In the year 2017, Bitcoin touched a market capitalization of over 100 billion dollars. In the year 2014, one Bitcoin could buy about 500 dollars, just three years later one Bitcoin buys 5,000 dollars. The Initial Coin offering is becoming the preferred method of raising money. Many countries like Dubai have announced their own cryptocurrency called emCash.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain are the most difficult technologies to understand. That's why most people including technology folks cannot understand the future direction of these technologies. The only way to understand anything complex is by going back to the basics.

This is what we do in this book. We explain every byte of the Bitcoin blockchain that is downloaded on your computer. only by going back to your roots can you understand anything complex.

Most of the code in this book is written in Python as today, it is the easiest language to use. The Bitcoin Source is written only in C++. Most of the important Bitcoin data structures are only documented in code, a bare knowledge of reading and not writing C++ will help. Finally,  the official client for Ethereum is written in the programming language Go.

It is written for a programmer, We use code and not words to describe a blockchain. We believe that all kinds of people including non-technology folks will need some programming knowledge to grasp the basic concepts of the blockchain. There is no other way to understand this technology.

Finally, we end the book with the biggest use of smart Contracts which is raising money using an ICO. Our primary focus is on Bitcoin and Blockchains and not on Ethereum and smart contracts which comprises only 4 chapters.

International Currency transfers are very expensive today. With the advent of the Lightning Network and sidechains, the Bitcoin blockchain can scale to a level where it can handle transactions faster than any credit card transaction.

One of the recent bigger innovations of Blockchain technology is the Initial Coin offering or an ICO. This will enable millions of people to invest in companies using blockchain technology. This will help us understand the technologies under the hood that makes it happen.

Chapter 1: Basics of the Bitcoin Block Header

Chapter 2: Transactions - Basics

Chapter 3: Computing the Merkle Hash

Chapter 4: Bitcoin Addresses

Chapter 5: Vanity Bitcoin Addresses

Chapter 6: Difficulty and Nonce

Chapter 7: Storing Bitcoin Transactions using SQL

Chapter 8: Transactions - Inputs and Outputs

Chapter 9: Hiding Data in the blockchain

Chapter 10: Signing Transactions

Chapter 11: Roll your own transaction

Chapter 12: Client and Server

Chapter 13: Notaries and OP_RETURN

Chapter 14: Pay to Script Hash or Multi-Sig Bitcoin addresses

Chapter 15: Basic Networking

Chapter 16: More Networking

Chapter 17: Hashes SHA0 and SHA1

Chapter 18: Hashes - Sha-256 and RipeMD-160

Chapter 19: ECC with Sage - Part 1

Chapter 20: ECC with Sage Part 2

Chapter 21: Sending our own transaction

Chapter 22: Sending one transaction without using library functions

Chapter 23: Index folder

Chapter 24: UTXO Dataset

Chapter 25: Wallets

Chapter 26: Rev/Undo files

Chapter 27: peers.dat and banlist.dat

Chapter 28: Miners, blocks and more

Chapter 29: fee_estimates.dat

Chapter 30: Building the Bitcoin Source code

Chapter 31: Testing Bitcoin for bugs

Chapter 32: Ethereum Solidity

Chapter 33: Ethereum leveldb keys and GOLANG

Chapter 34: Ethereum Unravelling the State Machine

Chapter 35: Bitcoin Cash vs Segwit vs Segwit2x

Chapter 36: Bitcoin Core 0.15, UTXO and more

Chapter 37: Transactions and Blocks - Error Checks

Chapter 38: ICO and Smart Contract Security

Chapter 39: What is a Bitcoin and a Blockchain

Chapter 40: AI and Blockchain – Never The Twain Shall Meet