Skip to main content

Bits to Bitcoin - Mark Stuart Day ***

When I saw the title of this book, I got all excited - at last we were going to get an explanation of bitcoin for the rest of us, who struggle to understand what the heck it really involves. There certainly is an explanation of bitcoin, but it comes in chapter 26 - in practice, the book contains far more. Almost every popular computer science title I've read has effectively been history of computer science - this is one of the first examples I've ever come across that is actually trying to make the 'science' part of computer science accessible to the general reader.

 I don't mean by this that it's an equivalent of Programming for Dummies. Instead, Bits to Bitcoin takes the reader through the concepts lying behind programming. If we think of programming as engineering, this is the physics that the engineering depends on. This is a really interesting proposition. Many years ago, I was a professional programmer, but I never studied computer science, so I was only familiar with the practical part, rather than the theory. And there's no doubt that I learned quite a lot, but it was distinctly hard work to do so.

 There are two problems here. One is that Mark Stuart Day is determined not to use code in examples, as he believes that it will scare off ordinary readers. So instead he uses analogies, some of which are so stretched that it's really difficult to follow what's going on - it would have been far simpler to have used actual examples from computing. I'm really not sure that the 'no code' approach works, because frankly, if you're prepared to put in the considerable effort required to work your way through this book, you wouldn't be scared of a little simple code.

 The second issue is that this really is a textbook with some of the sharp edges rubbed off. There's no context, no narrative, no people - nothing but fact after fact. Again, this makes reading the book much more like hard work than it needs to be. As I've already mentioned, that's not to say that you won't learn quite a lot if you make the effort - but things don't have to be like this. And the constant abstraction from actual code or hardware detail makes it more of a struggle to get through. This comes across particularly when Day gets on to the internet, where there pretty much has to be more specifics, and suddenly things get a touch more readable.

 As far as bitcoin goes, I'm still waiting for an explanation of it that is comprehensible to the general reader. Again, Day does give us plenty of information, but it's not put across in a usefully comprehensible way. I was pleased to see, though, that he does address the issue that has recently been in the news that bitcoin mining is currently resulting in a lot of dirty energy being used.

 Overall, then, the intention of this book is brilliant - it's supposed to be proper popular computer science. It's just the execution of that intent that makes reading it a lot harder work than it should be.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...
Post a Comment
Read more