Bitcoin Developer Basics 01: Transactions, Scripts + SegWit
Base58’s flagship Bitcoin Developer Basiscs course. Get a hands-on view of raw transaction data, encodings, and Bitcoin Script. We cover both legacy and segwit in this class.
About this course:
Base58’s flagship Bitcoin Developer Basics course 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. Exercises in this class will be in Python, using Replit.
What to know before class (pre-requisites):
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Strongly Recommended: nifty’s 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).
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Strongly Recommended: The Intro to Wire Protocols Replit
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Strongly Recommended: Andreas Antonopoulos’ classic book, Mastering Bitcoin.
Topics we'll cover:
What is a transaction? 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.
Let's learn 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.
Now that we've seen how transactions are constructed and built, time to 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.
"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."
FAQ
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Whether you're new to Bitcoin development or looking to go deeper, our courses give you the technical foundation to build, verify, and contribute with confidence.