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 block chain actually work? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are their users? 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.

Programming assignments

There are four assignments which will take you through the steps of designing and building a basic cryptocurrency. We are giving you grading scripts which you can use to check your solutions yourself.

The zip file contains four folders. In each folder, the assignment specification is provided as a PDF file. You're also provided starter code in the form of .java and .jar files. There's also a grading sub-folder in each assignment folder. The README file in the grading sub-folder has directions for how to run the grading script.

We've used these assignments in teaching this course at Princeton, but we haven't offered them on a large scale, so there are no doubt some bugs lurking in the starter code or the grading code. We appreciate your understanding and would be grateful for any bug reports. Email us at bitcoinbook@lists.cs.princeton.edu.