Base58'S Bitcoin Protocol Deep Dive: Transactions

Start your bitcoin dev journey with bitcoin transactions, scripts, and SegWit

What you'll learn
Basic intro to encodings, endianness, and bitcoin's specific base58 encoding
Learn the components of a bitcoin transaction
How to parse a bitcoin transaction from bytes
Intro to bitcoin Script, including writing your own bitcoin locking scripts
How to write standard bitcoin locking scripts (P2SH)
How SegWit changed the basic bitcoin transaction
The standard SegWit locking script: P2WSH
How to make legacy compatible SegWit scripts: P2SH-P2WSH
Requirements
This course is open to everyone, but it is in-depth bitcoin transaction protocol content.
Developers that have experience with byte-formats, encodings, and bitcoin will likely find it more approachable
Description
So you've heard about bitcoin? Ever wondered what's going on with the data in a transaction, or how bitcoin gets locked up and transferred from one holder to another?This course by Base58 instructor niftynei, will take you on a deep dive of the fields, bytes, and scripts that make up the bitcoin blockchain data. In an software engineer focused manner, we'll go over everything you need to know to build your own bitcoin transaction parser, write your very own custom bitcoin locking scripts, and adapt your transactions to the modern SegWit format.Step 1: Intro to bitcoin transactionsWe'll start off learning about what a bitcoin 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, coinbasesStep 2: Enter ScriptIn 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, opcodesStep 3: Transacting with SegWitNow 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

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Welcome to Base58's Intro to Bitcoin Transactions!!

Lecture 2 Prerequisites and Additional Resources

Lecture 3 OPTIONAL: Encodings - A Primer

Lecture 4 OPTIONAL: Endianness - A Primer

Section 2: Housekeeping

Lecture 5 Nifty's Bitcoin Coding Environment

Lecture 6 Different Bitcoin Networks and Address Types

Lecture 7 How to Use a Block Explorer

Section 3: Anatomy of a Bitcoin Transaction

Lecture 8 Transactions in the Bitcoin Protocol

Lecture 9 Summary Notes - Intro to Bitcoin Transactions - Part 1

Lecture 10 Parsing Our First Bitcoin Transaction

Lecture 11 Note on the Following Video

Lecture 12 Parsing a Segwit Bitcoin Transaction

Lecture 13 Why 1BTC = 1,0000,0000 Satoshis

Lecture 14 Types of Fields in Bitcoin Transactions

Lecture 15 Input and Output Amounts

Lecture 16 The UTXO Set (Unspent Transaction Outputs)

Lecture 17 TX Fees and Coinbase TXs

Lecture 18 Notes - Transaction Fees and Coinbase TXs

Lecture 19 Replit for Bitcoin Regtesting

Lecture 20 Block Rewards and Burning Bitcoin

Section 4: Formatting and Parsing Bitcoin Transactions

Lecture 21 Section 3 Recap and Next Steps

Lecture 22 Updated Skeleton for Parsing Bitcoin Transactions

Lecture 23 Creating a New Transaction by Hand

Lecture 24 Field Sizes and Memory

Lecture 25 Compact Field Sizes

Lecture 26 Compact Field Sizes - Notes and Python Code

Lecture 27 Hashing vs Cryptographic Hashes

Lecture 28 TXIDs and Cryptographic Hash Functions

Lecture 29 Cryptographic Hash Functions

Lecture 30 Duplicate TXIDs

Lecture 31 TXID Bitcoin Improvement Proposals

Lecture 32 The Empty Transaction and Calculating Fees

Section 5: Intro to Script: Locking and Unlocking Bitcoin

Lecture 33 Bitcoin TXs Recap and Next Steps

Lecture 34 The Yin and Yang of Bitcoin Script

Lecture 35 Writing Bitcoin Script (Data and Op_Codes)

Lecture 36 Summary Notes - Intro to Script

Lecture 37 Stack Evaluation of Bitcoin Script

Lecture 38 So How Does Script Keep Our Bitcoin Safe?

Lecture 39 Locking to a Custom Script

Lecture 40 Standard Scripts (Pay to Script Hash)

Lecture 41 Unlocking from the Pay to Script Hash

Section 6: Standard Bitcoin Scripts: Pay to Script Hash

Lecture 42 Pay to Script Hash Recap

Lecture 43 Interpreting a P2SH Script

Lecture 44 Takeaways and Tradeoffs with P2SH

Lecture 45 Legacy Bitcoin Addresses and Base58 Encodings

Lecture 46 When Do We Use P2SH Addresses?

Lecture 47 ScriptHash Security and P2SHs in the Wild

Lecture 48 REGTEST HW1: Pay to Script Hash

Lecture 49 SOLUTION VIDEO: Pay to Script Hash

Section 7: Enter Segwit

Lecture 50 Segregated Witness Overview

Lecture 51 Segwit Differences - TXIDs and vBytes

Lecture 52 Block Weight vs Block Size

Lecture 53 TX Malleability or Why Lightning Required Segwit

Lecture 54 Coverting our P2SH to a Segwit TX - Pay to WITNESS Script Hash

Lecture 55 Segwit Marker and Flag

Lecture 56 Updated Parsed Bitcoin Transaction Skeleton

Lecture 57 REGTEST EXERCISE: Pay to Witness Script Hash

Lecture 58 SOLUTION VIDEO: Pay to Witness Script Hash

Section 8: Script Hashes and Segwit

Lecture 59 Segwit Recap

Lecture 60 Making a new P2WSH Script

Lecture 61 Bech32 Addresses (bc1q, Segwit v0)

Lecture 62 Finishing the New P2WSH Transaction

Lecture 63 Backwards Compatible Segwit aka Nested Segwit

Lecture 64 Unlocking From our Nested Segwit Address

Lecture 65 Fun Facts about Segwit and Bech32

Lecture 66 REGTEST EXERCISE: Nested Segwit (P2SH-P2WSH)

Lecture 67 SOLUTION VIDEO: Nested Segwit

Section 9: Bitcoin Transactions Class Wrapup

Lecture 68 Recap of What We've Learned and Built

Lecture 69 Notes: Script Hash 3 Ways on Testnet: P2SH, P2WSH, Nested Segwit

Lecture 70 Next Steps on Your Path to Bitcoin Wizardry

Lecture 71 Thank You!

Developers who want to learn about blockchain protocols,Bitcoiners that want to really understand how transactions work,Beginning developers that are interested in protocol design,Cryptocurrency curious devs!,Protocol designers that want an in-depth course on bitcoin transaction design decisions,Cryptographers that want an engineer-focused understanding of bitcoin transactions