Book Review: Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos

Andreas Antonopoulos is an early Bitcoin proponent. He caught a lot of flak in recent history from the Bitcoin maximalists for writing a book on Ethereum. Since then he hasn't been as prominent in the space from what I can tell. That's unfortunate really. His appearance on Joe Rogan in 2014 really got me excited about the space and got me to open a Coinbase account and to buy my first Bitcoin.

I've read a few books about Bitcoin, however this is the first technical book I have read. The book seems targeted towards software developers. If you want a superficial book explaining why Bitcoin is 'good' or 'important', this probably isn't the book for you. There are many sections of the book that I had to skim through, because they were just too technical for me. That being said, it also provided an excellent view of the functional areas of Bitcoin such as:

• Wallets
• Keys
• Transactions
• UTXOs
• Timelocks
• Segwit
• Multisig
• Network architecture
• Blockchain
• Mining and consensus
• Security
• Applications

It is possible if I need a deeper technical reference later on, this book might be useful. The problem is that many important developments have occurred in Bitcoin since the latest edition (taproot is a good example).

Even if Bitcoin isn't your thing, MANY blockchain projects are derivative of it. For any project I've ever run a node for, the command always ends in 'd' for running the daemon, such as bitcoind, litecoind, zend, firod, etc. The command line commands always end in '-cli', such as bitcoin-cli, litecoin-cli, zen-cli, firo-cli, etc. This is the first sign of how much the original Bitcoin software is leveraged for other blockchains. If you have a good understanding of the general topics in this book, it's fairly easy to translate them onto other projects.

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