Bitcoin Forum

So I want to learn more about bitcoin on a technical level. The goal is to understand the alt cryptocurrencies in terms of their implementations and what value they produce.

I read through Satoshi's whitepaper and have a reasonable understanding of what's going on under the hood. What I would like to do is explore Bitcoin (or blockchain) on a lower technical level.

The idea I have at the moment is to checkout the Bitcoin repo and start my own Bitcoin "test" network on my local network.

I'm pretty sure that there are coin devs on here. So my question is whether this is a reasonable way to get started to understanding cryptocurrency?

the core devs have not done a good job of documentation.
trained devs usually learn to comment coding and have supporting documentation. something which back in my day was called pseudocode / BASIC code to explain each function and how it reacts/effects other functions in a more human readable way without having to read thousands of lines of code.
as i said the core devs have not really done anything like this

sometimes its better to just start from scratch and write the most simplest version you can make that does the functions. learning by doing and debugging is better than just being a script kiddy that just copies and pastes code and simply just runs the code. because you cant really learn much by just copy/pasting something

if unsure, just ask a question about anything your unsure about

Try and explore this link : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0
I am very sure you read and learn all the areas and technicalities involved in bitcoin and other important information regarding blockchain technology.

Hello shiroocrypto,

Good to hear that you have started getting interested in the more technical aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. An interesting website to look at is the Map of Coins which can be found here (http://mapofcoins.com/). This website shows you how different coins have derived from bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it also quickly describes the technology on which the different coins are based. If you start by looking up some of the earliest derivatives of bitcoin and cross reference their code to bitcoins base code, you can get an understanding of how different altcoins are constructed and how they differentiate from the bitcoin base code.

We highly recommend getting a decent understanding on the difference of these altcoins compared to bitcoin, just to help you determine the quality and use-cases proposed by the respective project. Another good website to get an understanding of the blockchain as a seperate technology is one of IBM, which offers a very nice tutorial on how to use the blockchain in practise. The link for this tutorial can be found here (https://developer.ibm.com/courses/all/blockchain-essentials/). They also offer a more in-depth course as well, it focuses more on the developer side of the blockchain which you can find here (https://developer.ibm.com/courses/all/ibm-blockchain-foundation-developer/)

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team