Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind the First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained - Softcover

Pritzker, Yan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1794326316 ISBN 13: 9781794326316

Publisher: Independently published, 2019

Synopsis

Bitcoin may well be the greatest invention of our time, and most people have no idea what it is, or how it works. Walking through its invention step by step, this short two hour read is critical before you invest.

No technical expertise required! Read it, then share it with your loved ones.

“It was much quicker and easier to understand than I expected [...] After reading it I sold some of my alts for more bitcoin. I’m on the edge of becoming a maximalist because of you.” - Nako Mbelle, Around The Coin Podcast

About this title

About the Author

Yan Pritzker is a technology entrepreneur with a career in tech startups that spans more than twenty years. His last company, Reverb.com, a marketplace for musical instruments, was sold to Etsy in 2019. Following that, Yan devoted himself to the study of Bitcoin and the education of others on this world changing innovation. Yan is the author of the book Inventing Bitcoin, the best technical book for beginners, and gives talks on Bitcoin related topics ranging from the importance of Bitcoin as a tool for freedom to the technical details of how Bitcoin works. Yan is also the cofounder and CTO at Swan.com, a Bitcoin services company focusing on Bitcoin education and onboarding individuals, companies, trusts, and retirement accounts onto Bitcoin, and an advisor to Riot Blockchain, a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company.

From the Inside Flap

When many people first hear about Bitcoin, they tend to develop opinions before even attempting to understand it. There is so much noise out there, it's easy to be misled about what Bitcoin is, and how it works. Up until 2016, I was one of these people.

Why did I decide to write this book? I spent the last twenty years building tech startups. I immerse myself in new technology every day, and I'm pretty good at figuring things out. Even still, it took me five years from first hearing about Bitcoin to actually sitting down to try to understand it. I have a feeling I'm not the only one who could use a little help wrapping their head around this potentially world changing innovation.

I first heard of Bitcoin in 2011 from slashdot.org, a news site for nerds. Back then, the Bitcoin price had gone through the roof to a massive bubble peak of around $30 per coin. All I knew was that some people on the Internet were trying to start some kind of peer to peer payment system. Not knowing the first thing about what it was, how it worked, or anything at all about investing and market cycles, I decided I should buy some just in case it turned out to be important. I had to use a questionable looking website called Mt. Gox to do so. This dollar-to-bitcoin exchange later turned out to be insolvent.

I slowly watched my investment shrink to nearly nothing, as the price crashed from $30 per bitcoin to $2. At some point, I forgot about it completely and went on with my life, working on startups. I don't even know what happened to those coins. I know I sold some or most of my stash at the bottom of the cycle. I imagine the keys to the rest are stored on some hard drive from an old laptop, lying in a dump somewhere.

In 2013 I heard about it again. This time, the noise in the media was louder, and now the experience of buying it was a lot slicker. There were apps like Coinbase, which looked downright legitimate. This was a marked improvement from the days of Mt. Gox. It seemed to me that Bitcoin could really be something.

Just in case it was, and again not knowing the first thing about it, I bought at the peak of the bubble (around $1000 per coin) and watched my investment decimated as it fell to about $200 per coin. This time, I figured it wasn't enough money to bother selling, so I left it be, and, proceeded to ignore it as I was knee deep in starting to build my next startup: Reverb.com.

Over the next four years, Reverb grew quickly, becoming the number one destination for musicians. I was making a difference in the world and bringing music to people. I was the CTO of an exciting, fast growing tech company, doing something I was passionate about, and I had no time for silly Internet money.

I'm embarrassed to say that it wasn't until the summer of 2016 that I finally watched my first video by Andreas Antonopoulos, which finally forced me to sit up and pay attention. I started asking questions. Where does Bitcoin come from? Who controls it? How does it work? What is mining? What impact will it have on the world? I started reading everything I could get my hands on, listening to hours of podcasts and videos every day for a year and a half straight. Finally, in early 2018, just after Bitcoin hit another all time high at around $20,000 per coin, I decided to leave Reverb in pursuit of helping bring Bitcoin to the world in whatever way I could.

Why did I leave a very successful, fast growing startup company to work on Bitcoin?

I believe that the invention of Bitcoin is the kind of thing that comes around once in a lifetime; perhaps once in many lifetimes. If Bitcoin succeeds, it may prove to be as important as the printing press, (decentralized production of information), the Internet (decentralized communication), and the multi branch checks and balances systems of modern democratic governments.

I hope that by understanding how Bitcoin works, you'll understand how it can turn out to be a force for good in the world. Bitcoin will decentralize the production and use of money, which is the key to unlocking new ways for humanity to collaborate on a scale that was previously unimaginable.

The price of Bitcoin is mostly what you hear about in the media. One day it's going to a million dollars, and the next it's in a death spiral going to zero. It's either that or Bitcoin will use all the world's energy and destroy the planet within ten years. Of course this is false, and you'll understand why once you learn about how it works.

My goal with this book isn't to analyze the economics of Bitcoin and sound money, though we'll touch on these concepts briefly. I'm not going to look at Bitcoin from the standpoint of investing, or try to convince you to buy some. I would highly recommend The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous and Why Buy Bitcoin by Andy Edstrom as immediate follow-ups to this book for those curious to understand money and the financial system.

We're also not going to dig into any computer code, and no computer science background is required to understand this book. If you want to look at Bitcoin through that lens, I recommend Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, and Programming Bitcoin by Jimmy Song.
For me, understanding all the things that come together to make Bitcoin work was a profound moment. In this book, I hope to share that knowledge with you in a short, simple format. My goal today is to tickle your brain, and to give you a taste of the computer science, economics, and game theory that make Bitcoin one of the most interesting and profound inventions of our time. By understanding the workings of Bitcoin, I hope you will find, like I did, that Bitcoin is much deeper than it appears to be at first, and may have an incredible impact on the world for generations to come.

The way we'll do it is one step at a time. With nothing but a high school level math background, we will walk through inventing bitcoin, step by step. I hope that this book will give you just enough of an introduction to send you down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Let's get started!

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1794326316
• ISBN 13: 9781794326316
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Evans Nicholas
• Number of pages: 106