This is a list of readings (and watchings) on blockchain related topics.
The word "blockchain" (or "block chain") started off as a more or less narrowly defined technical term.
It ("blockchain") later became a buzzword that represented anything related to BitCoin, alt-coins (ex: LiteCoin, Ethereum, etc), cryptocurrencies, etc.
And now that the word "blockchain" is on the verge of becoming a household name, it seems like it is starting to include what some others used to call "P2P", and are now calling "distributed computing".
(In some usages of the label "blockchain", neither blocks or hash lists seemed to be necessary for that thing to be called a "blockchain".)
This seems to somewhat mirror how previously the usage of the word "P2P" seemed to broaden and also include what others are calling "distributed computing".
(Although this time around, cryptography and various concepts of "money" seems to have prominence.)
Regardless, this document focuses on a more traditional definition of "blockchain".
But also includes some topics that the author of this document feels that, while not strictly about blockchains, will help provide readers with a deep(er) technical background that can be useful when working with or creating blockchain based technologies.
This document is targeted at technical people, who are looking to gain a deep understand of the concepts behind blockchain based technologies.
- Abstract Algebra
- Behavioral Science
- BitCoin
- Bit Gold
- B-Money
- Colored Coins
- Consensus
- Content Addressing
- Cryptocurrency
- Cryptography
- Distributed Computing
- Distributed Hash Tables
- eCash
- Error Detection and Correction
- Ethereum
- Handicap Principle
- Hashcash
- Hash Lists
- History (Cypherpunk)
- History (Open Source)
- Identity
- Mastercoin
- Money
- Onion Routing
- Paxos
- Peer-to-Peer Networks
- Privacy
- Proof-of-Stake
- Proof-of-Work
- Raft
- Rai
- Randomness
- Selfish Mining Attack
- Smart Contracts
- Solidity
- Sybil Attack
- Tamper Detection
- Trust Networks
- Worse Is Better
- Zero-Knowledge Proof Protocol
- Abstract Algebra (Socratica), by Liliana de Castro, Michael Harrison, Hatch Harrison
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Please, not another bias! An evolutionary take on behavioural economics, by Jason Collins
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The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, by Jason Weeden, Robert Kurzban
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Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm
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The Biology of Moral Systems, by Richard D. Alexander
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See also: Handicap Principle
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Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto
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Annotated: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", by Satoshi Nakamoto, Balaji Srinivasan, Et al.
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How the Bitcoin protocol actually works, by Michael Nielsen
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Ever wonder how Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) actually work?, by Grant Sanderson
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Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
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Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?, by Russell O’Connor
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OP_RETURN and the Future of Bitcoin, by Rich Apodaca
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Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they are stored: Nelson Mandela, Wikileaks, photos, and Python software, by Ken Shirriff
- Bit gold, by Nick Szabo
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MAGNET v0.1 (Draft Tech Overview/Spec), by Gordon Mohr
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A URN Namespace For Identifiers Based on Cryptographic Hashes by Peter Thiemann
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Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data, by Tobias Kuhn, Michel Dumontier
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See also: Distributed Hash Tables
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Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour, by Colin Percival
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$5 wrench attack, by Randall Munroe
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Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, by Claude Elwood Shannon
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New Directions in Cryptography, by Whitfield Diffie, Martin E. Hellman
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A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems, by Ronald Linn Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman
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How RSA Works With Examples, by Barry Steyn
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Why RSA Works: Three Fundamental Questions Answered, by Barry Steyn
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Cryptographic Hash VS MAC: What You Need To Know, by Barry Steyn
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End to End Encryption (E2EE) (Computerphile), by Mike Pound
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Secret Key Exchange (Diffie-Hellman) (Computerphile), by Mike Pound
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See also: Onion Routing, Randomness, Zero-Knowledge Proof Protocol
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Perspectives on the CAP Theorem, by Seth Gilbert, Nancy A. Lynch
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The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction, by Jay Kreps
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Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods, by Jeff Hodges
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Immutability Changes Everything (video), by Pat Helland
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Immutability Changes Everything (paper), by Pat Helland
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Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing, by Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, Jun Rao
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Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications, by Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, Hari Balakrishnan
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Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store , by Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, Werner Vogels
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MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, by Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat
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The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems, by Mike Burrows
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So, you want to trace your distributed system? Key design insights from years of practical experience by Raja R. Sambasivan, Rodrigo Fonseca, Ilari Shafer, Gregory R. Ganger
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Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure, by Benjamin H. Sigelman, Luiz André Barroso, Mike Burrows, Pat Stephenson, Manoj Plakal, Donald Beaver, Saul Jaspan, Chandan Shanbhag
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Queues Don't Fix Overload, by Fred Hebert
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See also: Consensus, Peer-to-Peer Networks
- Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric, by Petar Maymounkov, David Mazières
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Blind signatures for untraceable payments, by David Chaum
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Information Theory & Coding (Computerphile), by David Brailsford
