Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$0.00
or $9.99 to buy

Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial

Paperback
$15.95

$15.95

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Monday, May 20 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$15.95 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

30-day easy returns

Returns

30-day easy returns

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (13) from $13.16 & FREE Shipping

Follow the author

Yan Pritzker

+ Follow

More books from this author

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind the First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained Paperback – June 17, 2019

by Yan Pritzker (Author), Nicholas Evans (Illustrator)

4.7 685 ratings

See all formats and editions

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you borrow the Kindle edition of this book with your Kindle Unlimited membership. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$15.95","priceAmount":15.95,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"15","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"95","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"MFKZfPBGEszpY4PKfoeFDfaZ0lFkefM6%2FzdUvz9kqXBxXIjbMdmUU0yUls1GWXqZuTWV26vJQcTrJXSQe%2FOXw6vmOt9RcbaZfGTbcR2sHAN93wh3lZTPw59CTH6p04oDjDqlXu1tq%2BOv0GBP%2FDwCjA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Bitcoin may well be the greatest invention of our time, and most people have no idea what it is, or how it works. Walking through its invention step by step, this short two hour read is critical before you invest.

No technical expertise required! Read it, then share it with your loved ones.

“It was much quicker and easier to understand than I expected [...] After reading it I sold some of my alts for more bitcoin. I’m on the edge of becoming a maximalist because of you.” - Nako Mbelle, Around The Coin Podcast

Frequently bought together

Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind the First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained

$15.95

Get it as soon as Monday, May 20

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

$20.20

Get it as soon as Sunday, May 19

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$21.88

Get it May 21 - 28

Only 10 left in stock - order soon.

Ships from and sold by SuperBookDeals-.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Jeff Booth
2,949
Paperback
27 offers from $7.79
Saifedean Ammous
7,171
Hardcover
83 offers from $10.88
Lyn Alden
1,121
Paperback
13 offers from $21.59
Saifedean Ammous
951
Hardcover
21 offers from $12.75
Jason Paul Lowery
477
Paperback
4 offers from $42.99
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
20
Paperback
53 offers from $40.40

Editorial Reviews

Review

"There are extremely few books that can boast that they take a very complex and difficult idea, and make it easy to understand. 'Inventing Bitcoin' starts from the fundamental problem that needs solving and piece by piece rebuilds bitcoin conceptually from the ground up. And does this without a bunch of technical jargon. It may very well be my favorite book for grasping the how and why of the Bitcoin system... and I've read quite a few of them."
— Guy Swann, Host of Bitcoin Audible Podcast

"Yan explains what Bitcoin is with brevity and insight. Reading his book gave us the confidence to pivot our entire business into Bitcoin. Read it and it will change your life."
— Anthony Scaramucci, Founder, SkyBridge Capital

"Only took two hours! This will be an incredible resource for helping people understand Bitcoin."
— Marty Bent, Host of TFTC Podcast

"Inventing Bitcoin is so good because it's the result of Yan teaching Bitcoin to high school students for a year, evolving the best explanations and analogies, determining the optimal stacking and framing. I don't think any other Bitcoin book evolved that way."
— Cory Klippsten, Founder & CEO, Swan.com

"I sent out another copy today to an interested investor. I must have sent about one hundred this year. Great introduction to Bitcoin with enough depth if you want to get into the weeds."
— Dan Tapiero, Founder & CEO 10T Holdings

"I consider Inventing Bitcoin as one of the best books to gift to your friends or family for them to start their own rabbit hole journey. I personally found the book at the start of 2020 and was amazed at how it helped click so many pieces of the puzzle into place in my own mind after having spent years trying to wrestle with so many of the concepts that make bitcoin so unique!"
— Daniel Prince, Host of Once Bitten Podcast

From the Author

Inventing Bitcoin was the result of my own journey into discovering and understanding why Bitcoin was invented and how it works. I left a long and successful career in tech entrepreneurship to study Bitcoin full time because I believed it was among one of the most important inventions of this century. After more than a year of giving talks on Bitcoin to various audiences including high school students, I found that there was no book out there that succintly captured the how and why of Bitcoin. This book is written at a level anyone can understand, and yet will leave you with a depth of knowledge that will make you confident enough to explain Bitcoin to your friends and family. Today, Bitcoin is leading a radical transformation in our society and enabling human collaboration, freedom, and flourishing on a scale never before seen. This book will enable you to see what so many people who have dedicated thousands of hours to studying Bitcoin are talking about -- and all in just a short two hour read.

From the Inside Flap

When many people first hear about Bitcoin, they tend to develop opinions before even attempting to understand it. There is so much noise out there, it's easy to be misled about what Bitcoin is, and how it works. Up until 2016, I was one of these people.

Why did I decide to write this book? I spent the last twenty years building tech startups. I immerse myself in new technology every day, and I'm pretty good at figuring things out. Even still, it took me five years from first hearing about Bitcoin to actually sitting down to try to understand it. I have a feeling I'm not the only one who could use a little help wrapping their head around this potentially world changing innovation.

