"Basic Blockchain Programming", A developer-oriented series about Bitcoin

[keeshux]

Hi,

a few days ago I finished writing my blog series about the basics of Bitcoin programming.

In the last two years, I sort of hated that every tutorial I read couldn't teach blockchain development from the very start, I mean without taking for granted what a transaction is. Beyond that, lot of theory without practice. Everybody seemed so confident about the subject, yet I felt that no one was really paying attention to uneducated readers like me.

These were only some of my unanswered questions:

- How does a private key hold bitcoins?
- How an address is supposed to receive bitcoins?
- What the hell is a scriptPubKey and scriptSig?
- What about all those numbers and hexes?

So, after spending a lot of time looking for total beginner resources and failing at that, I felt I could somewhat fill this gap. Mine is a slow-paced bottom-up tutorial whose aim is teaching you to consciously build, sign and publish a basic raw transaction to the blockchain.

http://davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/

All sample code is written in C language, easy to read, easy to compile.

https://github.com/keeshux/basic-blockchain-programming/

I plan to dig further into the subject in the near future, but meanwhile it'd be great to have some feedback. If any article is not *that* clear, feel free to leave a comment and I'd be happy to reply.

Thanks,
Davide

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[YarkoL]

Thank you very much for this series.

I went in expecting demonstrations of how to
put together transactions programmatically with some API,
but to my surprise and delight it was very much along the
lines of "Bitcoin the hard way".

It's probably the closest thing to "How to build your own wallet
from the ground up" atm

You mention in the first post the "elitism" that
permeates atmosphere here - I agree about that and must admit
that once you have been initiated to the inner workings of Bitcoin
to even a tiny degree, there is a great temptation to think of yourself
as one of the "gentlemen"   and keep the secrets to yourself (because "we don't want
more scamcoins" or some other nonsense). So maybe it's time
for that to change.