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Multiple Dimension Error Correction (Computerphile), by David Brailsford
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The Perfect Code (Computerphile), by David Brailsford
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EXTRA BITS: More on Perfect Codes (Computerphile), by David Brailsford
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Ethereum in 25 Minutes, by Vitalik Buterin
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Ethereum Yellow Paper, by Gav Would, et al
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Ethereum Beige Paper: Rewrite of the Yellowpaper in non-Yellowpaper syntax, by Micah Dameron
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Mastering Ethereum, by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood
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See also: Solidity
- The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle, by Amotz Zahavi, Avishag Zahavi
- Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure, by Adam Back
- How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document, by Stuart Haber, W. Scott Stornetta
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A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, by Eric Hughes
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The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, by Timothy C. May
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Cyphernomicon, by Timothy C. May
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This Machine Kills Secrets, by Andy Greenberg
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Crypto, by Steven Levy
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar , by Eric Steven Raymond
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Homesteading the Noosphere, by Eric Steven Raymond
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The Wikipedia Revolution, by Andrew Lih
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Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood, by Jim Harper
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Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, by Bruce Schneier
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Secure Electronic Commerce: Building the Infrastructure for Digital Signatures and Encryption, by Warwick Ford, Michael S. Baum
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Understanding Windows CardSpace: An Introduction to the Concepts and Challenges of Digital Identities , by Vittorio Bertocci, Garrett Serack, Caleb Baker
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7 Laws of Identity by Kim Camerons,
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Getting Started with OAuth 2.0, by Ryan Boyd
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Digital Identity, by Phillip J. Windley
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Identity Management: A Primer, by Graham Williamson, David Yip, Ilan Sharoni, Kent Spaulding
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Mastercoin: A Second-Generation Protocol on the Bitcoin Blockchain, by Vitalik Buterin
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MasterCoin Complete Specification Version 1.0, by J.R. Willett
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Shelling Out: The Origins of Money, by Nick Szabo
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The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of The World (Documentary), by Niall Ferguson
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Onion Routing (Computerphile), by Mike Pound
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EXTRA BITS: Onion Routing (Computerphile), by Mike Pound
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Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, by Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson
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Circuit Fingerprinting Attacks: Passive Deanonymization of Tor Hidden Services, by Albert Kwon, Mashael AlSabah, David Lazar, Marc Dacier, Srinivas Devadas
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Neat Algorithms - Paxos, by Harry Brundage
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The Paxos Algorithm, by Luis Quesada Torres
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The Part-Time Parliament, by Leslie Lamport
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Understanding Churn in Peer-to-Peer Networks, by Daniel Stutzbach, Reza Rejaie
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See also: BitCoin, Bit Gold, Distributed Hash Tables
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On Stake and Consensus, by Andrew Poelstra
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Cryptocurrencies without Proof of Work, by Iddo Bentov, Ariel Gabizon, Alex Mizrahi
- See also: Handicap Principle, Hashcash, Selfish Mining Attack
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The Raft Consensus Algorithm, by Diego Ongaro, Et al.
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Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus, by Ben Johnson
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In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version), by Diego Ongaro, John Ousterhout
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Tangaroa: a Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft, by Christopher Copeland, Hongxia Zhong
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Island Money, by Michael F. Bryan
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The Rai Stones are huge stone wheels used as currency on the island of Yap, by Boban Docevski
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Uniform Non-Random Random Numbers, by Timothy Masters
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TIFU by using Math.random(), by Mike Malone
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The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure, by Tom Scott
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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable, by Ittay Eyal and Emin G ̈un Sirer
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See also: Proof-of-Work
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The Idea of Smart Contracts, by Nick Szabo
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Solidity Bytecode and Opcode Basics, by Bernard Peh
- The Sybil Attack, by John R. Douceur
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The Playdough Protocols, by Nick Szabo
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See also: Hash Lists
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Advogato's Trust Metric, by Raph Levien
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Attack Resistant Trust Metrics, by Raph Levien
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Advogato Has Failed, by Bryan Taylor
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Eigenmorality, by Scott Aaronson
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See also: Sybil Attack
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The Rise of “Worse is Better”, by Richard P. Gabriel
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Worse Is Better, by Richard P. Gabriel
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“RethinkDB: why we failed” (Worse Is Better: RethinkDB vs MongoDB), by Slava Akhmechet
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Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big, by Richard P. Gabriel
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Zero Knowledge Proofs (Computerphile), by Alberto Sonnino
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Zero Knowledge Proofs, by Scott Twombly
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Introduction to zkSNARKs, by Christian Reitwiessner
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Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More, by Benedikt Bünz, Jonathan Bootle, Dan Boneh, Andrew Poelstra, Pieter Wuille, Greg Maxwell