The Bitcoin Dog:
When Grandma Sheila’s grandpuppies come to visit her in Alice Springs, Australia, she entertains the rambunctious little ones with a delightful account of her adventures as a young pup, crossing the Australian outback to discover how the Bitcoin blockchain works. On her journey, her interactions with other Australian animals educate her through delineated allegory on the lower-level implementation of Bitcoin, the first Genesis Block, and when the issuance of new Bitcoin will end. Moreover, her nose allows her to follow the scent to the actual C++ Source Code of Bitcoin, and read line-by-line through the code how the metaphorical concepts presented in the outback translate to the real code.

The Bitcoin Dog is geek entertainment for those who are already invested in Bitcoin, or at least heavily interested. It does not seek to convince anyone to buy Bitcoin, nor does it teach how to write software programs for Bitcoin. Instead, it gives enthusiasts a chance to marvel at the elegance of the C++ computer code that governs Bitcoin, and understand the code via a fun, playful anthropomorphic narrative. This book is the first to offer interested readers without a computer science background an opportunity to “geek out” learning how Bitcoin works at a low-level and understand its code.

William Schoellkopf is a software engineer with a B.S. Computer Science from UCLA and M.S. Engineering Management from USC. He helps secure the Bitcoin network via his own independent Bitcoin Core node running on a Raspberry Pi. He lived in Alice Springs, Australia with his wife and their Aussie cattle dog they rescued, Sheila, for two years.