Srivastava Vizeet - Exploring Bitcoin with Blockchain

My beloved

Wife Rati and Daughter Aruvyaa

I am Vizeet Srivastava. I have over 20 years of experience in all phases of product development lifecycle. I have experience in wide range of technologies starting from Telecom, Datacom, and Windows device drivers, and now for last ten years I am into Big Data and Cloud Platform technologies.

My role has been to architect and design solution and work with team to bring the solution to completion. As a Data Engineer I have worked with multi-channel disparate data sources to perform Complex Event Processing, create State Machine, flow control and build graphical relationship. As a Cloud Engineer I have worked on automation of cloud migration, automation of data ingestion, cleansing, transformation, and consumption of transformed data.

I am certified Hyperledger developer and consultant.

Currently, I am a proprietor of HyperVerse Global Consulting company in Serbia, and I am providing software consulting services related to Big Data and Cloud platform to clients.

Priyank Jani has more than 7+ years of Blockchain experience and 14+ years of software industry experience. Presently he is working with Icertis as a Blockchain Architect. Priyank believes in Blockchain just not as a technology but as an idea, to change, to improve, to sustain, and to create new opportunities. Passionate about blockchain, Priyank has founded a community called LetsBlockchain, which enables businesses and individuals in adopting blockchain technologies. He is a member of the Government Blockchain Association and drives the Pune chapter.

There are a few people I want to thank for the continued and ongoing support they have given me during the writing of this book. First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife and daughter for their continuous support, encouragements and sacrifices they have made in my self-learning journey without it I could have never completed this book.

I am grateful to Satoshi Nakamoto who gave us hope of financial inclusion for over 1 billion people who are being neglected by the current financial system. I am also grateful to Andreas Antonopoulos for his book Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain and his YouTube videos which enlightened me and gave me technical perspective of Bitcoin. I am also grateful to Vijay Boyapati and Michael J Saylor for his book The Bullish Case for Bitcoin which gave me financial perspective of Bitcoin.

I am grateful to everyone who directly or indirectly helped me with all the material I needed to learn Bitcoin I could not have learned Bitcoin and completed this book without their contribution.

I gratefully acknowledge Mr. Priyank Jani and Samanyu Chopra for their kind technical scrutiny for this book.

My gratitude also goes to the team at BPB Publications for being supportive enough to provide me quite a long time to finish the the book since Bitcoin blockchain is the core of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology space it required a lot of research to bring the details, connection with other components in the ecosystem and benefit to the readers without making the book too voluminous.

The book takes the reader step by step and layer by layer deeper into the technological side of Bitcoin so that someone with no prior knowledge of Bitcoin or someone with intermediate knowledge both gets benefited. The book gives greater weightage towards explanation of concepts and fundamentals than programing. Though programing Bitcoin is important part of this book, more than half of the chapters do not contain any programs and are focused on explanation. The book uses Python programs, simple language, examples, charts and illustrations to explain each section and chapters.

The book is written for people with average programming skill and has interest towards understand basics of Bitcoin. Basic knowledge of Python programming is necessary. The book uses simple procedural programming which may be understood by anyone with average programming even if he has only little prior experience of Python.

The book is written keeping in mind the needs of college students and colleges. It includes question and programming assignments. It will be useful for person with no knowledge, beginner and have intermediate knowledge of Bitcoin.

It is important to realize that investment in bitcoin comes with a risk and is often attributed for financial losses. The book does not provide any financial advice and does not aim to influence readers financial decisions. It is purely a technical book and is only targeted to readers who has interest in the technical aspect of Bitcoin. Having said that the book does build a case in favor of Bitcoin as a technological milestone and its importance in our future.

The book is an effort to grow Bitcoin developer community by making the knowledge of Bitcoin internals easily accessible to the masses. This is the reason why the book focuses on theory and uses simple procedural programs written in Python. The programs in this book are only created for learning purposes, they are not gone through elaborate testing and so are not ready for production environments where real bitcoins are used for payments.