Bitcoin Developer Basics 02: Transactions, Scripts + SegWit
The second half of Base58’s flagship Bitcoin Developer Basiscs course. Build on your understanding of transactions and Bitcoin Script with a deep dive into the cryptography secp256k1, ECDSA, and sighashes. We cover both legacy and segwit signatures in this class.
About this course:
Base58’s flagship Bitcoin Developer Basics 02 course gives you an in-depth intro to bitcoin’s cryptographic protocols. This 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. Exercises in this class will be in Python, using Replit.
What to know before class (pre-requisites):
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Base58’s Bitcoin Developer Basics 01 Transactions and Scripts. This course builds off of what you learned in Basics 01.
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Andreas Antonopoulos’ classic book, Mastering Bitcoin.
Topics we'll cover:
We're halfway through class, it's about time we introduced cryptography. Time to start 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.
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.
How to bitcoin transactions turn into signatures? We’ll go deep into how sighash flags work.
This is the last topic of the course class. We'll cover multisig transactions and the OP_CHECKMULTISIG opcode.
"As a junior developer it's a daunting task jumping into Bitcoin development for the first time, I've tried on my own and failed multiple times in the past. Base58 gave me a new opportunity to dive in again guided by a real expert in the industry along side a class of likeminded students. This has been invaluable for my understanding of the Bitcoin protocol and has given me examples and actionable next steps for developing my skills and starting to build on Bitcoin for real. Thank you Base58!"
"Phenomenal course. Came into it with limited technical knowledge of bitcoin. They make it super accessible (no dev experience needed, interactive and fun) and I'm now sooo much more comfortable with the technical side of the bitcoin fundamentals. In fact, some of the things I learnt helped me while interviewing at bitcoin companies! If you're interested in bitcoin and want to learn about how it works - highly recommend taking this course!"
"I thought I knew how transactions worked in bitcoin up until I took the class. It is a deep, byte by byte dive into the different types of transactions, understandable for non-coding people. Just have an open mindset, let yourself be taught the most basic bitcoin-cli and python commands, and you are good to go. I was afraid it would be too technical, and don't get me wrong, it does get into the roots of how the transaction protocols work, but nifty managed to keep it simple and clear enough for someone with a basic bitcoin knowledge to follow."
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