is a fair presentation of the benefits and drawbacks of the bitcoin network.
Profile Image for Ryan West.
12 reviews
November 24, 2019
This was a great technical overview of the inner workings of Bitcoin. It gave a good introduction for any intelligent audience, but then dove into all of the technical details. I had to pause to look up some concepts at times, but adding more detail would have made the book too long. This book did not fully cover the economic or business implications of Bitcoin, and was instead intended for developers.
42 reviews29 followers
December 9, 2017
Finally the kind of comprehensive treatment on blockchains I was looking for. Incredibly dense with information, might have to reread it in parts. Some glaring structural and pacing issues (I didn't really need to know all the bloody details of multisig wallets before even knowing how blocks are assembled)
Profile Image for Boyan.
70 reviews3 followers
February 10, 2018
One of the best (technical) books I have read recently! It provides a lot of information about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin in particular. I like the balance between technical and non-technical information in the book. Plus, the technical one is described in an interesting way (this is often a big challenge). It gave me a good in-depth knowledge about bitcoin.
Profile Image for Gergely Szabo.
18 reviews8 followers
February 11, 2018
Andreas is definitely my favorite person in the cryptocurrency world. He makes this deep and complex topic fairly accessible to laymen. The basics of cryptography are explained, however I still recommend reading some introductory material in the field before starting. I will definitely refer back to the book as It includes the hottest topics in the field, like the Lightning Network.
Profile Image for Ivan.
1 review2 followers
December 30, 2019
The ultimate guide to understanding how bitcoin and blockchain technology works under the hood, explained in an easy to read manner, with references and in an ordered way.
Andreas has outdone himself in this one.
Profile Image for Jeremy Zhang.
23 reviews3 followers
March 24, 2017
I wanted to read a book detailing the opportunities and landscape of the industry. But this book delves deep into the technical implementations of Bitcoin. Wasn't exactly what I was looking for.
Profile Image for Hayal şensoy.
41 reviews3 followers
July 21, 2017
I finished recently but I have a quite strong feeling to read it again...
Profile Image for Simon Eskildsen.
215 reviews1,079 followers
January 28, 2018
Wanted to understand more about the underlying tech. Decent walk-through at a technical level, but found myself somewhat puzzled by how the author went through some explanations.
Profile Image for Reynard.
272 reviews10 followers
August 3, 2021
Questo è il libro migliore per capire in profondità come funziona bitcoin, non ci sono confronti con i vari libriccini che promettono di spiegare tutto ma che poi si rivelano sempre molto superficiali. Se volete capire il bitcoin leggete questo testo saltando la parte tecnica (poco utile per quasi tutti), la potrete sempre affrontare in un secondo momento se ne sentirete la necessità. Il mio voto: 4 stelle.
Profile Image for Hussein Elsayed.
19 reviews4 followers
March 14, 2021
Nice book. It covers the fundamentals of the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem in great detail. It starts with a decent introduction to Bitcoin history and the high-level building blocks it; Then dives into each of its components.
Profile Image for Francisco Segundo.
26 reviews2 followers
January 6, 2022
Único material que eu encontrei com uma abordagem mais técnica e aprofundada do assunto, cobrindo desde o zero até um nível suficiente para o entendimento de bitcoin e blockchain.
21 reviews1 follower
March 10, 2021
A decent overview of how Bitcoin works. Doesn't go too much into technical details than necessary, yet explains everything in a easy-to-follow way.
Profile Image for Rohit.
142 reviews28 followers
Read
January 1, 2018
This book has a lot of technical stuff most of which went way over my head. Still, I learned a lot from this book.
August 5, 2022
Wow, I mean, where do I even begin?? I dove into the book with limited technical understanding of the topic, figuring I’d have to bow out after 50-100pgs due to my perceived incoherence of content. I, however, was pleasantly surprised to find that, while some areas (eg the code snippets) were tough, the book covered so many different topics and helped me cumulatively build a knowledge base, which made the read fun as all hell! I repeatedly found myself asking questions only to find that they were explicitly answered by the author a few pages later; a very gratifying reader experience.

Did I at times find myself browsing Bitcoin Stack Exchange for even more simplified explanations? Yes! Did I have to incessantly bother Core devs [you know who you are :)], driving them sour with disappointment? Oh yes, mamacita! But, all worth it in the end, no?

If you’re passionate about Bitcoin, I would definitely recommend, regardless of your degree of understanding and technical knowledge.

I’m told the author and his signature widow’s peak has garnered fangirldom over the years; after reading this book, consider me one of them!!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Jamesob.
9 reviews7 followers
October 16, 2015
As good a technical manual as anyone could ask for. The contents of this book are a treat for those curious and with a little bit of background in computer science. Cryptography, bloom filters, peer-to-peer networks, decentralized trust -- it just doesn't get much better than this.

Antonopoulos is a skilled tutor and, for having picked up English as a second (or third) language, does a commendable job of making things that are conceptually murky quite clear. The prose is to the point but not without character; again, about the best you can ask for in technical readings.

If you're curious, don't hesitate.
Profile Image for Anton.
125 reviews21 followers
January 2, 2017
For those who are interested in blockchain development:

- you will acquire basic terminology (mempool, proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, ...)
- you will learn the basics: elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)
- you will find answers to such questions as:
a) why it takes ~10 minutes to generate a block?
b) who sets the target complexity for the new block?

Feel free to skip some chapters, which are no interest to you (e.g. "using a wallet app")

My overall recommendation: read it
June 12, 2021
Great to understand the actual working procedure on Bitcoin. The book is between a technical manual on the Bitcoin code and a non-technical explanation of Bitcoin. Still a great read to understand the fundamentals even if you aren't a coder. I read the 2013 edition, not sure if there have been revised editions since then because the 2013 edition is out-of-date in quite a few places, though the basics remain the same.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 251 reviews

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