Coursera – Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (2016)

Coursera – Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (2016)

About the book

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies provides a comprehensive introduction to the revolutionary yet often misunderstood new technologies of digital currency. Whether you are a student, software developer, tech entrepreneur, or researcher in computer science, this authoritative and self-contained book tells you everything you need to know about the new global money for the Internet age.

How do Bitcoin and its blockchain actually work? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are users of cryptocurrencies? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? These are some of the many questions this book answers. It begins by tracing the history and development of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and then gives the conceptual and practical foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network as well as to integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects. Topics include decentralization, mining, the politics of Bitcoin, altcoins and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the future of Bitcoin, and more.
Courses that use the book

The book has been used in over 120 courses worldwide, including courses at Berkeley, Cornell, George Mason University, New York University, Stanford, TU Delft, University of California, Davis, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Virginia, and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
About the authors

Arvind Narayanan @random_walker

Arvind Narayanan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton.
Joseph Bonneau @josephbonneau
Joseph Bonneau is a Technology Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford.
Edward W. Felten @EdFelten
Edward Felten is a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton, and the founding Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy.
Andrew Miller @socrates1024
Andrew Miller is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Steven Goldfeder @sgoldfed
Steven Goldfeder is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, advised by Arvind Narayanan.
Jeremy Clark @pulpspy
Jeremy Clark contributed the foreword. He is an Assistant Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering in Montreal.
Translations

Chinese and Japanese versions of the book are available. A Korean version is in preparation.
Free pre-publication draft

A pre-publication draft of the book is available for download here. The published version is better in a several ways: it is peer-reviewed, professionally edited and typeset.
Coursera course

The Coursera course Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies is a useful complement to this textbook. It has a series of video lectures that closely follow the textbook content, plus programming assignments and quizzes.
Programming assignments

There are three programming assignments which will take you through the steps of designing and building a basic cryptocurrency. The programming language we use for the assignments is Java. This is not because we’re fans of Java, but because the infrastructure we used for creating grading scripts is Java-based.

Download the assignments

The zip file contains three folders. In each folder, the assignment specification is provided as a PDF file. You’re also provided starter code in the form of .java files.

We’ve used these assignment in courses that we’ve taught, but there may still be bugs in them. We appreciate your understanding and would be grateful for any bug reports. Email us at [email protected].

We also have grading scripts for each of these assignments. If you’re an instructor and would like access to the grading scripts, please send us a brief email in which you introduce yourself and tell us about your course.
Exercises

Coming soon.
For instructors

Email us at [email protected] for additional instructional materials.
Errata

If you find an error in our book, please email us at [email protected].

The errata page lists all known substantive errors (typo corrections are also welcome, but not listed there).

Get Coursera – Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (2016) at tenco.pro