Resources

A curated list of primary sources, specifications, and books referenced throughout the book. Quality over quantity. This list favors original material over secondary summaries and blog posts.

Bitcoin

• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System: the whitepaper
• Bitcoin Core repository
• Bitcoin Core developer documentation
• Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs)
• Satoshi Nakamoto Institute: archive of Satoshi's writings and related cypherpunk history
• Cryptography mailing list archive: where the whitepaper was first announced
• bitcointalk.org: the original Bitcoin forum, active since 2009
• BIP 16: Pay to Script Hash
• BIP 34: Block v2, Height in Coinbase
• BIP 125: Opt-in Full Replace-by-Fee
• BIP 141: Segregated Witness
• BIP 340/341/342: Taproot
• Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index
• BIP 9: Version bits with timeout and delay
• BIP 148: Mandatory activation of segwit deployment
• Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Craig Wright, UK High Court judgment, March 2024

Ethereum

• ethereum.org
• Ethereum Yellow Paper
• Ethereum execution specs
• Ethereum consensus specs
• Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)
• EIP-1559: Fee market change
• Ethereum JSON-RPC specification
• Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget: Buterin & Griffith, 2017
• Solidity documentation
• viem documentation: used throughout this book's Web3 examples
• wagmi documentation
• EIP-712: Typed structured data hashing and signing
• EIP-1193: Ethereum Provider JavaScript API
• WalletConnect documentation

Cryptography

• A Cypherpunk's Manifesto: Eric Hughes, 1993
• Security Without Identification: David Chaum, 1985
• Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments: David Chaum, 1982
• Hashcash: Adam Back, 2002
• NIST FIPS 180-4: Secure Hash Standard
• SEC 2: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters: Certicom Research
• New Directions in Cryptography: Diffie & Hellman, 1976
• BIP 340: Schnorr Signatures for secp256k1
• RFC 6979: Deterministic Usage of DSA and ECDSA
• The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems: Goldwasser, Micali, Rackoff, 1985
• @noble/curves: the audited TypeScript library used in this book's cryptography examples
• @scure/bip39 and @scure/bip32, used in the Wallets section's derivation examples
• BIP 32: Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets
• BIP 39: Mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys
• BIP 44: Multi-Account Hierarchy for Deterministic Wallets

Distributed systems

• The Byzantine Generals Problem: Lamport, Shostak, Pease, 1982
• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance: Castro & Liskov, 1999
• The Part-Time Parliament: Leslie Lamport, 1998
• The Sybil Attack: John R. Douceur, 2002
• Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services: Gilbert & Lynch, 2002

Economics

• On the Origin of Money: Carl Menger, 1892
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: John Maynard Keynes, 1936
• A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960: Milton Friedman & Anna Schwartz, 1963
• Money Creation in the Modern Economy: Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014
• The Deficit Myth: Stephanie Kelton, 2020 (Modern Monetary Theory)
• The State Theory of Money: Georg Friedrich Knapp, 1905

Austrian economics

• On the Origin of Money: Carl Menger, 1892
• Principles of Economics: Carl Menger, 1871
• The Theory of Money and Credit: Ludwig von Mises, 1912
• Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined: Friedrich Hayek, 1976/1978
• What Has Government Done to Our Money?: Murray Rothbard, 1963
• Bitcoin, the Regression Theorem, and the Emergence of a New Medium of Exchange: Konrad Graf, 2013
• b-money: Wei Dai, 1998
• Bit gold: Nick Szabo, 2005
• Shelling Out: The Origins of Money: Nick Szabo

Smart contracts

• Solidity documentation
• Foundry Book
• OpenZeppelin Contracts
• EIP-1967: Standard Proxy Storage Slots
• EIP-2535: Diamonds, Multi-Facet Proxy

Tokens

• EIP-20: Token Standard
• EIP-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard
• EIP-1155: Multi Token Standard
• WETH9 (verified live on mainnet)

DeFi

• Uniswap v2 whitepaper
• Uniswap v3 whitepaper
• Uniswap v2 core contracts
• Curve StableSwap whitepaper: Michael Egorov
• Aave V2 whitepaper
• Aave documentation
• MakerDAO whitepaper
• Sky Protocol documentation
• Chainlink documentation: price feeds

Layer 2

• EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions
• EIP-7892: Blob Parameter Only Hardforks
• Ethereum: a rollup-centric roadmap: Vitalik Buterin, 2020
• Arbitrum Nitro whitepaper
• Arbitrum documentation
• OP Stack specification
• Optimism documentation
• Base documentation
• L2Beat: rollup stages framework
• zkSync documentation
• StarkNet documentation
• LayerZero documentation
• Wormhole documentation

Security

• Solidity security considerations
• Ethereum.org smart contract security
• Ethereum.org security and scam prevention
• OpenZeppelin Contracts documentation
• OpenZeppelin access control
• OpenZeppelin upgrades documentation
• Ethereum.org formal verification
• Solidity SMTChecker
• Flashbots documentation
• Ronin Network: Community Alert, Ronin Validators Compromised
• Wormhole incident report, 2 February 2022
• Verichains Ronin Bridge audit, June 2022

Infrastructure

• Ethereum nodes and clients
• Running an Ethereum node
• Ethereum archive nodes
• Ethereum JSON-RPC
• Bitcoin Core RPC
• Geth documentation
• The Graph subgraphs
• The Graph indexing overview
• Graph Node documentation
• CloudEvents specification

Governance

• BIP 3: Updated BIP Process
• Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository
• Bitcoin Core contribution guidelines
• EIP-1: EIP Purpose and Guidelines
• Ethereum governance
• Ethereum execution specifications
• Ethereum consensus specifications
• OpenZeppelin governance documentation

Regulation and society

• FATF guidance for virtual assets and VASPs
• Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets
• Banco Central do Brasil: regulation of virtual assets
• BCB Resolution 520
• BIS CBDC publications
• IMF CBDC Virtual Handbook
• Ethereum privacy

Books

• Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin, for Bitcoin transaction, script, wallet, and network mechanics
• Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood, Mastering Ethereum, for Ethereum accounts, transactions, the EVM, and smart contracts
• Ross Anderson, Security Engineering, for threat modeling, authentication, access control, and system failure analysis beyond blockchain-specific code

Papers

• Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments: David Chaum, CRYPTO '82
• Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail: Dwork & Naor, CRYPTO '92

Specifications

• Bitcoin Improvement Proposals
• Ethereum Improvement Proposals

Source-code repositories

• bitcoin/bitcoin: Bitcoin Core
• ethereum/go-ethereum: Geth, an Ethereum execution client