Base58 is the world’s best bitcoin education company.
Our 6-week developer-oriented bitcoin transactions class will take you from zero to blockchain hero.
Base58’s flagship Bitcoin Transactions class is a 6-week remote live-instruction course that gives you an in-depth intro to the bitcoin protocol. Our class will get you comfortable with the bitcoin-cli and command line interfaces. No prior experience required, but some understanding of bytes and encodings will be extremely helpful.
Classes meet Monday + Thursday nights for one and a half hours. Check our Upcoming Classes to find our next available class cycle.
This is week one! We get started by learning about what a transaction is. Specifically, what fields do they contain? We learn how to calculate a transaction id and what transaction fees are, and how are they calculated. Finally, we'll talk about coinbases and block rewards.
Topics: transaction fields, endianness, transaction ids, fees + transaction weights, coinbases
In week two we start talking about Bitcoin's native "programming language": Script! We'll write our own script this week (and learn about hashes and preimages). Once we've written a script we'll try locking some bitcoins up to it, as well as unlocking them.
Topics: Script, standard scripts, P2SH, opcodes
Now that we've seen how transactions are constructed and built, we'll introduce the bitcoin omnibus update bill, the SegWit soft-fork. SegWit impacted the structure of a transaction and its fee calculations, so we'll dive into how these updates work and two of the 'new' SegWit script types: P2WSH and P2SH-P2WSH.
Topics: SegWit! P2WSH, P2SH-P2WSH
We're halfway through class, it's about time we introduced cryptography. We'll start this week building an understanding of elliptic curves over a finite field and looking at bitcoin's secp256k1 curve parameters. Then we'll pick a private key and derive a public key. Finally we'll make our first signed transactions.
Topics: elliptic curves, secp256k1, public/private key cryptography, P2PK, P2PKH
Signing transactions is actually a bit complicated. We'll talk about the ECDSA and walk through how a private key produces signatures for a transaction. We'll cover sighashes and discuss the TX_HASH proposal.
Topics: ECDSA, SegWit, sighashes, TX_HASH
This is the last week of class. We'll cover multisig transactions and the OP_CHECKMULTISIG opcode. Our final class we'll cover some topics on how to get your transaction mined: RBF + CPFP.
Topics: multisig, OP_CHECKMULTISIG, RBF, CPFP
Our next bitcoin transactions protocol class starts June 27, 2022 and runs for 6 weeks. We meet every Monday and Thursday (Texas time) for an hour and a half.
Cost is $2,600 for six weeks of live instruction. Class size limited to 18 people.
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Base58⛓️🔓 is teaming up with the folks at PlebLab for a four-day conference and hackathon in Austin TX.
First up is a 2-day developer focused conference filled with great speakers.
Next is a 2-day in-person hackathon with your newfound friends and co-conspirators to compete for prizes.
@niftynei is a world-renowned bitcoin and lightning expert. A lightning protocol developer at Blockstream for c-lightning by day, she leads Base58 bitcoin protocol classes at night.
nifty is currently working on a book about transacting with bitcoin for No Starch Press.
@stakamoto21 is the brains and coordinating muscle behind Base58. He keeps the classes running on-time, fronts student outreach, and is a one-man bizops force of nature.
A longtime bitcoiner and serial entrepreneur, stakamoto brings deep community connections and bitcoin fire to Base58.