Bitcoin Forum

Doesn't necessarily have to be books,
I'm trying to gather research material about cryptography relating to the blockchain
Especially the cutting edge research like DAG, zk-snarks, alternative consensus algorithms, alternative blockchain protocols

I've been trying to do the same myself, but have limited success with gathering academic material. One starting point I tried was to look into cypherpunk resources (I thought, hey, it's the birthplace of Bitcoin, right?) and there were some good presentations from a few names like Jameson Lopp. I was very surprised that MIT resources didn't seem that good, but probably their best ones are close-sourced (boo!). These are all basic, though... but I found them useful. I also recommend the Lynda series on cryptography and network security for idiots like me.

For more "cutting edge research" I'm guessing very little is open source or free to access. But try security journals... this is one good journal (IEEE) in my bookmark: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8013

If you search hard enough (I guess you know where to look), you can find some torrents for some copies. I have access though, as am doing a long distance degree so pretty much have good access from OpenAthens.

If you're interested in a title like below, I don't mind passing on. Not embarrassed at all to say they were a tad too technical for me, so you can imagine I'm not from a programming background:
Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption - Jean-Philippe Aumasson (2017)

Anyone else able and willing to share resources?

"Cryptography: An Introduction" by Nigel Smart is a great and free book about cryptography, it covers well all the cryptographic primitives like hash functions, public key cryptography, symmetric ciphers. If you don't have a solid grasp of these subjects, I highly recommend reading that book, although it may be a bit hard to read due to heavy math notation.

Found this book, THE CODE BOOK by Simon Singh which explains the technical and mathematical process behind the most difficult codes and how they were broken. You'll love this if you're looking for history of cryptography.

Check out "Understanding cryptography" by Christof Paar, it's a good starting point. Another good one to start with is "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" by Jonathan Katz & Yehuda Lindell.

Both  "Cryptography Engineering" and "Practical Cryptography" by Bruce Schneier are worth a read as well.

There's also a "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", which is available for free in PDF format here: http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

He should search for his blog "Schneier on security" It should be online still. There are a lot of academic papers and articles. It's a good start.
But the best of the best is to go back to school and to go to a European university because there are the best. Israel has some quite good but not the best, let's say second quality choice lol

EDIT: schneier.com/academic/

Thanks, yeah I think Schneier are good reads, but probably not the type of in-depth technical education that OP seems to want to access. Speaking of good reads, no one is better or more experienced than Antonopoulos in delivering basic understanding in an easily digestible manner. His books are very easy to find online (they're just collections of his lectures and notes).

I've been looking also at a few formal institutions but it's really hard to tell which is "the best", especially when searching online doesn't seem to turn up graduates from these institutions. I'm very tempted to try the long distance degree from Cyprus/Nicosia uni (that's where Antonopoulos lectures), but it's a Computer Science degree, so might not focus heavily on security. In terms of recognition though, it might not be up there with the Top 200 unis, but its specific attention to crypto (Bitcoin, actually) makes it attractive.

Maybe somebody know good video/audio courses from where to learn?

There are dozens of videos on YT but most of them are worthless IMO, the most informative I know of (entry-level) is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHkqB2-46k

It's the first of a series of lectures by dr. Christof Paar. If you can endure the camera instability and find it useful, check out his channel - he has 20+ lecture videos there.

You can try checking out some of the stuff on Coursera. I just started this one tonight so can't vouch for it in any way.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/classical-cryptosystems/home/welcome

There are a few others there too on Cryptography.

My advice is to read The Denationalization of Money by Friedrich Hayek,this book does not directly describe blockchain technologies because it was written in the twentieth century,but I  promise that if you read this book you will define very well the fundamental aspects of its structure.you may also like Irrational Exuberance by Shiller its not describe cryptocurrencies but you will have adequate representation about speculative behaviours of investors in  stock market.
I highly recommend you to read professor Nigel Smart's books (read more here https://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~nsmart/)

Ment to come back to this to add a link showing how to get the Corsera courses for free by using the 'audit' option.

https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-signup-for-free/

I was also doing that when I first got into this and still is. Fact is if you read or watch more about cryptocurrency, you'll learn so much.
I first got myself hooked on videos in different channels on Youtube. I clicked on every video that I see about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and such. I also happened to read a book, How Money Got Free: Bitcoin and the Fight for the Future of Finance by Brian Patrick Eha. Well, not all of it, but most of it. It is a really good book about the pioneers of Bitcoin; The twenty-first-century outlaws - cryptographers, hackers, Free Staters, ex-cons and drug dealers, teenage futurists and self-taught entrepreneurs. Overall, it's almost about the history of Bitcoin.

thanks for this recommendation. this is informative for newbies in crypto.

Hey guys I believe this book will be interesting to you.
One of the best technical books about blockchain technology

Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Programming-Open-Blockchain/dp/1491954388/ref=pd_sbs_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1491954388&pd_rd_r=E8ETCAAA7JRFZT741TEG&pd_rd_w=nvUcZ&pd_rd_wg=fAZje&psc=1&refRID=E8ETCAAA7JRFZT741TEG

Cryptography and Network Security” Seventh Edition by William Stallings. It has good review over Amazon

Let me introduce you to https://scholar.google.com (https://scholar.google.com)

You want papers on zk-snarks?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=zk-snarks&btnG= (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=zk-snarks&btnG=)

Try to read this book, Blockchain Basic by Daniel Drescher, this will give you broad idea about cryptography fundamental principles.

You said it doesn't necessarily need to be books, well in that case I find very interesting reading papers and forum posts of these credited by satoshi as inspirations. For instance Wei Dai's stuff:

http://www.weidai.com/

Loots of interesting things there, specially the bmoney .txt

Some interesting posts on Szabo's blog too:

https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2017-02-23T23:48:00-08:00&max-results=11&start=1&by-date=false

Seems it's not a new thread but if anyone wants, personally I can't recommend any book because I always learn some things about bitcoin online (not a dev guy so given information here is already enough for me).
Don't want to promote but for such books darknet is really great, but you need deep search to find good book, usually they are sold in cheap prices.

This post is just what I was searching. I have some free time this winter and I finished Mastering Bitcoin. I would really like to have more knowledge in cryptography tho,because many articles I read are out of my range I really struggle to understand them..

Mastering Bitcoin is a very good start imo

This is a must read - http://bloc10.com/splittingbits Splitting Bits - Understanding Bitcoin and the Blockchain.  It is not a technical 'how to' book, and provides many practical examples for actual developmental use cases, and some good history of Blockchain going back to David Chaum.

This topic is really beneficial. And I think there are plenty of books and articles. The thing is when we get into reading we want to find more and more regarding the specifics.

To know about bitcoin and blockchain, I'd recommend this book Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain 2nd Edition
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Its 5 star on amazon. Its a little long, but you can skim through finding the main ideas for you research.

About the cryptography part, you may want to look at this one called "Cryptography and Network Security” Seventh Edition by William Stallings. A very good read. Again you can skim through and get the crucial points.

Understanding Cryptography by Christof Paar, Cryptography and Network Security by William Stallings, Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier are all great books for learning cryptography.