According to @cnLedger, who follows Chinese cryptocurrency news, Andreas Antonopoulous’ book, Mastering Bitcoin, was recently recommended on Chinese television as a way to get introduced to cryptocurrency and the blockchain.
The tweet mentions that the Chinese version of the book, as made available in the Asian nation, has a completely different title – Blockchain: The Path Towards Digitized Assets.
Antonopoulous, widely considered one of the leading experts on Bitcoin and professional speaker on the subject who has made numerous major media appearances, was nevertheless pleased with the news. He considers himself the “open blockchain expert.”
The book is meant to introduce a newcomer to Bitcoin and help them become a “master” of the subject. Of course, there’s no mastery of something which remains in development, the book does a great job of helping people get acquainted with the subject. There are numerous complexities within Bitcoin which the book helps to iron out, from the first chapter on, such as the following:
Bitcoin is a distributed, peer-to-peer system. As such there is no “central” server or point of control. Bitcoin are created through a process called “mining,” which involves competing to find solutions to a mathematical problem while processing bitcoin transactions. Any participant in the bitcoin network (i.e., anyone using a device running the full bitcoin protocol stack) may operate as a miner, using their computer’s processing power to verify and record transactions. Every 10 minutes, on average, a bitcoin miner is able to validate the transactions of the past 10 minutes and is rewarded with brand new bitcoin. Essentially, bitcoin mining decentralizes the currency-issuance and clearing functions of a central bank and replaces the need for any central bank.
Readers who are interested can read the book for free.
Andreas Antonopoulous travels the world giving talks on the subject of Bitcoin and has long been considered an authority on it. Whenever the Bitcoin community is facing a serious dilemma, his opinion carries a great deal of weight.
Bitcoin is nothing new in China. It has long been one of the top mining hubs and its regulatory landscape has been a subject of keen interest. It is home to several of the major exchanges and mining hardware producers. It is, of course, where most of the hardware used in Bitcoin is produced, regardless if the companies are based in China.
Several Chinese people have become notable figures in important debates and topics within the Bitcoin space, including Jihan Wu and Samson Mow, both of whom played prominent if opposite roles in the great Bitcoin scaling debate which eventually culminated in the Bitcoin Cash fork.
Shanghai satellite image from Shutterstock.
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