I first heard of Bitcoin in 2011 from slashdot.org, a news site for nerds. Back then, the Bitcoin price had gone through the roof to a massive bubble peak of around $30 per coin. All I knew was that some people on the Internet were trying to start some kind of peer to peer payment system. Not knowing the first thing about what it was, how it worked, or anything at all about investing and market cycles, I decided I should buy some just in case it turned out to be important. I had to use a questionable looking website called Mt. Gox to do so. This dollar-to-bitcoin exchange later turned out to be insolvent.

I slowly watched my investment shrink to nearly nothing, as the price crashed from $30 per bitcoin to $2. At some point, I forgot about it completely and went on with my life, working on startups. I don't even know what happened to those coins. I know I sold some or most of my stash at the bottom of the cycle. I imagine the keys to the rest are stored on some hard drive from an old laptop, lying in a dump somewhere.

In 2013 I heard about it again. This time, the noise in the media was louder, and now the experience of buying it was a lot slicker. There were apps like Coinbase, which looked downright legitimate. This was a marked improvement from the days of Mt. Gox. It seemed to me that Bitcoin could really be something.

Just in case it was, and again not knowing the first thing about it, I bought at the peak of the bubble (around $1000 per coin) and watched my investment decimated as it fell to about $200 per coin. This time, I figured it wasn't enough money to bother selling, so I left it be, and, proceeded to ignore it as I was knee deep in starting to build my next startup: Reverb.com.

Over the next four years, Reverb grew quickly, becoming the number one destination for musicians. I was making a difference in the world and bringing music to people. I was the CTO of an exciting, fast growing tech company, doing something I was passionate about, and I had no time for silly Internet money.

I'm embarrassed to say that it wasn't until the summer of 2016 that I finally watched my first video by Andreas Antonopoulos, which finally forced me to sit up and pay attention. I started asking questions. Where does Bitcoin come from? Who controls it? How does it work? What is mining? What impact will it have on the world? I started reading everything I could get my hands on, listening to hours of podcasts and videos every day for a year and a half straight. Finally, in early 2018, just after Bitcoin hit another all time high at around $20,000 per coin, I decided to leave Reverb in pursuit of helping bring Bitcoin to the world in whatever way I could.

Why did I leave a very successful, fast growing startup company to work on Bitcoin?

I believe that the invention of Bitcoin is the kind of thing that comes around once in a lifetime; perhaps once in many lifetimes. If Bitcoin succeeds, it may prove to be as important as the printing press, (decentralized production of information), the Internet (decentralized communication), and the multi branch checks and balances systems of modern democratic governments.

I hope that by understanding how Bitcoin works, you'll understand how it can turn out to be a force for good in the world. Bitcoin will decentralize the production and use of money, which is the key to unlocking new ways for humanity to collaborate on a scale that was previously unimaginable.

The price of Bitcoin is mostly what you hear about in the media. One day it's going to a million dollars, and the next it's in a death spiral going to zero. It's either that or Bitcoin will use all the world's energy and destroy the planet within ten years. Of course this is false, and you'll understand why once you learn about how it works.

My goal with this book isn't to analyze the economics of Bitcoin and sound money, though we'll touch on these concepts briefly. I'm not going to look at Bitcoin from the standpoint of investing, or try to convince you to buy some. I would highly recommend The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous and Why Buy Bitcoin by Andy Edstrom as immediate follow-ups to this book for those curious to understand money and the financial system.

We're also not going to dig into any computer code, and no computer science background is required to understand this book. If you want to look at Bitcoin through that lens, I recommend Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos, and Programming Bitcoin by Jimmy Song.
For me, understanding all the things that come together to make Bitcoin work was a profound moment. In this book, I hope to share that knowledge with you in a short, simple format. My goal today is to tickle your brain, and to give you a taste of the computer science, economics, and game theory that make Bitcoin one of the most interesting and profound inventions of our time. By understanding the workings of Bitcoin, I hope you will find, like I did, that Bitcoin is much deeper than it appears to be at first, and may have an incredible impact on the world for generations to come.

The way we'll do it is one step at a time. With nothing but a high school level math background, we will walk through inventing bitcoin, step by step. I hope that this book will give you just enough of an introduction to send you down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Let's get started!

About the Author

Yan Pritzker is a technology entrepreneur with a career in tech startups that spans more than twenty years. His last company, Reverb.com, a marketplace for musical instruments, was sold to Etsy in 2019. Following that, Yan devoted himself to the study of Bitcoin and the education of others on this world changing innovation. Yan is the author of the book Inventing Bitcoin, the best technical book for beginners, and gives talks on Bitcoin related topics ranging from the importance of Bitcoin as a tool for freedom to the technical details of how Bitcoin works. Yan is also the cofounder and CTO at Swan.com, a Bitcoin services company focusing on Bitcoin education and onboarding individuals, companies, trusts, and retirement accounts onto Bitcoin, and an advisor to Riot Blockchain, a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (June 17, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 106 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1794326316
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1794326316
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.24 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #95,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #70 in Digital Currencies
- #71 in Money & Monetary Policy (Books)
- #96 in Theory of Economics

Customer Reviews:
4.7 685 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Yan Pritzker

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Yan is the co-founder and CTO at Swan.com. Yan has spent the last twenty years building startups, including Reverb.com, which was acquired by Etsy. Today, he focuses on Bitcoin education and onboarding through his efforts at Swan.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

685 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Daniel Scheibly

Very informative and a great read.

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2024

Verified Purchase

Thanks a bunch.
Got a lot from reading this book.

Learned a lot of stuff I didn't know.
Appreciate it 🙏

Helpful

Aron C. Gahagan

Focuses on most important take-aways without getting too deep into the weeds

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2022

Verified Purchase

Pritzker packs a lot of helpful information into 106 pages. However, at every point, he is clear, concise, and makes no assumptions about the reader's background. Those who want to really understand the mechanics of the Bitcoin network, without getting lost in the weeds, will appreciate this book. What is cryptography and how does Bitcoin leverage this? Why is decentralization important? How does the software account for incentives at every point of Bitcoin's inflation schedule in order to secure the network? What about vulnerabilities? All this and more is covered in clear, direct language than the vast majority of people will understand. He explains the invention of bitcoin step by step, addressing what problem arose, how it was solved, etc. Very helpful, and a very quick read. I will be recommending it widely.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Michael Tabone

best intro to Bitcoin

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2023

Verified Purchase

I’m going to use this in my graduate level blockchain classes to make sure everyone understands the basics of Bitcoin. Great explanations and demonstrated depth of knowledge all the way through the book. Just wonderful.

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2020

Verified Purchase

Good overview of Bitcoin, but a little short on other details. I wish it would have gone into more on wallets, transactions, etc.

Helpful

Ed Cleaves

Great Technical Explanation of How Bitcoin Works

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2022

Verified Purchase

Starting with a description of the problems with traditional money; the book proceeds to describe how Bitcoin offers solutions - step by step, slowly adding more nuance and detail. I really appreciated the use of analogies to explain what the Bitcoin Network is, how it works, and why it is important. This book is easy to read and is a great resource to help people understand Bitcoin’s use case - a true censorship resistant, sound money. It’s supply can’t be created easily, it can’t be issued by a single entity, and it’s monetary policy can’t be changed - randomly or flippantly.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Jessa

Consider this your first book on Bitcoin!

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

I’ve read many books about Bitcoin and I like this one the best. If you want to understand Bitcoin in a simple and straightforward way without sacrificing depth, then this is the book for you. I highly recommend this book—in fact I have gifted several copies to my friends and family.

Helpful

Peter

Very efficient and accessible explanation of Bitcoin

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2021

Verified Purchase

I knew almost nothing about it crypto prior to reading, and this book was really helpful and valuable. It was a little dense since I’m not previously familiar with some of the concepts, so there were paragraphs I had to reread a couple times. But I much prefer this brisk, shorter book that I have to work to digest - rather than a longer book that may restate the same thing over and over. Worth the purchase for sure.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Brian P. Evans

Excellent Overview of Bitcoin

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book is a great intro to all aspects of bitcoin. Concepts are explained in a manner that is easily understood by a broad audience.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

EL

Succinct explanation of the most important fundamentals

Reviewed in Canada on December 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is an absolutely fantastic book about the fundamentals of bitcoin explained in a manner that is easy to understand and memorable. I would recommend it to any beginner all the way up to a seasoned bitcoiner. Highly recommend!

One person found this helpful

Ben Clay

Clear explanations for the technically curious but excludes Lightning (it was written in 2019)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 7, 2023

Verified Purchase

It's a small book and I read it in an evening but worth it. I've often had trouble explaining some of the technical aspects of Bitcoin to potential converts and this helped: most notably with the "somebody could hack the code" objection.

Cliente Kindle

excelent

Reviewed in Brazil on January 11, 2021

Verified Purchase

excelent book, highly recomended! inventing bitcoin is a nice way to start to comprehend this revolution! specially in times like we are living in!

Kindle Customer

Highly Recommended for anybody

Reviewed in India on September 19, 2022

Verified Purchase

Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the next financial revolution called BITCOIN. It will surely gonna blow your mind....

Cliente de Kindle

Conceptos técnicos clave de bitcoin

Reviewed in Spain on September 3, 2022

Verified Purchase

Un buen libro para introducirse en los fundamentos tecnológicos de bitcoin, con extensión contenida. Emplea un inglés técnico y accesible que facilita la lectura. Complementariamente, aporta una buena selección de enlaces a lo largo del libro para ampliar información. Dada su aproximación eminentemente técnica, eché en falta, no obstante, algún anexo con código comentado.

Translate review to English

See more reviews

Return this item for free

Follow the author

Image Unavailable