// the take
An open-source, pre-first-edition textbook on crypto covering Bitcoin through prediction markets across 15 chapters and 90,000+ words. It's aimed at people who want a real technical grounding rather than another trading-focused explainer, and it's backed by people who actually work in the space: author Larry Cermak (The Block), co-authors and reviewers from Wintermute Research.
The author/reviewer lineup is unusually credible for this genre — Wintermute Research and The Block Research aren't marketing shops, they trade and build this stuff, so claims about market structure and MEV are less likely to be hand-wavy than the typical 'crypto explained' content. It covers topics most intro material skips entirely (MEV, market microstructure, custody, quantum resistance) alongside the standard Bitcoin/Ethereum basics, giving a more complete picture than narrower books. It's explicitly in a feedback phase before the first edition locks, so errors caught now get fixed before the version that actually gets distributed as an ebook. Each chapter is a standalone markdown file, so it's easy to read, link, or translate (there's already a Korean fork) without needing any tooling.
It's pre-first-edition by the author's own description, meaning known-incomplete and open to factual corrections — treat current claims as drafts, not settled text. The compiled book's license is CC-BY-NC-ND, which blocks redistribution of modified versions of the whole work; only individual PR contributions are CC-BY, so 'open source' here is narrower than it sounds. Wintermute is a market maker with direct skin in the game on market structure and MEV, and that's the exact chapter they're reviewing — there's no disclosed process for catching conflicts of interest in that section. There's nothing executable or testable in the repo (no code, no data, no citations file structure visible), so verifying any specific technical claim means trusting the author chain rather than checking a source.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →