Beginner's Guide to Blockchain Technology | Hacker News Reader

Beginner's Guide to Blockchain Technology

blockstrap.com

185 pointsbytebot25 comments

I found the O'Reilly book Mastering Bitcoin excellent.

It's been a while since a tech book gave me such enjoyment. In an age when when word innovation typically is used to mean "I duck-taped these two turds together" it is great to encounter real novelty in tech.

The book makes the wonder of blockchain easily approachable if you have some background in CS and takes some nice excursions to topics like elliptic crypto.

an online version lives here: https://github.com/aantonop/bitcoinbook

It doesn't really feel "for beginners" to me. Quite the opposite, difficult (if not slightly boring) to read.

On the other the free ebook Mastering Bitcion by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, available at http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001802/index.ht... is an absolute pleasure to read imho.

It starts by explaining the core blockchain/bitcoin concepts in humorous layman terms ("nerd money!") and slowly goes deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole while keeping things pleasant.

The chapter that explains cryptographic hashing (SHA1 and all) is a masterpiece at opening the tech to non-technical audience.

It feels like this is for people who have a good understanding of all the technologies that bitcoin uses, but have never looked at bitcoin.

It's not free.

Edit: It is free. Thanks nnx.

How did you get it free? Or you just go the repository from github?

It's the github repo and you can also read it free online.

Anyone else having trouble reading the slides in Chrome? I'm getting "Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document." in the console. Works fine in Firefox though.

nope, fine for me.

I'm also getting those errors - probably because I block third party cookies. A workaround would be to open the slideshare links and view the presentations from their site. In Incognito, so their cookies won't matter :)

Privacy Badger blocks the tracking cookie of slideshare.net and linkedin.com. Therefore the slides do not work for me.

Is this content also available without privacy infringement?

You could open the slideshare links in Private/Incognito mode.

That does not prevent the browser from loading from those domains.

Agreed, but the tracking cookies will be worthless. It seems like a good trade-off to me.

You could also just switch privacy badger from block to kill cookies mode. Unless those sites are using some sort of super cookie, it should do the job.

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Biggest fan of your API uptime, using since last year! Any updates as to when I will be able to chose defrag UTXO per wallet?

In the next couple months, we are adding a bunch more features in the next few weeks :)

A relevant course: https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

Hey everyone, Johnny from Blockstrap here. I tweet from @johnnynomics.

This course was presented as a free series of workshops we did around Europe this summer - you can read more about it here - http://blockstrap.com/en/blog/onboarding-europe/.

These slides make a lot more sense when we talk you through them - we're currently editing the video and will be sharing it on Blockstrap when finished. There's only so much structured learning we could fit in a day, so we thought this presentation was a good starting point for those new to Bitcoin and the underlying tech.

If you're interested in building blockchain applications come check out our stack at http://blockstrap.com. We have an API, framework, and several open source starting points. We welcome contributions from the community and we're very open to alternatives to SlideShare.

It says these guys do talks. Anyone got a video of one?

Not sure about these guys, but I gave a similar talk at Airbnb last year if you're interested.

http://youtu.be/TIYqN7j1mys

We actually had this very course recorded in both London and Amsterdam. We'll be sharing the videos on http://blockstrap.com when we've finished editing.

I wrote about why the Blockchain is important too

https://blog.safello.com/index.php/2015/07/29/bitcoin-enterp...

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