SKZ - Episode 4 - Mastering Bitcoin Review

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

In this episode I give my thoughts on Andreas Antonopoulos' 2017 book Mastering Bitcoin. The book answers a lot of "how" questions regarding Bitcoin, as it describes the Bitcoin network works: nodes, transactions, wallets, mining, and more. It's a really great textbook to add to your library and reference whenever you need more information on a certain aspect of Bitcoin.

Hey everybody, this is Joe. This is episode four of the SKZ podcast. Today I wanted to go back to a kind of a classic in the Bitcoin community, right? And do a book review of mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos. This came out in 2017. And I think Safedian's book came out in 2018, right? So a lot of people do refer back to somewhat older books. But at the same time, I think it's really easy to be kind of like, I don't know, listener of the moment is the right phrase, but just want to read the latest thing, right? Listen to the latest podcast, not go back to something from a few years ago because, you know, it's not going to apply to today, right? But if you think about it, Bitcoin's whole ethos is more of the, I guess I would say, like if it ain't broke, don't fix it versus the ETH mentality or kind of just the Silicon Valley mentality of like move fast and break things, right? That's not what Bitcoin's about.

So anything from 2017 really does apply. I mean, the infrastructure of Bitcoin isn't very much different. So I think this is a great book to kind of answer a lot of like the how questions of Bitcoin, right? And that's how I would contrast it from a lot of other books. For example, last week I gave a review of mastering Bitcoin or sorry, this week I'm going to do a master in Bitcoin, of course. Last week was a progressives case for Bitcoin by Jason Meyer. And I think that answers a lot of why questions, right? Why Bitcoin is important for people who care about the environment,

for people who are unbanked and have been marginalized and why it's helpful to end wars or reduce the frequency of wars, things like that. And I think those questions are really important. And a lot of times they're the important ones to kind of bring someone into the Bitcoin space in the right way and to just someone who maybe isn't into computer science, cryptography, whatever it may be, and they just don't understand what Bitcoin is. Giving a book like that can be really helpful to just explain,

hey, here's why Bitcoin's important, right? But I will say a lot of times when you get a book like that, you're still curious about like, okay, well, how does this thing work? Why can't someone just make another Bitcoin? Why can't, you know, someone just doubled my Bitcoin? or steal my Bitcoin wallet super easily, whatever it may be, right? So I think once you understand the why you might be bought into wanting to understand more about Bitcoin, I think mastering Bitcoin is a great, I would say like reference book, almost like a textbook

to come to and to really like understand the how questions of Bitcoin versus the why questions. So how does the transaction work? how to the network of nodes work, how does mining work, how does a wallet work, things like that, right? And I'm not going to go chapter by chapter because I really can't give it just, I'm not going to be able to like explain or summarize everything that's going on in each chapter. Because again, I'm not a very technical person. I'm not someone who's done a lot of coding. I've only done coding in like a data analysis sense for my research. but I haven't really done any advanced coding or building programs, anything like that, right? So a lot of the stuff did go over my head, I will say that.

But I found it a very valuable read. And I didn't follow along with the code. You can kind of follow along with the code if that's something that you're interested in, right, in a lot of the chapters. But even not doing that, I still gained a lot of just the basic understanding, the basic kind of premises, right, of all these different things. and it's really awesome that it is learnable in a sense, right? Because it's free and open source software. It's not like a trust me, bro,

this is how this works and just put your money in here and it'll be okay, right? It's like, you know, a lot of people in the Bitcoin community, maybe everyone you could argue, does have to exhibit some level of trust, right? Especially if you're not a computer scientist

or whatever, then if you're not a coder, you do have to trust that there's these other engineers that built it this way. You don't have to trust, right? You can go verify, but a lot of times it's like, well, I don't know how to do that. But there's all these engineers that have built it that have looked at the code been working on it and kind of verify that this is how it works. So there's that trust minimization, right? It's not one person you have to trust that, like, trust me, bro. There's that trust minimization and kind of decentralization.

