Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available | Hacker News Reader

Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available

freedom-to-tinker.com

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Michael Nielsen has a nice intro the protocol, for those looking for another source:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a...

(he has other articles I would recommend taking a look at, too --- check them out if you're interested! )

This is the resource I recommend to all of my friends as well. Great walkthrough.

Here's the link to the actual PDF: https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p...

I read this book when I took CS251 last fall. It is an accessible, mostly nontechnical overview of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. For those interested in reading the book and learning more about cryptocurrencies, I recommend going through the CS251 reading list which includes this book.

https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/syllabus.html

One of the author of this book already had a MOOC about Bitcoin on Coursera.

Link : https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

Despite being a little outdated and justifiably overly focused on the computer-science aspects, this is a huge improvement in bringing academia up to speed on cryptoeconomics.

I found the book(& course notes) to be interesting but non-technical & little verbose. For those wanting to read technical subject matter I'd recommend the bitcoin developer reference & bitcoin developer guide at bitcoin.org

Why not Satoshi's original paper [1]?

1. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

That's a good place to start but it's also light on technical details and Bitcoin has evolved a bit since then.

Since nobody has mentioned it yet, Andreas Antonopoulos' book, "Mastering Bitcoin," is quite good.

You can build the ePub from source:

https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

Or get it from oreilly:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032281.do

epub or any ebook ready format?

>> Princeton University Press is publishing the official, polished, and professionally done version of this book. It will be out in summer 2016.

Is this really freely available? I'd much rather see Princeton release this book to the public domain.

While I think the notion of intellectual property is a mistake, when someone offers us a half-full glass of lemonade, to respond with a complaint that the glass is half empty is extremely poor form.

You can download the draft as PDF right from their site.

Yes, but that isn't free imho. Can I host a copy on my own website? Can I include the book as part of a course taught at my school? Can I integrate chapters of the book into another book that I may be writing? Making a copy available for reading isn't the same as making it free.

Some people are just never happy about anything

That's not really free though, is it? Because I can't really just start hosting it, claiming to be its author, and have people believe me. (White-labelling). For that to happen, the original authors have to stay anonymous, it has to have much less branding included.

So it's not really all that free in my opinion, even with your additions. /s

in other words: your standards are too high. It's free because you don't have to pay for it.

Free as in beer, which is a step in the right direction at an institution where other textbooks could cost hundreds of dollars.

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