by

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.

If you’re looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity with computer science and programming, this book is for you. Researchers and advanced students will find the book useful as well — starting around Chapter 5, most chapters have novel intellectual contributions.

Princeton University Press is publishing the official, peer-reviewed, polished, and professionally done version of this book. It will be out this summer. If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, you should sign up here. UPDATE: The book came out in the summer of 2016, and was the runner up for the 2017 PROSE Award in Computing and Information Sciences, Association of American Publishers. Check it out here.

Several courses have already used an earlier draft of the book in their classes, including Stanford’s CS 251. If you’re an instructor looking to use the book in your class, we welcome you to contact us, and we’d be happy to share additional teaching materials with you.

Online course and supplementary materials. The Coursera course accompanying this book had 30,000 students in its first version, and it was a success based on engagement and end-of-course feedback.

We plan to offer a version with some improvements shortly. Specifically, we’ll be integrating the programming assignments developed for the Stanford course with our own, with Dan Boneh’s gracious permission. We also have tenative plans to record a lecture on Ethereum (we’ve added a discussion of Ethereum to the book in Chapter 10).

Finally, graduate students at Princeton have been leading the charge on several exciting research projects in this space. Watch this blog or my Twitter for updates.