of trust in a way. And it's cool that a book like this exists where if you, depending on how deep you want to go, right, I did more of like the read it, not code along, anything like that, but just understand the premises, right, of like, oh, okay, this is how wallet works. This is how UTXOs truly work and, you know, are involved in transactions, things like that. But yeah, I mean, it's really helpful in that sense of just kind of getting a lot of those how questions, right, how does the security work? How does a wallet work? For example, my brother a few weeks ago, before I had read this book, asked me, I was telling him to like, oh, my wallet, like, because he was saying, oh, couldn't someone just hack your wallet? And I was like, well,

my wallet's like completely offline. So someone had to, you know, come to my house and break in, which, of course, could happen, right? But he was like, well, how, there's got to, it's got to be online. It's got to be Wi-Fi or something like that. I was like, no, like, it's really offline, right? And I think before reading this book, I couldn't give the best explanation. I was like, well, you're just creating a wallet, but it doesn't have to be online. You can still send stuff to it even if it's not online, right? And I think after this book, I could give an even better answer to that of just truly explaining like all wallet is is just a string of 256 zeros or ones, right?

But that is the possibilities there is almost as many as atoms in the universe. and you go from that as your private key to translating to public keys, right, that can't go back to the private key. And then, you know, kind of like invoice numbers almost that are your transaction, you know, addresses that can go, that you can't get back to the public key from there. And I think I understand that at a little bit of a deeper level after reading this book. That's just one example, right? It talks about mining. It talks about nodes. things like that too.

But it just gives you that deeper level understanding, which I do think is really helpful to dispel a lot of fud, right? Because even after you might explain the why questions that help people overcome some fud of like environmental fud, things like that, there's still other kind of doubts people have about like, well, how does this system actually work? Why can't someone, you know,

something my dad's asked me is like, why can't someone just double Bitcoin, right? And I think mining, understanding mining at a deeper level could be really helpful for someone like that that's concerned about like why can't someone just duplicate, you know, my Bitcoin copy it, copy and paste it, right? But that's just not how it works. So again, I'm not going to go chapter by chapter as I typically do. But so this is going to be a little shorter. But I will just say, I mean, I really encourage anyone who is wondering about some of those how questions to read this book. it's uh it's 500 pages but a lot of that is kind of like coding and there's a lot of really helpful

tables and graphs and things like that uh i want to say that i read it in about four to five hours and again i didn't follow along with the coding i didn't do very specific things and that might sound crazy right a lot of it is um like the it's about 400 pages if you don't count kind of the appendices and things like that, the index, stuff like that. So it is kind of, I will say it's kind of like a textbook, right? But what I did, and again, this is not, I didn't go the deepest level of following along with the coding, anything like that. What I did was I read it on this app called Natural Reader that you can do three times

speed on. And I read three times speed and followed along. And that's what I've been doing for a lot of these books recently. Not with a progressive case for Bitcoin because I bought a physical for that one. But a lot of these books, what I'll do is I'll put it in a natural reader. It has like kind of almost like closed captioning. We're at the bottom of your screen. It'll like highlight the words as it's reading.

It'll read three times speed, right? And I had to build up to reading or listening to stuff at three times speed. But once I did, I can read these books a lot faster. And again, I'm probably not deeply absorbing every single word that's being read. You could argue that. But I'm like gaining this understanding. from a lot of different sources. So I would encourage you to try that, whether it be natural reader or just starting to list

a podcast at faster speeds, if you're interested in getting more information, right? It's not objectively better to listen to something faster. Some stuff I want to listen to at 1.0 because I, you know, am just listening to some sports podcasts that I'm just out of a long drive, right? And I'm not like trying to learn every single moment of that. But if you are trying to like get through a book quickly, I think it's a really great tool, natural reader and just starting to read things at faster speeds. So anyways, that's how I read the book. And again, that kind of helps just explain that like this is not a technical person's review of mastering Bitcoin and deep critique about the coding and stuff like that.

