Deciphering Bitcoin: An Introduction to Its Design, Purpose, and Reality will be an academic textbook about Bitcoin. One that offers insight into how Bitcoin works technically, but also delves into the breadth of less technical issues that are crucial to understanding Bitcoin. It will focus on three interrelated main questions:
- What is Bitcoin and how does it work?
- What is the purpose of Bitcoin?
- What societal value does Bitcoin offer?
This book is being written in public. Changes to the text will be regularly committed to this repository.
The Deciphering Bitcoin textbook will be written at such a level, so that later-stage undergraduate and master students with at least some mathematical and/or technical background can work through it entirely. Think, for example, of students in computer science, engineering, mathematics, environmental science, climatology, economics, innovation management, and technical management.
Students without any technical background would often struggle with completing the entire book. However, the aim of the textbook is to be well-modularized, so that less technical students can also have a smooth reading experience only working through some parts of it.
While university students are intended to be a key audience, Deciphering Bitcoin should have appeal to a much wider audience. Anyone that wants to break-through in the Bitcoin industry, for example, might find this book a great place to start.
Any contributions are most welcome. Please have a look at the CONTRIBUTING file in the repository for some guidelines on how to support the project.
Copyright law automatically grants authors of literary works certain exclusive rights, mainly the exclusive right to make copies, distribute those copies, and create translations or adaptations. Although there are exceptions and limitations with regards to these rights (e.g., making copies for research purposes), they are fairly restrictive. Sharing a copy of a book protected by copyright on a website, for example, would require permission from the authors. This can be a hassle, particularly when the authors are difficult to track down.
Creative commons licenses work in conjunction with traditional copyright law. They express up-front in more detail how others can use the literary work without having to request permission from the authors. This fosters the spread of knowledge.
Deciphering Bitcoin is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This basically entails the following:
- You can copy and redistribute the textbook in any medium or format, as long as (1) it is in its original form and not remixed, transformed, or built upon in some way, and (2) you give appropriate credit and provide a link to the license.
- You cannot use the book for commercial purposes.
I would like to make three important clarifications with regards to usage of the Deciphering Bitcoin textbook.
First, using the textbook to teach classes at universities, research institutes, and similar venues would typically not constitute a commercial use of the work. So there is no need for any permissions from the author. Only if you wish to use the textbook for highly commercialized educational programs—such as for paid courses on Udemy and Coursera—would you require permission from the author.
Second, for the purpose of making contributions to the textbook, you can fork the respository, make alterations to the text, and create a pull request. This does not violate the clause that you cannot redistribute the work if you remix, transform, or build upon it. You cannot, however, fork the repository and start a project that remixes, transforms, or builds on the textbook. In that case, you are creating a derrivative work.
Third, copying and distributing any historical state of the repository is permitted. But it is strongly recommended that any copies you distribute pertain to its latest state.