1: Intro to bitcoin transactions

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

• Intro to bitcoin transactions
• Inputs + outputs, form fields
• Endianness
• Variable length fields and CompactSizes
• Calculating a tx’s weight
• Identifying transactions by id

2: Intro to Script

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

• Intro to Script
• Locking and unlocking scripts
• P2SH and redeemScripts
• Building our first transaction

3: Enter SegWit

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

• Enter SegWit
• P2WSH and witness scripts
• P2SH-P2WSH
• Reviewing tx construction

4: Public/Private keys; intro to elliptic curves

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

• Public/private keys
• Intro to elliptic curves + finite fields
• Compressed vs uncompressed keys
• P2PK, P2PKH, P2WPKH
• Bitcoin addresses

5: Signing transactions

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

• Signing schemes
• ECDSA
• DER encoding
• Sighashes
• Spending our first signed tx

6: Multisig + Getting your transaction mined

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

• Multisig
• PSBTs

Class Pre-Requisites

• Strongly Recommended: This 1.5h class on Encodings and Endianness. These are really core topics that we'll use the first day of the class (and every class).
• Optional: Andreas Antonopoulos' classic book, Mastering Bitcoin is extremely good background reading for our class.
• Optional, and we'll help you with it if you're in a cohort: Installing a local copy of bitcoind/bitcoin-cli. We've got a guide here, but there's also plenty around the internet if you're into that sort of thing. Unless you've got some gigabytes of storage available, we highly recommend you follow the instructions for setting up your `bitcoin.conf` file with the regtest=1 set.