I have a lot of people to thank for making this book possible.
First, I’d like to thank my wife, Linnéa, for all our valuable discussions and your consistent encouragement. You are absolutely fantastic.
Christina Taylor at Manning, my dear development editor: thank you for keeping me busy. Work work work. Thank you also to Bert Bates for your very valuable input on the pedagogy.
I’d like to also thank everyone else at Manning who contributed with their professionalism, including Ozren Harlovic, Rebecca Rinehart, Candace Gillhoolley, Ana Romac, Michael Stephens, Erin Twohey, Christopher Kaufmann, Matko Hrvatin, and Greg Wild. A special thanks to the fantastic production team: Chuck Larson, illustrator; Rebecca Deuel-Gallegos, copy editor; Kevin Callahan, typesetter; Tiffany Taylor, proofreader; and Lori Weidert, production editor.
I’d also like to thank Jonathan Jogenfors and Pontus Lindblom for reviewing some chapters covering their respective fields of expertise.
A lot of people on various internet forums were very helpful during my research. The ones that stand out the most are David A. Harding, Pieter Wuille, and Mark “Murch” Erhardt. Thank you for all our Twitter conversations and great answers on Bitcoin Stack Exchange (see web resource 2 in appendix C).
I got help from Andreas M. Antonopoulos when negotiating the open source terms for this book. Your encouragement during that process was gold. Thank you! In addition, thanks for the “vegetarian restaurant” analogy used in chapter 11. Thank you also for your amazing talks; you are a major source of inspiration for me.
I wrote this book using Asciidoctor, which is a text markup language. Thank you, Dan Allen, for your hard work on Asciidoctor; it’s fantastic.
The book went through three review rounds, with several reviewers in each round. Those reviews were extremely useful in vetting ideas and finding gaps in the learning path. Thank you to Jan Goyvaerts, Max Humber, Iryna Romanenko, Jean-François Morin, Al Krinker, Joel Kotarski, Markus Beckmann, Christopher Bailey, Viton Vitanis, Paolo Freuli, Tomo Helman, Marcello Seri, Maciej Drozdzowski, Cicero Zandona, Barnaby Norman, Frances Buontempo, Glenn Swonk, and Sergio Fernandez Gonzalez.
Thank you also to all the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) readers who contributed their thoughts, corrections, and questions on the Manning Forum, and to Aruna Surya for providing feedback via email.
If I left someone out, I’m terribly sorry; thank you, too.