Chapter 1: The History of Money and Alternate Currencies
Chapter Goal: Explain the historical evolution of money and alternate currencies prior to bitcoin
Sub-Topics 1. Characteristics of money
2. Gold and silver backed currencies
3. Gold standard and fiat currencies
4. Alternate currencies prior to bitcoin (Liberty coin, etc.)
5. Bitcoin 6. The Darknet
7. Future evolution of cryptocurrencies
Chapter 2: Bitcoin and Altcoins
Chapter Goal: Discussion of bitcoin and altcoins in circulation and their properties and their raison d'etre.
Sub-Topics
1. Introduction
2. Bitcoin
3. Ethereum 4. Monero
5. Ripple
6. Stellar, Tron, and other cryptocurrencies
Chapter 3: Cryptographic Hash Functions
Chapter Goal: Explain cryptographic hash functions, their characteristics, and why they are important in blockchain and cryptocurrency application development. Sub-Topics
1. Introduction
2. Cryptographic hash functions
3. The collision free property of cryptographic hash functions
4. Proving the tamper free property
5. The irreversible property
6. The unique range property
7. Hash pointers and data structures
8. Proving authenticity with crytpographic hashes
9. The SHA-256 cryptographic hash
10. Common cryptographic hash functions
Chapter 4: Symmetric Encryption
Chapter Goal: Explain what symmetric encryption is and it's deficiency in secure key distribution
Sub-Topics: 1. Introduction
2. How symmetric encryption works
3. The key distribution problem 4. Common symmetric encryption algorithms
Chapter 5: Public Key Cryptography
Chapter Goal: Explain what public key cryptography is and how it works
Sub-Topics:
1. Introduction 2. Algorithms to generate public private key pairs
3. RSA and elliptic curve cryptography
4. Using public-private key pairs for encryption and decryption 5. Identity formation and proof with public keys
6. Generating globally unique IDs
Chapter 6: Digital Signatures Chapter Goal: Show how the digital signature algorithm is implemented and how it can be used to prove authorship and authenticity of documents
Sub-Topics: 1. Introduction
2. Creating digital signatures
3. Proving authorship and authenticity of documents Chapter 7: Blockchain Construction
Chapter Goal: Discuss properties of a blockchain and how to create a blockchain Sub-Topics:
1. Introduction
2. Properties of blockchain
3. How to create a blockchain
4. The bitcoin blockchain 5. Scalability issues in blockchain
6. Blockchain databases
7. The genesis block
8. Creating a simple cryptocurrency
Chapter 8: The Merkle Tree Algorithm
Chapter Goal: A discussion of the Merkle tree algorithm along with source code implementations
Sub-Topics:
1. Introduction 2. Implementation of the Merkle tree algorithm
Chapter 9: Topology of Cryptocurrency Networks
Chapter Goal: What is a peer-to-peer network and the use of such P2P networks in blockchain applications to broadcast and verify transactions.
Sub-Topics:
1. Introduction
2. Peer-to-peer networks
About the Author:
Karan Singh Garewal is an attorney at law in Canada. He has over 20 years of software development experience in C, C++, Go, JavaScript, Node, Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, Vue, PostgresSQL, MySQL, and Cassandra. His current interests are in financial engineering and real-time algorithmic trading systems. He is developing a neural network cryptocurrency trading platform on a C++, Go, Cassandra, and Vue stack.
