Topic: Any reference books or scholarly books about cryptocurrency? (Bitcoin) (Read 2846 times)

Andreas Antonopoulos just released (or is just about to release) a book on bitcoin. here you can purchase as ebook here http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032281.do. from what ive heard it is quite good, for both general readersv and advanced students of crypto. not a physical book, but has all the library #s and ISBN etc, so its a legit publication.

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For a few months I have been writing a book aimed at introducing beginners to cryptocurrency.  Since March 2014, I have devoted much of my time towards researching a total of 41 coins (including Bitcoin).  This book will also have other pages which define cryptocurrency terminlogy in a non-technical manner.  Besides these, factual tables, statistics and more will be included.  At the moment (03/10/2014) I have completed 37 coin sections with the following still incomplete:

Feathercoin FTC
Franko FRK
Novacoin NVC
Peercoin PPC


Old Bitcointalk thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cryptocurrency-the-alt-ernative-beginners-reference-book-483187


After the introduction, there are 20 sections based on the following topics:

a) What is Cryptocurrency?
b) Why does Cryptocurrency exist?
c) Why are there so many "alt" coins?
d) Is Cryptocurrency money?
e) What is mining?
f) The Blockchain
g) Proof of Work and Proof of Stake
h) The Wallet Client
i) The Block Time
j) The Block Reward
k) What is a Pre-mine?
l) Difficulty Re-targeting
m) Scrypt, SHA-256 and others
n) What is a 51% attack?
o) Community
p) Exchanges
q) Coin Developers
r) Purchasing Cryptocurrency
s) Advertising/Marketing
t) Anonymity

These won't necessarily be it the above order

Phew, well I guess Bitcoin really is too young and still to small in order to be mentioned in a big way in books. There certainly are scientific papers on it, or certain aspects of it - especially the aspect of achieving a distributed consensus!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16

this says it all with regards to wikipedia I remember reading the creator of wikipedia found out he enjoyed playing chess after reading the page about himself on wikipedia

Hope people see the humour in the above....I use wikipedia all the time, but it doesn't make the above any less accurate.  Research is generally from more than one source anyway.

Also, in all honesty, my University will mark me down for using wikipedia references for any coursework, and my thesis mentor won't even entertain the idea.  The rules are pretty simple, use published papers and text books as part of your research.

HOWEVER, In saying this, B-Money, Hashcash, and Bitcoin - none of which are academic published papers. Even though I am doing an academic thesis, I see the excellence in the work done by all three of those papers, all of which have added tremendous value to the world on a number of levels.  I wish the university community were not such prudes when it comes to these things.  A good paper is a good paper, regardless of the credentials of the people who wrote them.  For all we know, Nakamoto has 3 degrees.

Hashcash by Adam Back:  http://www.hashcash.org/

I forgot to mention Hashcash in my previous suggestions.  Hashcash is pretty important for the proof-of-work concept.

Bitcoin seems to be the amalgamation of about 3 to 4 other concepts, but together for a single purpose.

To easily understand some of the concepts in Bitcoin and if you prefer videos, check out Lynda - up and running with bitcoins and also check out the Khan Acadamy videos online.

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-what-is-it?v=EA0LkCkvUeU

You are welcome to PM me if you have any questions or need more suggestions.

CK

Read  this post.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8598207

I am pretty sure if you did enough searching and research on the internet you would find just as much if not more information on bitcoins than what you would find in a book and it means no clutter for you. Wikipedia is always a great source and I know there are many blogs and articles out there about bitcoin to help you find your way.

Because it's for a thesis paper, and books are more reliable than the internet in most cases. Plus it's a requirement.

Just curious, why do you need a full book about bitcoins? Wikipedia can be a good source, else search on youtube if you are a newbie.

just go on youtube and get through all the videos with Andreas Antonopoulos on btc
An education and experience in themselvers

Oh, wow! Thanks so much!

Hi there,

I am doing a thesis on Bitcoin for University so can gladly help.  Books, I have a few but so far have not found one that has been detailed enough for my purpose:

Bitcoin and Digital Currencies - The new world of money and freedom
Bitcoin Beginner - A step by step guide to buying, selling and investing in Bitcoin
Bitcoin Exposed - Today's complete guide to tomorrow's currency
Bitcoin Internals - A technical guide to Bitcoin
Bitcoin Step by Step
Mastering Bitcoin
The Bitcoin Skeptic

Other than this, there is a fare about of articles published on the internet freely accessible which you can look at:

B-Money:  http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt
The original paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Bitcoin Wiki Homepage - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page
Bitcoin.org - https://bitcoin.org

some academic papers (this is where scholarly books reference from in general):

Bitter to Better:  http://crypto.stanford.edu/~xb/fc12/bitcoin.pdf
Bitcoin and the age of bespoke silicon - http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mbtaylor/papers/bitcoin_taylor_cases_2013.pdf
Economics of bitcoin mining - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pdf
Majority is not enough - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcArXiv.pdf
Two bitcoins for the price of one - https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248.pdf

No text books though....this is what you would have to use.

Thank you for responses so far.. any more?? 

i have one
but in indonesia languange.

write by CEO of bitcoin.co.id

maybe this could be interesting:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Satoshi-Collected-Writings-Nakamoto-ebook/dp/B00M6KGJ2K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1409131255&sr=8-2&keywords=satoshi+book+of

I suggest you make use of the materials provided via this forum or you make references to websites because Bitcoin is new and developing.

I'm in high school and a guy

They insist on some books.. so here are some replies to an identical Reddit thread about this subject I posted:

https://github.com/aantonop/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/book.asciidoc
http://www.ofnumbers.com/the-anatomy/
http://www.ofnumbers.com/the-guide/
http://www.bookofsatoshi.com/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0534

Tell your professors the internet itself is the greatest library of knowledge ever accumulated, and they need to get over the physical book fetish and step into the information age like the rest of us.

If they continue to insist of that obsolete form of knowledge known as a "book", tell them they're an irrelevant old dinosaur and also fat, and that you always secretly hated him/her. Then go to your college ombudsman and claim they sexually harassed you. Should work if girl.

If you're not a girl, give him this book:



See how much more fun this is than reading a book?

Any physical books though? That's mainly what I'm looking for.

The best technical book about bitcoin I have read so far is:
Bitcoin Internals: A Technical Guide to Bitcoin by Chris Clark
It is a pity it doesn't have a section on Elliptic Curves...

I havent checked it out but, what about this one?
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032281.do