Mastering Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Mastering Bitcoin

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Here's a 40% off discount code: WCYAZ

It brings the price down from $29.99 to $17.99, but also takes away free shipping so YMMV.

And if you're interested in some more details about the book, here an outline that was posted a while ago:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKV_VEmGPsPr74rFhhpqmdkF...

It would be great if they started accepting Bitcoin to buy this book.

I've never read an O'Reilly book but have obviously heard of them, are they generally effective at communicating more than general principles?

If I regularly read blog posts and essays written about Bitcoin, would this book be worthwhile? If not, what audience is this book targeting?

I'm generally happy with the O'Reilly books I've bought. What they cover depends on the book.

Some, particularly some of the language or OS books, are reference-oriented. Not the kind of thing you'd necessarily read straight through.

Some, the "intro" books, are just what that sounds like. Enough material to get started.

I don't know if I have any O'Reilly books I'd consider "deep", exactly, but I don't think they really aim at that.

In general, my experience is the books are what the titles say they are.

Right (and thanks for the response), so I would expect "Mastering Bitcoin" to go in to great detail...

Here is your decoder ring for O'Reilly "Animal" titles:

"Learning..." For beginners

"Programming" For intermediate-level

"Mastering" For advanced-level books

The "animal" books have the line-art drawings of animals on them. O'Reilly has other series, including books on general audience topics. There might be other key words indicating the level of the book if it isn't a programming book, but that's the nomenclature behind Programming Android

I would expect this book to go deep on bitcoin.

Ah, a friendly reminder than in a gold rush it is best to sell shovels.

Or, a reminder that if you want change, you have to educate.

Actually, in a gold rush, the very best thing for most individuals is to be among the first to start digging. Profits from shovel selling (and book publishing) are marginal.

http://www.leighdrogen.com/selling-shovels-in-a-gold-rush/

I'm really glad Andreas is writing this book, should be a great way for more developers to get involved. Crypto-currencies are unfortunately still a little too arcane and books like these help maturation.

Table of contents, possibly out of date but should give you a general idea of what's in it: http://pastebin.com/w9isSyer.

I have another good title for the second in the series: "Biting Mastercoin"

You'd think there would be a bitcoin pay option, but I guess they don't have the option since it's published through o'reilly

I went to order. Does $7.50 for the lowest shipping option seem high? Am I just sheltered living in the world of free shipping?

A little of both. I don't see it available on amazon yet.

That does sound a bit high, they should have media mail from USPS as an option, it's pretty much the cheapest way to ship books. Shipping 1lb is about $3, and material should be at max $1. They should easily be able to ship a book for around $4.

Media Mail is pretty freaking slow though.

$7.50? Try living in New Zealand where the only option is $49.50 shipping: http://i.imgur.com/PR6V6SN.png

You are probably better off with the ebook. They are DRM free so you can print it if you like.

It's a pre-order and scheduled for August. Sometimes <cough>massively and all the time</cough> book schedules slip. When Amazon lists it it is probably in editing.

> Ships via DHL International Express ($49.50)

Uh, no thanks. And there's no cheaper option.

Is it possible to get early access to the ebook?

I find it hard to tell what will happen with Bitcoin tomorrow, much less in 5 months... I am under the impression that there's a decent chance that by August, the Bitcoin story will be a great story to write a novel about. I guess there is also the chance that it will evolve and achieve some level of legitimacy. But for that to happen, a lot needs to happen between now and then, and I find it hard to believe that a book announced now will include that part of the story.

I used O'Reilly books extensively 10-25 years ago, but I have found them (and pretty much all other printed technical books) out of date too quickly in the last 5-10 years for them to be useful for technical stuff, and Bitcoin is evolving faster than even most things in the tech world.

Are there any Bitcoin for dummies books?

no, but what specifically are you looking for? it's on Khan Academy.

Oh I was just kidding. I have a background in crypto and I already understand how the system works--It's brilliant.

Isn't that redundant?

Andreas is the man. One of the best voices in the Bitcoin community. Looking forward to this.

I'm waiting for Mastering Dogecoin.

Great, I thought that there would not be a good option but seeing the content and author it's a must have

Mastering Dollars...why not?

This is an irrelevant comment, but I miss the classic O'Reilly font.

why is the ebook is not available for pre-order ? seems strange

If you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killerapp or business, you will find this book essential reading. From the basic use of 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.

I hope this book has a very thorough section on securing your app, because that's probably the biggest problem that you'll face.

Andreas is the CSO of Blockchain.info, a site which takes client security seriously enough that they never touch their client's private keys, rather than "handing out IOUs to their users"; maybe we'll see a rise in adoption of this approach.

Blockchain is just a wallet though. Many use cases (e.g. exchanges) require a trusted third party to be in control of the coins. I agree that there is no reason to hold coins if your use case doesn't absolutely require it.

They've had some pretty horrible mistakes with respect to security though (before Andreas' time though, so no reflection on him), and the basic model of a web wallet is inherently broken...

20 rounds of PBKDF2, there's tears in my eyes.

what's so wrong with 20 rounds of pbkdf2? I don't know of any attacks that can defeat it in realistic time spans.

A KDF is meant to slow down dictionary attacks by introducing a lot of computation. Normal values might be in the hundreds of thousands, even millions to bring the computation time down to less than a few a second on extremely high powered GPUs. 20 rounds has so little impact it's astonishing they even bothered to load the KDF library. Attacking encrypted files like this would be very fast for a motivated person, and when we know there's magic internet money involved there's a lot of motivated people.

doing 20 rounds in a browser represents a non-trivial amount of work. that's much better than nothing, as it helps defeat existing rainbow tables. iirc, 1000 rounds will take a

however as you suggest, on the server side, I would expect them to use a much higher 10k or so round count.

May I ask, what are some examples of the security mistakes?

They left people's wallets with "aliases" open to be cracked by anybody who found them for years, messed up their RNG and revealed some users private keys, a few XSS mishaps, and their support reset 2FA keys for hackers with social engineering.

a.k.a. they made mistakes and then remedied the problem quickly without much controversy. Sounds like the opposite of another trading firm that just collapsed.

These sound like mistakes that many beginner companies can easily make when trying to craft them. Why is there a demand for perfection out of the gate? And why are offers to remedy the situation not given the same kudos?

> Why is there a demand for perfection out of the gate?

Because it only takes one flaw for money to be permanently lost.

Like with airliners and nuclear reactors, there is no room for mistakes because you get no second chances.

If the book is written, it might be a little too late.

Security would be a good topic to cover though.

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