Background¶
This book is meant for, but by no means restricted to, the course Introduction to Blockchain taught by the Blockchain club at Cornell. The course was first offered in Fall 2021 and has been offered every semester since. Each time we, the teaching staff, try to improve the course and this textbook is one such improvement, first introduced in Spring 2022.
We want to thank everyone in the Cornell Blockchain for their contribution to the course and the textbook.
Note
One of the reasons for this textbook is that information on the Blockchain is often scattered and hard to verify. At the end of each chapter we will have a list of sources we deem reputable and ones we base the text on.
The formatting and structure is inspired by Cornell professor Michael Clarkson and his CS3110 textbook.
The only exception to the above is the use of italics and single-quotes. When we use italics we are using a formal definition that is commonly used for Blockchain while ‘single-quotes’ are our own definitions to help explanation. Using definitions outside this course means others in the Blockchain community understand them but ‘definitions’ might leave some confused. The only exemption to this rule is for blockchain-as-a-data-structure, our own definition, which is too wordy to constantly repeat, so we often use its italicized acronym, BADS.
Copyright 2022 Cornell Blockchain & Daniel Mistrik.