Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Princeton: Princeton University Press (forthcoming), 2016. This textbook closely follows the video lectures in the course. The official and professionally done version of the book will be out this summer.

Introduction to the book

There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Optimists claim that Bitcoin will

fundamentally alter payments, economics, and even politics around the world. Pessimists claim

Bitcoin is inherently broken and will suffer an inevitable and spectacular collapse.

Underlying these differing views is significant confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We

wrote this book to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique.

To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical

level. Bitcoin truly is a new technology and we can only get so far by explaining it through simple

analogies to past technologies.

We’ll assume that you have a basic understanding of computer science — how computers work, data

structures and algorithms, and some programming experience. If you’re an undergraduate or

graduate student of computer science, a software developer, an entrepreneur, or a technology

hobbyist, this textbook is for you.

In this book we’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin. How does Bitcoin work? What

makes it different? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What

applications can we build using Bitcoin as a platform? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? If we were

designing a new cryptocurrency today, what would we change? What might the future hold?

Each chapter has a series of homework questions to help you understand these questions at a deeper

level. In addition, there is a series of programming assignments in which you’ll implement various

components of Bitcoin in simplified models. If you’re an auditory learner, most of the material of this

book is also available as a series of video lectures. You can find all these on our Coursera course . You

should also supplement your learning with information you can find online including the Bitcoin wiki,

forums, and research papers, and by interacting with your peers and the Bitcoin community.

After reading this book, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when

reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you

need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to

integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects.

https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University

Joseph Bonneau, Princeton University

Edward Felten, Princeton University

Andrew Miller, University of Maryland