Kostas A. Karasavvas

Multibase, Multihash, and Hashlinks

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin Programming Book

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Some time ago I have started a series of blog posts to introduce Bitcoin programming. However, I soon realized that the material would be better presented in a book format. Thus, the beginning of my new project, a Bitcoin programming book licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The book aims to help software engineers start Bitcoin programming but it is not intended for complete beginners. Still, the introductory chapters attempt to summarize what you need to know to progress with the rest of the material.

Pay to Script Hash

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this post we will explain the rationale behind Pay to Script Hash (P2SH) type of addresses and demonstrate with code. This tutorial assumes some understanding of the high-level Bitcoin concepts or at least having gone through the previous technical articles of this tutorial.

Signatures

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this post we will talk about how and what needs to be signed to prove ownership of funds residing in specific addresses. The tutorial assumes high-level understanding of Bitcoin and at least having gone through the previous technical articles of this tutorial.

Creating Transactions

Fri, 29 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post we went through transactions, their inputs and outputs and how the funds are locked. In this post we will go through different ways of creating a simple payment transaction from the command line and then programmatically. The tutorial assumes some understanding of the high-level Bitcoin concepts or at least having gone through the previous technical articles of this tutorial.

Transactions

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This part of the tutorial will introduce basic Bitcoin transactions and focus on Pay to Public Key Hash (P2PKH) transaction output types. The tutorial is aimed for people who already have some knowledge of how Bitcoin works at a high-level and want to understand how it works at a low-level.

Bitcoin Addresses

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this part we will talk about Bitcoin’s addresses. We will explain how they are created, some of their properties as well as provide examples. The tutorial is aimed for people who already have some knowledge of how Bitcoin works at a high-level and want to understand how it works at a low-level.

Bitcoin Public Keys

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This part of the tutorial will explore Bitcoin’s public keys. We will not attempt to go into the math behind the cryptography involved but provide the necessary resources for people who want to delve deeper. The tutorial is aimed for people who already have some knowledge of how Bitcoin works at a high-level and want to understand how it works at a low-level.

Bitcoin Private Keys

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This part of the tutorial will explore Bitcoin’s private keys and how we can create them programmatically. The tutorial is aimed for people who already have some knowledge of how Bitcoin works at a high-level and want to delve deeper.

Bitcoin Technical Fundamentals

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the beginning of a tutorial that explores some of the technical aspects of Bitcoin and how these can be implemented in Python. The tutorial is aimed for people who already have some knowledge of how Bitcoin works at a high-level and want to delve deeper. In this first post we aim to provide some of the technical computer science background required for later posts. It aims to explain the fundamentals in a concise way but links will be provided inline for further study.