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 core audience for the Deciphering Bitcoin textbook is business students at the late undergraduate and master levels. While the primary purpose is to decipher Bitcoin, the textbook will offer substantial background in two other areas of knowledge crucial for any modern business student.
- The historical and modern institutions and practices surrounding money, payments, and banking
- General technological topics, including computer communication, cryptography, programming, and software development.
The textbook can also serve students well in other disciplines. Students with a strong mathematical and technical background will probably want to skip over some of the sections intended purely to introduce certain topics on technology. 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. Policymakers and journalists may also find it a helpful resource.
Citations are placed in notes at the end of each chapter. For legal citations, full references are given within the endnotes. In all other cases, short citations are utilized. A list of references is found at the end of this book.
Some notes are without any specific citations. These are not demarcated in some particular way from notes that include text citations. Instead, all notes are organized according to a single numbering system per chapter.
Online locations for references are generally only provided for journal articles, papers, blog posts, and so on, in case of open access (if known). Sources that are really only available online are indicated so by the phrase “Available at [URL]” at the end of a refer-ence. Sources that are also circulating in print form are indicated so by the phrase “Also available at [URL]” at the end of a reference.
For readers not familiar with English legal notation, please note the following.
Acts of Parliament typically have a short name which includes a date. Before 1963, the year often refers to starting year of the responsible Parliamentary session. It is not necessarily the same year that the act was passed by Parliament and granted royal assent.
For example, in 1720, the Bubble Act 1719, was passed by Parliament and granted royal assent. As the Parliamentary session started in 1719, however, the official short name is Bubble Act 1719. In the literature, authors sometimes attempt to avoid confusion by using the Bubble Act 1720 as a short name. However, we will stick here to official short names.
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.
At the moment, I am working on the first part of the book called Money, Payments, and Banking. It will consist of an introduction and eight chapters. The chapters are as follows:
- Chapter 1: Banks and banking
- Chapter 2: Joint stock companies and corporations
- Chapter 3: Merchant banks
- Chapter 4: Deposit banks
- Chapter 5: The American history of money, payments, and banking
- Chapter 6: Bank payments
- Chapter 7: Beyond bank payments
- Chapter 8: Money
At the moment, completed initial drafts of the Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 have been committed, as well as near complete drafts of Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.