Blockchain in Theory and Practice

A Student's Guide to Distributed Ledgers

A 20-chapter course on blockchain technology, written as runnable Jupyter notebooks. Each chapter pairs a short explanation with hands-on Python examples — tampering with a naive ledger, building chained hashes, simulating consensus, scoring use cases, and more. Examples use the Python standard library almost exclusively and seed their random number generators, so every run is reproducible.

Link to Amazon: Blockchain in Theory and Practice: A Student's Guide to Distributed Ledgers

Each chapter is available in two formats:

• ipynb/ — interactive Jupyter notebooks (run and modify the examples yourself)
• pdf/ — pre-rendered PDFs for reading offline or printing

Table of Contents

#	Chapter	Notebook	PDF
1	Blockchain and the Derivatives Market: An Introduction	ipynb	pdf
2	A Short History of Blockchain	ipynb	pdf
3	Types of Blockchain: Public, Private, Permissioned, and Consortium	ipynb	pdf
4	Transactions, Blocks, and the Chain Data Structure	ipynb	pdf
5	Cryptographic Foundations: Hashing, Signatures, and Wallets	ipynb	pdf
6	Consensus I: Byzantine Generals, Proof-of-Work, and Proof-of-Stake	ipynb	pdf
7	Consensus II: BFT Families, Raft, and Proof-of-Authority	ipynb	pdf
8	Performance and Scalability: Transactions per Second	ipynb	pdf
9	Smart Contracts, Peer-to-Peer Networks, and Hash Maps	ipynb	pdf
10	Reference Architecture: Inside Hyperledger Fabric	ipynb	pdf
11	Use Cases I: Cross-Border Data Clearance and the Coin-Based Exchange	ipynb	pdf
12	Use Cases II: Digital-Asset Custody and Immutable Metadata Storage	ipynb	pdf
13	The Landscape Since 2023: A 2026 Update	ipynb	pdf
14	Real-World Asset Tokenisation	ipynb	pdf
15	Stablecoins: Design, Reserves, and Risk	ipynb	pdf
16	Stablecoins, Money, and the Economy	ipynb	pdf
17	Central Bank Digital Currencies	ipynb	pdf
18	Decentralised Finance (DeFi)	ipynb	pdf
19	Oracles, Interoperability, and Cross-Chain Infrastructure	ipynb	pdf
20	Security, Risk, and Assurance in Tokenised Finance	ipynb	pdf

Getting Started

Requires Python 3.10 or newer.

# 1. Create and activate a virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate        # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# 2. Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 3. Launch Jupyter and open any chapter
jupyter notebook ipynb/

The examples rely on the Python standard library, with one exception: chapter 5 uses the ecdsa package for elliptic-curve signatures (installed via requirements.txt). Run the cells in each notebook in order; they are designed to be modified and re-run.

Building the PDFs

The PDFs in pdf/ are generated from the notebooks with nbconvert, which requires two system tools in addition to the Python dependencies:

• Pandoc
• A LaTeX distribution with XeLaTeX (e.g. texlive-xetex and texlive-fonts-recommended on Debian/Ubuntu)

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install pandoc texlive-xetex texlive-fonts-recommended

Then rebuild any chapter (or all of them):

jupyter nbconvert --to pdf ipynb/chapter01.ipynb --output-dir pdf/

Repository Layout

ipynb/            # 20 chapter notebooks (the source of truth)
pdf/              # pre-rendered PDF of each chapter
requirements.txt  # Python dependencies