About this book

The primary goal of this book is for you to be able to decide for yourself whether you trust Bitcoin. On the way to that goal, you’ll learn a number of Bitcoin concepts—such as digital signatures, proof of work, and peer-to-peer networks—on a pretty deep level. Some secondary goals fall out naturally:

Who should read this book

This book is intended for technically interested people who want to understand Bitcoin on a deep technical level. The book doesn’t require any programming skills, but a basic understanding of some technical concepts is beneficial—for example, databases, computer networks, computer programs, and web servers. A little math background can be useful too, but it’s certainly not required.

How this book is organized: A roadmap

This book consists of 11 chapters and 3 appendices:

I suggest that you read chapters 2–8, where we’ll build the cookie token system from the ground up, sequentially. Each chapter adds a technology to the system to solve a specific problem, and by chapter 8, we’ll have built Bitcoin. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 can be read out of order, but I recommend reading chapter 11 carefully, because it covers the essence of Bitcoin. If you get chapter 11, you’re grokking Bitcoin.

I reuse some overview figures from chapter 1 every now and then throughout the book to help you with orientation, both in chapter intros and embedded in the chapters. It’s easy to lose track of the big picture and the goal of the current topic; look for the periscope and section headers like “Where were we?”

Each chapter, except chapter 1, contains exercises. They’re there for you to assess your skills. Each batch of exercises is divided into an easier section called “Warm up,” used for shorter fact checks; and a tougher section, “Dig in,” that requires more thinking. Some of the exercises in the “Dig in” sections are dreadfully difficult, so if you get stuck, please consult appendix B for answers.

Code conventions

There’s not much code in this book. None, actually. But there are some Linux commands in chapter 8 and appendix A. A command is prefixed by a dollar sign and a space, as follows: 

$ cd ~/.bitcoin

When a command is too long to fit on a single line, we break the line with a backslash \ and indent the next line by four characters, as follows: 

$ ./bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction \
    30bca6feaf58b811c1c36a65c287f4bd393770c23a4cc63c0be00f28f62ef170 1

Backslashes can be used to write commands across multiple lines in most Linux command-line interpreters, so you can copy and paste such commands into your terminal. Lines of output from commands aren’t broken with backslashes; they’re instead wrapped as needed using a line break arrow as follows: 

{"result":"000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f",
 "error":null,"id":"1"}

Throughout the book, data is written in a fixed-width font: for example, 7af24c99. I usually don’t explicitly write out what encoding is used (decimal numbers, hexadecimal strings, base64 strings, base58 strings, and so forth), because it’s often obvious from the context.

liveBook discussion forum

Purchase of Grokking Bitcoin includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum, go to https://livebook.manning.com/#!/book/grokking-bitcoin/discussion. You can also learn more about Manning’s forums and the rules of conduct at https://livebook.manning.com/#!/discussion.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers, and between readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions lest his interest stray! The forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.

Other online resources

If you have specific questions about Bitcoin that you didn’t find the answer to in this book, I recommend Bitcoin Stack Exchange (web resource 2 in appendix C), which is a platform for questions and answers where good answers are up-voted by readers.

I also recommend the Bitcoin Developer Reference (web resource 3), for more comprehensive documentation of Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin Core source code (web resource 4) is the most accurate source of information. It’s the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, and reading that source code is sometimes the only way to find answers to questions.

If you want to search the contents of this book online, I recommend working with the source code available at web resource 5. It will be released at the latest 90 days after the book is published.