This is a reading list with some books or articles that do a good job of explaining some of the fundamental theories of blockchain technology and applications. I have not read every single one on this list, but they have been recommended by people like William Mougayar and Richard Brown.
Great Chain of Numbers (Tim Swanson)
This book written by Tim Swanson is intended to be a guide as well as a brief primer and resource for those looking to understand:
what a cryptoledger is,
what smart contracts are,
how smart property works and
the disruptive impact of trustless asset management.
I used this book extensively during the writing of my own report. Swanson also runs a blog with several interesting posts on blockchain technology.
Ethereum: The problems to be solved
This comprehensive post by the Ethereum Foundation lists and explains several challenges that needs to be solved in the future of blockchain technology and the new field of “cryptoeconomics”.
Particular domains of cryptoeconomics include:
Online trust and reputation systems
Cryptographic tokens / cryptocurrencies, and more generally digital assets
Self-executing “smart” contracts
Consensus algorithms
Anti-spam and anti-sybil attack algorithms
The General Theory of Decentralized Applications, DApps (David Johnston)
David Johnston describes why decentralized applications have the potential to be immensely successful, how the different types of decentralized applications can be classified, and introduces terminology that aims to be accurate and helpful to the community
Understanding Modern Banking Ledgers through Blockchain Technologies (Gareth Peters et al.)
Academic Paper based on a collaboration of the following institutions:
Department of Statistical Science, University College London
Oxford Mann Institute, Oxford University
Systemic Risk Center, London School of Economics.
UCL, Department of Computer Scienc
The Blockchain Application Stack (Joel Monegro)
The dawn of trustworthy computing (Nick Szabo)
Nick Szabo is is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of cryptotechnology, and described the framework for “smart contracts” way before blockchain technology were even invented.In this article he describes his vision of a trustworthy internet, and also introduces smart contracts and the wet code vs dry code debate
The Second Wave of Blockchain Innovation (Joel Dietz)
An architecture for the Internet of Money (Meher Roy)