But I will say like reading this book as someone who considers themselves a bitcoiner but is, you know, not the. best that may be explaining some of the technical things. This can help you understand some of those technical elements and at least even if you do like a cursory look or cursory overview of the book, it can help you kind of explain some of or understand and then explain to other people some of those basic premises of how a wallet works, how mining works, how a transaction works, how the node infrastructure works, things like that, right? So I think it's great for that. And I think it's just a great reference book to have, right? So maybe you do a cursory overview, but maybe you really are curious about how wallets work. Then you can read that chapter really in depth and get that deep

understanding right versus like if you just do the cursory overview, you might not fully understand. But it's great to have this almost like textbook of how Bitcoin works out there. Because it is free and open source software. Anyone can understand it, right? Even though I talked about that trust decentralization of like I haven't you know run the code myself right so I'm kind of trusting that other people are not being completely malicious right but I can at least minimize that trust by understanding how the code works and understanding how Bitcoin Core works you know the nodes things like that it's just really helpful so anyways I'm kind of babbling on now but I would really recommend giving the book an overview and having it in your library right

of if you want to reference something specific about how Bitcoin works, this is going to be useful. And even, you know, in 2030 and 2040, I think this will still be really useful because Bitcoin doesn't change that much, right? The basic infrastructure is always going to be the same. There might be some new development, some new, you know, software that's implemented, similar to how, you know, there was recently TapRood and Segwit before that, things like that. But of course, I mean, this mentions Segwit and talks about it, or it has it in an appendix. So yeah, I mean, it's a really great and it's going to be timeless, you know, as a tool. So yeah, hope that was helpful for if you're kind of curious about what mastering Bitcoin is or maybe you've never heard about that book, right?

And maybe it's something you want to look back at because that's one thing that in the Bitcoin community, we often do kind of promote the latest thing, right? There's nothing wrong with that. But when a new book comes out, a lot of people are talking about it and excited about it, right? but it's worth every once in all mentioning some of those, you know, timeless resources that you can always go back to and learn more about Bitcoin, learn more about the infrastructure, things like that. So I hope you enjoyed. If you're listening on Fountain, feel free to, you know,

leave me a boost and I'll read it on the next episode. I'd be happy to. And again, I think if you're not listening on Fountain, I think Fountain is a great tool to earn Bitcoin while you're listening and then be able to give it back to creators that you enjoy. So I would encourage you to at least try it out. It's a really awesome podcast platform. The interface is pretty great too.

There's not too much to complain about. Sometimes it's a little slow with finding new episodes. You can mark an episode for update and then it'll kind of find the new episodes within a couple minutes. So it's worked out most of the software bugs, even though it is a pretty new platform. and it's an enjoyable place to listen. And yeah, I'll keep doing some more. I have a couple more ideas for book reviews because, like I said, I've done a few books on this natural reader app.

And a lot of books, I will say this one's longer, but a lot of Bitcoin-related books, like layered money. I'm trying to think of a couple of the other books I've read recently. But a lot of the books with Bitcoin, you can read in like an hour. to two hours when it comes to just reading out three times speed and kind of following along. So if you're someone who does that or is kind of interested in learning more about Bitcoin, it's really not that hard to read a couple books, you know, in a week or something like that. So I would encourage you to do that.

And also if there's any specific books you want me to review, let me know if there's also any specific just topics about Bitcoin or even not about Bitcoin where I have done some other kind of variety content and want to just keep the SKZ PletkaZ Plet. platform open to whatever, just fun stuff to talk about, interesting stuff, more book reviews, you know, anything, just where I can give my thoughts, right, and be an outlet that hopefully some people enjoy. So anyways, that's my book review for mastering Bitcoin. Hope you enjoy. And have a great rest of your day.