Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

Front Cover
"O'Reilly Media, Inc.", Jun 12, 2017 - Business & Economics - 416 pages

Join the technological revolution that’s taking the financial world by storm. Mastering Bitcoin is your guide through the seemingly complex world of bitcoin, providing the knowledge you need to participate in the internet of money. Whether you’re building the next killer app, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this revised and expanded second edition provides essential detail to get you started.

Bitcoin, the first successful decentralized digital currency, is still in its early stages and yet it’s already spawned a multi-billion-dollar global economy open to anyone with the knowledge and passion to participate. Mastering Bitcoin provides the knowledge. You simply supply the passion.

The second edition includes:

  • A broad introduction of bitcoin and its underlying blockchain—ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executives
  • An explanation of the technical foundations of bitcoin and cryptographic currencies for developers, engineers, and software and systems architects
  • Details of the bitcoin decentralized network, peer-to-peer architecture, transaction lifecycle, and security principles
  • New developments such as Segregated Witness, Payment Channels, and Lightning Network
  • A deep dive into blockchain applications, including how to combine the building blocks offered by this platform into higher-level applications
  • User stories, analogies, examples, and code snippets illustrating key technical concepts
 

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
1
Chapter 2 How Bitcoin Works
15
The Reference Implementation
31
Chapter 4 Keys Addresses
55
Chapter 5 Wallets
93
Chapter 6 Transactions
117
Chapter 7 Advanced Transactions and Scripting
149
Chapter 8 The Bitcoin Network
187
Chapter 12 Blockchain Applications
291
Appendix A The Bitcoin Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto
323
Appendix B Transaction Script Language Operators Constants and Symbols
335
Appendix C Bitcoin Improvement Proposals
341
Appendix D Bitcore
347
Appendix E pycoin ku and tx
351
Appendix F Bitcoin Explorer bx Commands
361
Index
365

Chapter 9 The Blockchain
211
Chapter 10 Mining and Consensus
229
Chapter 11 Bitcoin Security
285
About the Author
374
Copyright

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About the author (2017)

Andreas is a passionate technologist, who is well-versed in many technical subjects. He is a serial tech-entrepreneur, having launched businesses in London, New York, and California. He has earned degrees in Computer Science and Data Communications and Distributed Systems from UCL. With experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business and financial systems technology consulting and years as CTO/CIO/CSO in many companies — he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand. More than 200 of his articles on security, cloud computing and data centers have been published in print and syndicated worldwide. His expertise includes Bitcoin, crypto-currencies, Information Security, Cryptography, Cloud Computing, Data Centers, Linux, Open Source and robotics software development. He also has been CISSP certified for 12 years. As a bitcoin entrepreneur, Andreas has founded three bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He often writes articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on Let’s Talk Bitcoin and prolific public speaker at technology events. Andreas serves on the advisory boards of several bitcoin startups.