Bitcoin Cryptography: Simply Explained

One of the great features of Bitcoin is that it makes a near perfect teaching example for cryptography. Most people get that cryptography is about hiding messages, but they struggle with stuff like integrity, authentication/signatures, hash functions. Bitcoin has it all. You can have students sign transactions on bitcoins testnet, which is far easier than signing emails in PGP/GPG let me tell you.

Giving an undergrad the gift of digital signatures, cryptographic hash functions, merkle trees and hash-chains lets them understand so much about modern cryptographic engineering.

This is quite a nice introduction to cryptography on it's own, there is not Bitcoin aspect to it at all.

It introduces what cryptography (very basic number shift cyphers) and then brings in hashing , symmetric / asymmetric encryption and the finally elliptic curves.

At 81 pages, one did find oneself chuckling at the titled words “Simply Explained”.