Bitcoin Forum

There are quite a few gaps in my Bitcoin knowledge, and I'm considering trying to start a beginners blockchain so that I can learn about mining, including cpu, gpu and asic. Ir shouldn't require much time or storage, and it would gives us a chance to play with hard forks and other elements in the Bitcoin economy. I understand the purpose of the testnet, but I think that is designed for project development, than for beginners experimentation.

Sometimes doing something hands on is a much better learning experience than reading and watching videos about the blockchain and mining.
I would really love to especially feel the real experience of running a blockchain node or mining but my computer resources are way too limiting.
So yes, I would very interested in running a training blockchain node?

i have found that the more i learn about Bitcoin the more gaps i find in my knowledge and i have covered a huge area so far from the heart of the cryptography (DSA algorithms and hashing) to P2P protocol. the damned thing is too huge and the worst part is that as i pursue knowledge, everything advances and new things are introduced!

depending on whether you just want to understand how things work or you want to actually do it, things can be very easy or complicated.
it would be interesting to see a new blockchain from scratch based on bitcoin though.

I do have the gist on what Bitcoin is, what it has done, and what it could do now and in the future but the technical part of it, like running a node, what codes you need to know and how they wrote it, I have no idea. And I would like to be part of that training also. I guess it would be nice to have a webinar or something like that. Just a few PowerPoint slides and someone explaining would good to everyone who could attend. Run a node with you also.

I'm more than interested in learning these but you know I'm still totally fresher in bitcoin. I'm still learning. If you check my threads, you will find I'm trying to learn these stuffs and you will get an idea where I have been right now.
If a fresher like me is allowed, probably I will give it a try.

Unless somebody else want s to start this, I'll try to plan it, and start a project thread here. At the moment I don't even know how to lay a genesis block. As it won't be a commercial project, it may need some changes to the core software. I wondered about smaller block rewards, but it may be more instructive if we could see what it is like to own a few hundred coins. I don't think people should have to mine 24/7, so a longer block interval might be a good idea - can anyone think of any other changes for a training project. It would also be important to change the name from Bitcoin, as I understand that some people have tried to sell coins from the testnet. Maybe they should be called TalkTokens or something. The default directories and port would need to be changed. This should allow it to be run alongside a genuine Bitcoin node.

now i am a little bit confused about what you are trying to do. some things you say sounds like you just want to fork bitcoin and change some variable which doesn't seem to be teaching anybody anything but some other things you say sound like you want to actually build a blockchain from scratch which would teach you and others lots of things but it will be extremely hard because it requires lots of programming.

for example when you say "...so that I can learn about mining..." does it mean how to use an application to mine new blocks or does it mean how to actually "mine" a block which requires understanding how hashcash works, how to construct a block from its trasnactions (building Merkle tree) incrementing nonce to find the hash that satisfies the difficulty target with its zeros.

well you first set your consensus rules like difficulty adjustment, block size, algorithm, ... then create a new address and "create" the first block which is more like a hack or hardcoding it, then you "mine" the rest of the blocks from that point on.

i think it is a bad idea because if someone wanted to learn and mine a block they would have to wait a full day to succeed! setting the difficulty adjustment to seconds is probably the best idea (similar to TestNet) it both allows people to mine blocks fast without needing to wait around and waste computing power and it prevents the coin to have any value because you can simply mine millions of blocks in a day if you wished to.

Guys lets focus on the initial agenda, " HOW Blockchian Works" with hands on experiments.

We will try one at a time.

lets make a community learning project.

I m creating a discord channel for this. please join.
i think this is the first step

https://discord.gg/W9zmncT

Lets make it happen!

C++ is hard language to learn but I heard Python is relatively simpler to learn. Do you think it is better to learn from some coin that have blockchain written in Python or create a blockchain in Python.

I would also like to see this project running. It looks like a great idea.
I should be able to at least CPU-mine it 24/7 if there's a problem with the lack of miners. Unfortunately I don't have access to 24/7 computer with open ports in order to run a node  :-\

the programming language doesn't matter, what matters is that you should already know at least one programming language to some extent and be able to read/write code in that language before you start programming blockchain related applications.

but yeah, they say python is easier to learn, i wouldn't know since i have never looked into it. I only know c# and i'm quite happy with this strongly typed managed language (not an expert though).

if you want to start learning a programming language for the sole purpose of learning how to code for blockchain related stuff, there is references for all the languages for you to look at but there are a lore more examples in c++ and then javascript and then python. the rest have smaller number of examples to look at.
for example i only know of 1 coin that is written in c# but basically 90% of the altcoins are in c++ because most of them have copied bitcoin core!