This post was originally published on coreyscottnaas.wordpress.com on 27 December 2017.
Alice,
You asked me about how you can learn more about how bitcoin works on the back end. You said that your understood the basics about decentralization and something about “mining”, but a lot of tutorials and videos don’t get deep enough for you.
I’ll suggest to you some resources that worked really well for me. The first resource is 3Blue1Brown’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4. If you understand the basics of bitcoin and a little bit of cryptography, this is a great video that cohesively puts those ideas together.
After watching that videos and perhaps others (“Bitcoin under the hood” by CuriousInventor is pretty much the de facto starting point of educational videos on Bitcoin), I would suggest reading the original Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. It’s only nine pages, and it’s a surprisingly simple read. It is still dense though, especially if you don’t have a computer science background. even so, I would suggest taking the time to really study it because it succinctly explains the biggest concepts that Bitcoin runs on. The techniques I like to use are just printing it out and annotating it, asking questions (by writing them down in the margins and looking up the answers only after I’ve read the entire thing), and explaining the concepts to someone else. Don’t skip over words and terms that you don’t understand, look them up! There were some things referenced that even I didn’t know existed until I looked them up, namely Merkle Trees and Poisson Distribution.
The last resource is a book by a group of professors from Princeton that I found from a post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7m0gu3/sixty_free_lectures_from_princeton_on_bitcoin_and/. The thing I really like about books that you just can’t get from free internet resources is that their depth and exposition is almost always better. This is definitely true here. The book dives deep, but not too deep, into the math and the real “behind the scenes” of Bitcoin’s cryptography, peer-to-peer infrastructure, and how the coin is actually used among different software and even hardware.
I hope this helps you start off. If you finish these and still want more, let me know. I am as curious as you are and am always looking for an excuse to learn.
Regards,
Corey