Free Bitcoin textbook from Princeton

The Princeton Bitcoin Book by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten,
Andrew Miller and Steven Goldfeder is a free download — it's over 300 pages and is intended for people "looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity with computer science and programming."

It'll be a physical book from Princeton University Press this summer.

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).

The Princeton Bitcoin Book

The Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available
[Arvind Narayanan/Freedom to Tinker]


(Image: Bitcoin Wallpaper, Jason Benjamin, PD)