Mastering Bitcoin is the no. 1: https://www.amazon.de/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-Cr...

Suggestion: Mastering Bitcoins [0]

It's great and it was the first technical book which I read so was kind of interesting. You can skip to the actual part, after Introduction to get to know Bitcoins (and Blockchain) works.

Read these if you haven't already:

- Zero To One, Peter Thiel [1]

- Hooked, Nir Eyal [2]

- The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz [3]

[0] http://amzn.to/2lgnHrS

[1] http://amzn.to/2yMNvR1

[2] http://amzn.to/2lftjCq

[3] http://amzn.to/2gKv3Cl

I find these three books entertaining.

[Blockchain Revolution by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott](https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Revolution-Technology-Chan...) [The Business Blockchain by William Mougayar](https://www.amazon.com/Business-Blockchain-Practice-Applicat...) [Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper](https://www.amazon.co.jp/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-R...)

If you want to dig deeper, read [Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos](https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-C...).

I believe the best one is "Mastering Bitcoin" Andreas M. Antonopoulos: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-C... It's fairly technical, but gives good explanation of how everything works.

In terms of philosophy, I grasped Bitcoin only after I read enough of the Austrian school of economics.

I think a good unorthodox start is skimming/looking at Q&A sorted by votes on [1] and [2]. A good book but oriented towards bitcoin is [3]. My company also made an spreadsheet comparing different blockchain approaches [4] to have a high level understanding (e.g. blocks speed, security vulnerabilities)

I work in the field and the most difficult thing is to separate the noise from the signal. On talks with financial institutions and the government, they say they want to use the blockchain but when you ask about how many nodes they are planning to run they came up with one, or doesn't understand the question. Also, there are a lot of use cases that are not realistic because they depend on oracles or there is no way to enforce the smart contract in the real world.

[1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes

[2] http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-C...

[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DQ770nGnHfJOoRSqTLmI...

Although I haven't personally read it, everything Andreas Antonopoulos does is great and this seems to have received very favorable feedback from the bitcoin community. http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-Cr...