Bits to Bitcoin: How Our Digital Stuff Works

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Mark Stuart Day (Visiting Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) C.A. Jennings

Bits to Bitcoin

How Our Digital Stuff Works

Mark Stuart Day (Visiting Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), C.A. Jennings

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English

MIT Press
06 February 2024

Other technologies & applied sciences; Computing: general

"An accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and other topics for the general reader.

An accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and other topics for the general reader.

Most of us feel at home in front of a computer; we own smartphones, tablets, and laptops; we look things up online and check social media to see what our friends are doing. But we may be a bit fuzzy about how any of this really works. In Bits to Bitcoin, Mark Stuart Day offers an accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and related topics for the general reader. He takes the reader from a single process to multiple processes that interact with each other; he explores processes that fail and processes that overcome failures; and he examines processes that attack each other or defend themselves against attacks.

Day tells us that steps are digital but ramps are analog; that computation is about ""doing something with stuff"" and that both the ""stuff"" and the ""doing"" can be digital. He explains timesharing, deadlock, and thrashing; virtual memory and virtual machines; packets and networks; resources and servers; secret keys and public keys; Moore's law and Thompson's hack. He describes how building in redundancy guards against failure and how endpoints communicate across the Internet. He explains why programs crash or have other bugs, why they are attacked by viruses, and why those problems are hard to fix. Finally, after examining secrets, trust, and cheating, he explains the mechanisms that allow the Bitcoin system to record money transfers accurately while fending off attacks."

By: Mark Stuart Day (Visiting Lecturer Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Illustrated by: C.A. Jennings
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262551076
ISBN 10: 0262551071
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 06 February 2024
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction 1 I Single Process 2 Steps 5 3 Processes 17 4 Names 31 5 Recursion 41 6 Limits: Imperfect Programs 49 7 Limits: Perfect Programs 65 II Interacting Processes 8 Coordination 81 9 State, Change, and Equality 89 10 Controlled Access 101 11 Interrupts 111 12 Virtualization 123 13 Separation 135 14 Packets 151 15 Browsing 155 III Unstoppable Processes 16 Failure 177 17 Software Failure 199 18 Reliable Networks 207 19 Inside the Cloud 217 20 Browsing Revisited 241 IV Defending Processes 21 Attackers 253 22 Thompson's Hack 263 23 Secrets 273 24 Secure Channel, Key Distribution, and Certificates 289 25 Bitcoin Goals 307 26 Bitcoin Mechanisms 315 27 Looking Back 335 Index of Metaphors and Examples 337 Subject Index 341

Mark Stuart Day was Chief Scientist at Riverbed Technology for a decade and is currently Visiting Lecturer at MIT. With more than thirty patented inventions, he has also made technical contributions at Dropbox, IBM, Cisco, Digital, and BBN.