Book description
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
Publisher resources
Table of contents
- Preface
- Quick Glossary
- 1. Introduction
- 2. How Bitcoin Works
- 3. Bitcoin Core: The Reference Implementation
- 4. Keys, Addresses
- 5. Wallets
- 6. Transactions
- 7. Advanced Transactions and Scripting
-
8. The Bitcoin Network
- Peer-to-Peer Network Architecture
- Node Types and Roles
- The Extended Bitcoin Network
- Bitcoin Relay Networks
- Network Discovery
- Full Nodes
- Exchanging “Inventory”
- Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) Nodes
- Bloom Filters
- How SPV Nodes Use Bloom Filters
- SPV Nodes and Privacy
- Encrypted and Authenticated Connections
- Transaction Pools
- 9. The Blockchain
-
10. Mining and Consensus
- Introduction
- Decentralized Consensus
- Independent Verification of Transactions
- Mining Nodes
- Aggregating Transactions into Blocks
- Constructing the Block Header
- Mining the Block
- Successfully Mining the Block
- Validating a New Block
- Assembling and Selecting Chains of Blocks
- Mining and the Hashing Race
- Consensus Attacks
- Changing the Consensus Rules
- Soft Fork Signaling with Block Version
- Consensus Software Development
- 11. Bitcoin Security
- 12. Blockchain Applications
- A. The Bitcoin Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto
- B. Transaction Script Language Operators, Constants, and Symbols
- C. Bitcoin Improvement Proposals
- D. Bitcore
- E. pycoin, ku, and tx
- F. Bitcoin Explorer (bx) Commands
- Index
Product information
- Title: Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition
- Author(s):
- Release date: June 2017
- Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- ISBN: 9781491954386
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