Distributed Ledger Technology: The Science of the Blockchain

by Roger Wattenhofer

FinTech developers and managers understand that the blockchain has the potential to disrupt the financial world. Distributed ledger technology allows the participants of a distributed system to agree on a common view of the system, to track changes in the system, in a reliable way. In the distributed systems community, agreement techniques have been known long before cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (where the term blockchain is borrowed) emerged. Various concepts and protocols exist, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. This book introduces the basic techniques when building fault-tolerant distributed systems, in a scientific way. We will present different protocols and algorithms that allow for fault-tolerant operation, and we will discuss practical systems that implement these techniques.

Genres: Computer Science

170 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2017

Reviews

[Peter Aronson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book appears to be the course notes for a distributed systems course taught by the author, and as such is rather dry and terse -- the actual lectures would have presumably expanded and explained the material. The author would have done better to have included that lecture material as well if he's going to sell the book to a general audience. And, despite the title, only to one chapter out of eight really involves the blockchain.

This is a rather mathematical treatment of the subject material, the author apparently belonging to the school of of academic computer scientists that wish they could reduce all of computer science to mathematics and skip all of that messy programming stuff. You can get through most of the book with algebra and set theory, but there are occasional veers into non-trivial probability theory, real analysis and graph theory.

All that said, it's not a completely awful review of the material covered if you can put up with the how dry and dense it is.

The Kindle version of this book appears to be an image capture, and does not flow at all, making it useless on a small screen such as a smart phone or e-reader.

[Helger · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject matter of the book was exactly what I hoped (consensus, byzantine agreement, and some explanation of what blockchain achieves). However, this book is just a copy of some chapters of the author's freely available online lecture notes on distributed computing. Moreover, both the book and the lecture notes read like a printout of slides, used during lecturing. Probably all the rest (motivating and explaining different protocols) was done verbally during the lecture course. I feel that the book (and the lecture notes) are mostly good as a link to different protocols together with a good reference list.

[Fan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book already requires solid knowledge in and familiarity with mathematical notation, computer science and algorithms. Those who have these skills may not need that book in the first place.

The best readership for this book are people who, on one hand have sufficient skills in mathematics, algorithms and computer science in order to understand the text, but on the other hand were not able to learn about blockchain on their own. Well, I guess the number of people who fulfil that criterion is pretty limited.

Those who are looking for a book that explains blockchain technology to non-mathematicians will be disappointed.

[Tuấn Anh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book write about Blockchain in computer science

[Haihsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

a hardcore book, i like,

[Jeremy Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

An academic trace from distributed systems through to blockchains and beyond. Given "blockchains" is in the title, I expected more on it. In reality, the blockchain chapter is stapled to some earlier chapters on Paxos and BFTs with little interplay beyond a claim of eventual consistency for a blockchain (a claim now challenged as being considerably weaker than the level actually achieved). On the positive side, I enjoyed the conversational style of the remarks highlighting corner cases of what was just presented.

[Warren Mcpherson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very short, very academic book that follows the development of topics foundational to the creation of the blockchain. It describes a variety of distributed system concepts like fault tolerance, consensus, and quorum. I thought the book did a particularly good job of defining Byzantine nodes and following up with implications for several algorithms. It is very good at showing the quantitative impact of defence against attacks in different systems.
The book seems like it is targeting a committee of professors with its lemmas and formal definitions. No concession is made to civilians. That said, I quite like the remarks at the end of the chapters that discuss first publication of ideas tracing their history. Furthermore, the ideas themselves are generally well explained. I did learn several things.
If you are committed to learning more about the computer science that shapes the blockchain then I recommend this book. But it's not as easy a read as it's diminutive size would suggest.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The term "Blockchain" features prominently in the title, but that's probably just to sell copies, as it's hardly the focus of this book. Rather, Wattenhofer lays out the evolution of algorithms designed for creating distributed systems, with an emphasis on distributed consensus. Also explored are how these systems behave when participants may be faulty or malicious. The tradeoffs of each approach are listed, with subsequent systems usually focusing on the previous systems' shortcomings.

Topics span:
- two-phase commits,
- Paxos,
- Byzantine agreement,
- Zyzzyva,
- quorum systems,
- blockchains (and a few programmable-money scripts that can be ran against them),
- hypercubic networks,
- and DHTs with churning.

4.5 stars

[Björn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Little more than a computer science lecture script and just as motivating to read, even if you (partly) understand the math inside.

[Delhi Irc]

Location: GG6 IRC
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