Table of Contents for Ethereum Papers

There are two main papers when it comes to Ethereum. The Eth white paper and the yellow one.

Whitepaper

• published 1st April 2014 but Vitalik Buterin
• https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ (or PDF from Dec 2014)
• since first publish it has been kept updated and evolved
• definitely worth a read, even if you don’t have much interest in Ethereum.

It is quite an easy read. But if you want a summarized overview of it then you could check out this summary of the whitepaper

Yellow paper (Ethereum’s Formal Spec)

• This is the more technical version, going deep into the specifications of how ethereum works (including gas prices). It is much more technical than the whitepaper
• https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf
• Originally written by Gavin Wood but now maintained by Nick Savers and other contributors
• Useful when you need to check gas prices or to understand a bit more about opcodes.
• It is kept updated on Github (it can be useful to keep an eye on it - sometimes its minor changes or typos, but sometimes larger updates) https://github.com/ethereum/yellowpaper
• There is this good summary which is a bit easier to read if you don’t want to tackle the yellowpaper itself.

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