Book Review - Mastering Bitcoin

mypathtofire (75)in We Are Alive Tribe • 6 months ago (edited)

Mastering Bitocoin was a book I was looking forward to reading after finishing The Bitcoin Standard. It is by Andreas M.Antonopoulos who is very knowledgeable about Bitcoin and has many videos available on youtube.

The book aims to be useful for developers and also for beginners to Bitcoin. The author of the book comes across as a very knowledgeable person about Bitcoin and there are some really great explanations with diagrams for example about how the network is actually working, how it is choosing block, block size and other pretty important information to know.

Although, you could argue, to use Bitcoin, you do not need to necessarily know how it is fully working to be able to use and enjoy it, I found much of the information pretty interesting and useful to know. It was great for picking up various titbits with a technical explanation so you know how it is really working.

There were some points that were really Dev heavy with coding examples that were mainly only useful to other Devs and maybe people wanting to playing around with the code, but for me it was too technical and not something that I was too interested in.

I also liked some of the coverage of the security features of Bitcoin and how strong it is and how the cryptography works and the explanations on why. Sometimes it could be quite heavy though and is maybe not for everyone.

However, there was also really useful chapters on wallets, how they work and other useful related things regarding onchain keys and seedphrases. Many of these things are not covered in any depth in The Bitcoin Standard and shows the technical nature of the book. The extend of the knowledge of Andreas seems to have a large depth and it really comes across in this book.

What was also good for new users was the details about the different types of wallets, how safe they are how to create the different ones and things to consider such as BIP standards.

Also explained in the book is the fact that wallets are actually empty and are only signing devices for transactions. This is pretty important information and good for people to know and understand. Especially with regards the risk involved in owning and looking after the keys.

There was also some good information to be garnished about the blockchain itself, how it is created and about the nodes. The difference between the different nodes and how with a full node, you can trace a transaction back to the genesis block. Here there was also some code which was too tech heavy for me, but reading about the nodes and blocks and the features I found very interesting and useful.

Although Andreas does cover some of the importance and differences between using Bitcoin, it does not cover the economic theory and features of money that you can read about in The Bitcoin Standard. The books do not have too much overlapping information in a sense of what they are telling and what you can learn from the authors. The Bitcoin Standard is very much a big picture book and covers a much larger topic, whereas Mastering Bitcoin goes into detail about what is Bitcoin and how it is working with the technical and dev background information to really inform you.

Quite a bit of the information is abit overload and more than is required from the average layman and at times I couldn't read some sections and just skipped them as they were too code-y and not really practical or useful for me to read. There were quite a few sections like this, but this is really showing you the depth of knowledge of Andreas, he really knows Bitcoin inside and out and this isn't a bad thing, it reinforced my confidence and trust in his knowledge.

The book is not small either, there is a wealth of information in there and I can imagine some people can mark pages with useful information for future referencing.

Some really cool nuggets of information are contained there such as this one one thing I found particularly fascinating with regards to how you get to the totals of your Bitcoin stack and how you may want to combine these to keep it more tidy onchain.

I was also finding useful with regard to the private and public key sections and how they are generated and was shocked to realise that you could have the same public key generated by another, but although it is long odds for this to occur, it could still happen and I wonder what would happen in this situation!

Of course, this isn't just a thing for Bitcoin I'm sure. Anyhow - I think the Mastering Bitcoin book is the perfect accompanyment for The Bitcoin Standard and both are worth reading. Although you could theoretically look up and find out online much of the information presented, it is so well organised and flows logically from one chapter to the next, this makes sense to have this book to refer back to and use to increase your knowledge.

Reading the book, you feel you are in safe hands and getting the best information from an original source from someone who not only knows Bitcoin, but seems to live it too.

I also want to say the book also covers another interesting topic such as the immutability of the blockchain and the computing power of it. Why it is secure and how Miners are incentivised to mine. The details of these problem solutions are also explained simply and also how it is easy for these answers to mathematical problems checked. It is an eye-opener into the world of cryptography.

Another thing that I found great about this book is also that it stays focused on Bitcoin and doesn't deviate, so you are learning about just Bitcoin only and do not find yourself skimming pages looking when they will write something about Bitcoin.

Overall, I enjoyed and found the book interesting and it increased my knowledge in many areas with regard to Bitcoin, however, as I mentioned, I did find myself skipping quite a few technical areas that were either not relevant for me or too techy. Possibly, I could go back and read them if I might need to know this in the future.

Probably the book is more aimed to Devs and maybe not so targeted to new or experienced Bitcoin users wanting to improve the knowledge and learn the best practices, which is what you can do with this book, but it goes over and beyond that requirement.

As a basic and easy flowing book and telling the story of Bitcoin, this is not something you will find in this book. Easy flowing it is, but it is technical and less of a story or presenting some sort of case for Bitcoin. Even though, it would have been interesting if there was more on Andreas's history and background in Bitcoin as this was compeling reading when it was brought up.

I know he has a youtube channel which is a great resource and I often check out from time to time.

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