I just read the preface and have to ask... is this heavy on marketing, cheerleading and kool-aid? First the author makes it sound like the Nakamoto paper was sent from the heavens and then this:

> I became obsessed and enthralled, spending 12 or more hours each day glued to a screen, reading, writing, coding, and learning as much as I could. I emerged from this state of fugue, more than 20 pounds lighter from lack of consistent meals, determined to dedicate myself to working on bitcoin.

To me, this seems a little dramatic for what should be a technical topic.

Ignore that -- the meat is in the inner content. Very technical, and gets into all the gory details of nearly all aspects of Bitcoin.

> is this heavy on marketing, cheerleading and kool-aid?

I haven't looked at the book, but the author is, a bit. Here's a somewhat banana-pants talk he recently gave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyK4P7ZdOK8

Gold-bug has at times been used as a pejorative against people who criticized central banking and favored gold.

I wonder what pejorative will be coined for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Banana-pants is just too broad. /s

I'm a cryptocurrency enthusiast myself. To be more precise, the talk is ignorant of the history of money as a system of domination, and utopian in that it ignores critical vulnerabilities intrinsic to distributed-consensus currency systems.

I wrote about it in a little more detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/73fi5q/mone...

That's what prefaces often sound like. It's the author introducing themself and their claim to authority that will make you take their following content seriously. This author is just explaining why they cared so much as to write a book.

there is no marketing etc in this book. it is by far the best book on the topic. it covers only bitcoin, i.e. no etherium/smartcontracts etc, but it does that really well. and in fact all the other blockchains are more or less the same

It's the Hollywood version of the events.

Skip intro, jump right in the technical chapters, it really goes into necessary details as an introductory book.

The preface maybe a bit dramatic but the contents are really good for a beginner.

Why so hateful? What does having autism have to do with this? I don't really like the quoted piece from the preface either, and even if the author has autism, what does it matter? Isn't it more fair to people with autism and more powerful with regards to your dislike to the author to just not like the author based on that you don't like him as a person? That way you don't insult everyone with autism and you insult him more.

Also, your diagnose does not make much sense; you state that the dramatised telling in the preface means that the author has autism? In that case that would mean that people like Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert or in that case most Americans (compared to us reserved Dutch people) would have autism.

On top of this you seem to suggest that you have to have some sort of mental condition to do things 'wrong' (as far as you want to call the preface wrong). What disorder do you have that led you to write cliché as 'clise'? Or did you mean 'sexy young man'?[1]

[1]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clise

> Or did you mean 'sexy young man'?

So 4chan is invading HN now? I thought they considered us too intertwined in the cargo cult botnet.

what's a clise

cliché

This book helped me understand the basics of bitcoin as well. Great read.

Ditto. This book is excellent, and is in it's second print

I second this. It's good both as an introductory book for someone new to blockchain and for someone with more experience looking to round out their knowledge.

Is this available in Mobi/Kindle format?