Introduction To Cryptocurrency
A free course on cryptocurrencies for developers. Covers history, cryptographic foundations, networking, consensus, game theory, Bitcoin, Ethereum.
Bitcoin's P2P Network
Bitcoin's P2P network comes with its own unique challenges: bootstrapping your initial peers, defending against spam, and ensuring network-level privacy.
Gnutella: an Intro to Gossip
Gnutella was one of the first decentralized P2P protocols to take off after the death of Napster. It's a direct predecessor to Bitcoin's networking design.
P2P Networking
Bitcoin is built atop the shoulders of the early P2P file sharing protocols. And the history of P2P file sharing starts with the grandfather of all massive P2P protocols, Napster.
Public-Key Cryptography
Without public key cryptography, Bitcoin would be impossible. It lays the foundation for digital identities and cryptographically enforced property rights.
Hashcash
To understand Bitcoin's consensus mechanism and the concept of proof-of-work, we first have to understand Hashcash.
Merkle Trees
Merkle trees magically represent arbitrary amounts of data with a constant amount of space.
Satoshi Nakamoto
We don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto was, where they came from, or where they are today. But here's what we do know.
The Cypherpunks
"Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and we're going to write it." — The Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993
A Brief History of Money
To understand why cryptocurrencies were invented, you first have to understand the problem they were meant to solve.