Princeton Bitcoin Textbook Available Online, To Be Published In Summer

The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook – Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies – is now freely available online.

Authored by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller and Steven Goldfeder, the official version of this book will be published by Princeton University Press during this summer.

“The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available. We’re very happy with how the book turned out: it’s comprehensive, at over 300 pages, but has a conversational style that keeps it readable”, said Arvind Narayanan, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, in his blog.

The book explains how Bitcoin works at a technical level and seeks to familiarize readers with computer science and programming. It is fairly detailed and the chapters covered include:

1. Introduction to Cryptography and Cryptocurrencies
2. How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization
3. Mechanics of Bitcoin
4. How to Store and Use Bitcoins
5. Bitcoin Mining
6. Bitcoin and Anonymity
7. Community, Politics, and Regulation
8. Alternative Mining Puzzles
9. Bitcoin as a Platform
10. Altcoins and the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
11. Decentralized Institutions: The Future of Bitcoin?

In addition, at the end of each chapter, links to other relevant sites have been provided that readers may refer along with exercise questions related to the chapter.

Narayanan said that they plan to offer a version with some improvements shortly. Moreover, he also suggested that there are “tentative” plans to record a lecture on Ethereum, noting that a discussion of Ethereum has been included in Chapter 10.