Mastering Bitcoin

Mastering Bitcoin is a book for developers, although the first two chapters cover bitcoin at a level that is also approachable to non-programmers. Anyone with a basic understanding of technology can read the first two chapters to get a great understanding of bitcoin.

This repository contains the complete first edition, second print, published in December 2014, and the complete second edition, third print, published in March 2018, as published by O'Reilly Media in paperback and ebook formats.

Issues, Errors, Comments, Contributions

To contribute to this book, see CONTRIBUTING.md. All contributions must be your original work and contributed under a public domain (CC0), or attribution (CC-BY) license. You must include your own attribution in the pull request, as an edit to the github_contrib.asciidoc file.

If you know how to make a pull request to contribute a fix, please write the correction and use a pull request to submit it for consideration against the develop branch. If you are making several changes, please use a separate commit for each to make it easier to cherry-pick or resolve conflicts. Otherwise, please submit an issue, explaining the error or comment. If you would like to contribute extensive changes or new material, please coordinate with the author first; contact information can be found on his website: https://aantonop.com/

Reading this book

To read this book, see book.asciidoc. Click on each of the chapters to read in your browser. Other parties may choose to release PDFs of the book online, for those editions where a PDF derivative is licensed.

The 2nd edition of "Mastering Bitcoin" is available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, not a CC-BY-SA license.

It is deliberately not available as a PDF. Why? Because a PDF is a "derivative" product, which is what the ND prohibits. That's because the publisher (O'Reilly Media) is a for-profit publisher who puts considerable resources behind distributing the book. The book will eventually (within a year of publication) be released under a CC-BY-SA license, at which point the PDF format and translations will be allowed. Until then, making PDF copies violates the license and interferes with the publisher's (and the author's) ability to make a living. Furthermore, if you make it so the publisher can't recoup their investment, they will delay the release into CC-BY-SA.

Please don't create or distribute PDFs until the license is changed to CC-BY-SA. It is rare for a publisher to even agree to a CC-BY-NC-ND license. Don't make it harder for free culture by violating even that, already generous, license.

Published

"Mastering Bitcoin (Second Edition, Third Print): Programming the Open Blockchain" is now available in paperback and ebook formats by many booksellers worldwide:

• Amazon

Mastering Bitcoin is also published in German, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other languages by publishers in the respective countries.

Mastering Bitcoin (Open Second Edition), based on the Seond Edition, is also available in English and Spanish at https://aantonop.com

Source

The book's source code, found in this repository, is kept synchronized with the print and ebook editions.

Mastering Bitcoin - First Edition

The tags Edition1Print1, Edition1Print2 correspond to the two existing prints of Mastering Bitcoin (First Edition) as published by O'Reilly Media.

Mastering Bitcoin - First Edition by Andreas M. Antonopoulos LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This "Free Culture" compliant license was approved by my publisher O'Reilly Media (https://oreilly.com), who understands the value of open source. O'Reilly Media is not just the world's best publisher of technical books, but is also a strong supporter of this open culture and the sharing of knowledge.

Thank you O'Reilly Media!

Mastering Bitcoin - Second Edition

The tags, second_edition_print_1 second_edition_print2, second_edition_print3, correspond to the first (June 8th, 2017), second (July 20th, 2017) and third (March 23rd, 2018) print of Mastering Bitcoin (Second Edition), as published by O'Reilly Media.

Mastering Bitcoin - Second Edition by Andreas M. Antonopoulos LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

It is expected that the second edition will be released under a CC-BY-SA license within a year of publication.

Translations

If you are interested in translating this book, please join our team of volunteers at: https://www.transifex.com/bitcoinbook/mastering-bitcoin/