Going Deeper into Bitcoin

I ended my previous post, Online Bitcoin Course, with a task to accomplish.

About ten minutes into the first video, I suddenly realized I wasn't understanding the lecture. Then when I reached the end, I couldn't answer the first question. Looks like I'll have to apply some real brainpower to this thing if I want to make it work.

It turned out that I had a preconceived idea about a piece of the logic underlying bitcoin that contained a misperception on my part. Once I recognized this and eliminated it, the rest was easier. The course's 'Welcome' section says,

This week, your main tasks are to watch lectures 1 and 2 and to complete the embedded quizzes. [...] We also encourage you to read the book chapters that closely follow the lectures. For technically complex explanations, you may find it helpful to use the text and go at your own pace.

It took me exactly a week to work through the first two lectures. I'm sure that I won't be able to maintain this pace week after week, and I only skimmed the readings.

The 'Welcome' section points to another resource, Bitcoin.org - Open source P2P money, that I don't remember seeing before. I'll look at this another time.

Online Bitcoin Course

At the end of my previous post, Bitcoin at Princeton, I noted a free online course Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. The signup page says,

There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin, but also a lot of confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We’re offering this course focusing on the computer science behind Bitcoin to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique.

The signup process was quick and within minutes I was watching the first video.

'Welcome to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies'

The course starts with 'Lecture 1: Intro to Crypto and Cryptocurrencies', where the first video is 'Cryptographic Hash Functions'. I have a degree in math and computer science and have worked all of my professional career with various aspects of computing. About ten minutes into the first video, I suddenly realized I wasn't understanding the lecture. Then when I reached the end, I couldn't answer the first question. Looks like I'll have to apply some real brainpower to this thing if I want to make it work.

Bitcoin at Princeton

In my previous post, Bitcoin in the News : 2016-02, there was another news item worth special mention: Crypto connoisseurs - Curl up with Princeton's 300-page ode to Bitcoin (theregister.co.uk).

It points to princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf, 'Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies' by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder, with a preface by Jeremy Clark, ('Draft — Feb 9, 2016'). Since the draft doesn't include a table of contents, I constructed one myself (with page numbers):-

003 Preface — The Long Road to Bitcoin
023 Chapter 1: Introduction to Cryptography & Cryptocurrencies
051 Chapter 2: How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization
075 Chapter 3: Mechanics of Bitcoin
101 Chapter 4: How to Store and Use Bitcoins
131 Chapter 5: Bitcoin Mining
165 Chapter 6: Bitcoin and Anonymity
194 Chapter 7: Community, Politics, and Regulation
216 Chapter 8: Alternative Mining Puzzles
237 Chapter 9: Bitcoin as a Platform
265 Chapter 10: Altcoins and the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem
293 Chapter 11: Decentralized Institutions: The Future of Bitcoin?
307 Conclusion to the book
308 About the authors

The preface includes the following chart.

Notable electronic payment systems and proposals

A second link in The Register article worth noting is 'Narayanan's free online Bitcoin course': Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (coursera.org).

Bitcoin in the News : 2016-02

After spending most of my February posts on 'Bitcoin in the News : 2016-01' -- Predictions, More++, and Davos -- the month of February itself offered no dominant news themes. Except for the continuing debate on the so-called 'hard fork', the few repeated stories I found were tied together geographically.

Europe:

• Europe wants end to anonymous Bitcoin transactions (theregister.co.uk)
• Here's Why Europe Is About To Crack Down On Bitcoin Anonymity (fortune.com)

China:

• China's Role In Bitcoin: How Cultural Differences Are Affecting The Technology's Progress (forbes.com)
• Why the Great Firewall of China Is Causing Serious Issues for Bitcoin Miners (nasdaq.com)

Russia:

• Putin Advisor: Accepting Bitcoin Payments in Russia is a Crime (coindesk.com)
• Russian Narcotics Claim Bitcoin has Doubled-Up Drug Trades (newsbtc.com)

Japan:

• Japan Considers Deeming Bitcoin as a Currency (cryptocoinsnews.com)
• Japan considers making bitcoin a legal currency (theguardian.com)

Those second Europe and China stories, 'Why Europe Is About To Crack Down...' and 'Why the Great Firewall of China...', are typical of many bitcoin stories. I'll call them the 'Why?' stories.

• Why Bitcoin Will Thrive First in the Developing World (wired.com) • 'send money across borders without paying the steep fees charged by traditional gatekeepers like Western Union'
• Why Bitcoin Looked Much More Grown Up This week (nasdaq.com) • 'bitcoin behaved just like any other currency and strengthened against a weakening dollar'
• Why the Banks See Bitcoin as their Number One Enemy (huffingtonpost.com) • 'bitcoin is something they can`t control because the system works without a central repository'
• The Fifth Amendment and Bitcoin: Why the Battle is About to Begin (coindesk.com) • 'whether the Fifth Amendment protects a person from government compelled disclosure of his or her bitcoin private key or keys'
• What Apple's Privacy Fight Means For Bitcoin (nasdaq.com) • 'the anonymous nature of bitcoin and to what extent, if any, that should be sacrificed for public safety and security'

Those last two stories are related. It's curious that the 'Why?' stories can all be reduced to a single 'Because' sentence.