Good books for beginners to understand Bitcoin

[rabbitfairferry]

Just wondering if you experts have any good books to recommend a newbie and non-programmer to understanding Bitcoin?

Background: Current student in Arts and Social Sciences and looking to read up during upcoming holiday.

Please do not recommend Mastering Bitcoin. That book is clearly not catered to beginners. I read the first few chapters (still fine) but after they began talking about elliptical curves etc, I couldn't follow.

Thanks.

[mk4]

Just gonna copy paste from my site(they're easily Google-able anyway):

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous
The Internet of Money Vol.1 by Andreas Antonopoulos
The Internet of Money Vol.2 by Andreas Antonopoulos
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction by Narayanan, Bonneau, Felten, Miller, Goldfeder

Though I can only speak for the first three. Haven't really read the fourth.

[riritsurya1202]

The fourth book listed by mjglqw is enjoyable to read, they start from the history of internet currency and then deep dive to Bitcoin and crypto. If you love reading I think it's a good choice. Anyway, you can search this forum because topics like this has been created many times, might save your time too.

[RapTarX]

A little bit off topic-
I would suggest you to hangout in this forum, spend some of your times here, participate in discussion. This will be the great way to learn things. Before joining here, I only knew about bitcoin as a currency and how to send/receive bitcoin. But, now I'm confident that I have learnt a lot of new things within few months.IMHO, It is easier to learn here than reading a book.

[tranthidung]

Just wondering if you experts have any good books

I don't have a list of good books, but I have a topic on blockchain courses (most of them are free).
There you go:
Available courses on Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology from colleges and Univers
I don't know those courses are relevant for your interests or not, just left them here for you.

[Beerwizzard]

You can try to pick some course from coursera.com
There is a plenty of step-by-step courses that include all the necessary information and will be shorter and more interesting than just reading books.
Brief search gives us 2 pages of available courses. You can pick whatever is best for you.

[vit05]

If you consider Mastering Bitcoin complicated and difficult, I think it would be interesting to first read the original whitepaper and a commented version.
A simple and didactic book is the Bitcoin for Dummies

Others that I recommend are:
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-Reinvent
https://www.amazon.com.br/Age-Cryptocurrency-Blockchain-Challenging-Economic

[tranthidung]

You can try to pick some course from coursera.com

I searched, chose appropriate courses (in my opinion) and added them into my topic, there:
Available courses on Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology from colleges and Univers
Anyway, you gave good search strategy, that can be used to search by the OP to find what is relevant for his interests, not mine.

[whotookmycrypto]

Not really book. But there are two excellent resources to look at.

1) https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/

Covers basics to advance material.

This portion below is directly taken from their site.

Here’s a list of crypto readings and resources. It’s organized from building blocks and basics; foundations (& history); and key concepts — followed by specific topics such as governance; privacy and security; scaling; consensus and governance; cryptoeconomics, cryptoassets, and investing; fundraising and token distribution; decentralized exchanges; stablecoins; and cryptoeconomic primitives and crypto goods (non-fungible tokens, cryptocollectibles, token-curated registries, curation markets). We also included a section with developer tutorials, practical guides, and maker stories — as well as other resources, such as newsletters/updates and courses, at the end.

2) http://learnmeabitcoin.com/

Discusses Bitcoin in an easy to understand and light-hearted manner.

[tyz]

I have read some books on the subject. The problem is that most of the books are written by nerds and professionals and they are accordingly technical and not easy to understand. If you are looking for information specifically for beginners, I would recommend blog articles to you. Many of them are written by semi-professionals and thus, they are much better to understand or are written in simple language. As soon as you understand the topic better I would recommend you the books of Andreas M. Antonopoulos. His book Mastering Bitcoin is available for free on Github.

[iam_aayushiJ]

Let me tell you how did I start -

I joined a cryptocurrency exchange back in November 2017, I was then introduced to BitCoins. The first book that I was recommended to start with was -

• 1. Mastering BitCoin By Andreas M. Antonopoulos

I did pick up Mastering Bitcoin, but that is mainly written for learning to program on the BitCoin Blockchain, the first 3 chapters are a must read, and anyone like you mentioned having an arts back ground can also read and understand about Bitcoin. After reading the first 3 Chapters, I moved to listening some of the talks which Andreas has only given, you can find them in his youtube channel.

2. I then one day discovered this blog - https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html, it has an amazing compilation of one of the best resources to learn about BitCoin, it is written by one of the very knowledgeable fellow in the BitCoin domain only. I read some of his, articles which gave a very good clarity on it.

3.The purpose is to learn about BitCoins and the underline technology, which you can do by reading some of these articles also, you can then step into the following books

• Internet of money Volume 1.
• Internet of Money Volume 2.

[Pook-sapot]

There are many good books that are available to be used for learning purpose or even to know the history of Bitcoin. I am not someone who read a lot, but I never shy away from reading something worthy!

And I would suggest people to check these Crypto Books, as it’s something that you should be seriously happy to use or see. Aside this you can also see that it involves everything about the industry (past/present/future), which makes some of these so thrilling.

[VonSeed]

I would suggest to check out this package of free crypto eBooks:
https://books.hula-da.com/freepackagedeal

It rounds up nicely what a beginner needs in every field.
- Free E-book #1 - How to earn passive income with cryptocurrencies (even if you do not want to invest in them directly)
- Free E-book #2 - ICC Wave Trading Strategy (a simple and effective trading strategy to take regular profits from the market)
- Free E-book #3 - Cryptocurrency Market Uncovered (complete guide for beginners)

Cheers.

[r1s2g3]

If you want to read Mastering Bitcoin for free then you can read it from github.
https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

I also liked Mastering Blockchain by Imran Bashir . You need to pay for it or just check that below link daily if it appear for free.
https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning

[kingpin4321]

This is so easy you can just search up bitcoin books on google and you would get enough answers to your request and most of the suggestions you would get there would be sourced from the internet

[gentlemand]

Weird how few suggestions are ever made regarding its social history type stuff when people ask this question.

I'd much rather start off reading about its origins, context and why it was created. Most will never need to know or care anything about the techy side.

I recommend Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper which is very good about the earliest days of BTC when no one gave a shit. It gets boring and irrelevant about long dead stuff later on, but the start is really interesting.

The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous is also a fine read and is much more about BTC's impact than the noodling behind the scenes.