Table of Contents

Stage 1: Terminology and Technical Foundations.- Step 1: Thinking in Layers and Aspects.- Step 2: Seeing the Big Picture.- Step 3: Recognizing the Potential.- Stage 2: Why the Blockchain Is Needed.- Step 4: Discovering the Core Problem.- Step 5: Disambiguating the Term.- Step 6: Understanding the Nature of Ownership.- Step 7: Spending Money Twice.- Stage 3: How the Blockchain Works.- Step 8: Planning the Blockchain.- Step 9: Documenting Ownership.- Step 10: Hashing Data.- Step 11: Hashing in the Real World.- Step 12: Identifying and Protecting User Accounts.- Step 13: Authorizing Transactions.- Step 14: Storing Transaction Data.- Step 15: Using the Data Store.- Step 16: Protecting the Data Store.- Step 17: Distributing the Data Store Among Peers.- Step 18: Verifying and Adding Transactions.- Step 19: Choosing a Transaction History.- Step 20: Paying for Integrity.- Step 21: Bringing the Pieces Together.- Stage 4: Limitations and Their Solutions.- Step 22: Seeing the Limitations.- Step 23: Reinventing the Blockchain.- Stage 5: Using the Blockchain, Summary, and Outlook Step 24: Using the Blockchain.- Step 25: Summarizing and Going Further.- Bibliography.-

About the Author

Daniel Drescher is an experienced banking professional who has held positions in electronic security trading in a range of banks. His recent activities have focused on automation, machine learning and big data in the context of security trading. Amongst others, Daniel holds a Doctorate in Econometrics from the Technical University of Berlin and an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford.

Reviews

"The book is really what is says to be - it introduces the "Blockchain Basics" without formulas or programming. And still, does it in a serious way, which allows you to "take home" the knowledge after reading it." (vitoshacademy.com , May, 2018) "The book could be used as a textbook or simply to help structure a presentation on blockchain. ... I think that the book achieves its objectives: to explain to a nontechnical audience what the blockchain is, how it works, and where it can be applied. It should also allow the reader to understand a lot of the hype that surrounds blockchain and to differentiate the ways in which the term is used." (Computing Reviews, October, 2017)