Undocumented Internals of the Bitcoin and Ethereum Blockchain

Author: Vijay Mukhi
Publisher: BPB Publications
(Pp 910 pages, ISBN- 978-93-8655-130-6, Rs 1995)

2017 Bitcoin touched a market capitalization of over 100 billion dollars. In the year 2014, one Bitcoin could buy about 500 dollars, just three years later one Bitcoin buys 5,000 dollars. The Initial Coin Offering or a ICO is getting to be the preferred method of raising money rather than going to a Venture Capitalist or using an Initial Public Offering or IPO. Lots of countries like Dubai have announced their own crypto-currency called emCash.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain are one of the most difficult technologies to understand. This is why most people including technology folks cannot understand the future direction these technologies will take. The only way to understand anything complex is by going back to the basics. This is what is done in this book. We explain every byte of the Bit coin block chain that is downloaded on your computer.

Most of the code in this book is written in Python as today it is the easiest language to use. The Bitcoin Source is written only in C++. Most of the important Bitcoin data structures are only documented in code, a bare knowledge of reading and not writing C++ will help. Finally, the official client for Ethereum is written in the programming language Go. This book is written for the programmer in mind.

– Vasu V