hey! nifty here. we've got a few seats left still in both our March and April Base58 transaction deep dives classes. In-person in Austin TX!
Classes are for 4 mornings in-person lectures, with afternoons for homework or exploring Austin. Our next class is during SXSW week, and then we'll be running another class in the lead-up to bitcoin++ in Austin in late April!
Here's what we'll be covering:
- INTRO TO BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS 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. Topics: transaction fields, endianness, transaction ids, fees + transaction weights, coinbases
- INTRO TO SCRIPT 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. Topics: Script, standard scripts, P2SH, opcodes
- ENTER SEGWIT 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. Topics: SegWit! P2WSH, P2SH-P2WSH
- PUBLIC/PRIVATE KEYS; INTRO TO ELLIPTIC CURVES We're halfway through class, it's about time we introduced cryptography. Time to start building an understanding of elliptic curves over a finite field and looking at bitcoin's secp256k1 curve parameters. Then we'll pick a private key and derive a public key. Finally we'll make our first signed transactions. Topics: elliptic curves, secp256k1, public/private key cryptography, P2PK, P2PKH
- SIGNING TRANSACTIONS Signing transactions is actually a bit complicated. We'll talk about the ECDSA and walk through how a private key produces signatures for a transaction. We'll cover sighashes and discuss the TX_HASH proposal. Topics: ECDSA, SegWit, sighashes, TX_HASH
- MULTISIG This is the last topic of the course class. We'll cover multisig transactions and the OP_CHECKMULTISIG opcode. Topics: multisig, OP_CHECKMULTISIG, RBF, CPFP
More info on our classes page: https://www.base58.info/classes
Get 15% off when you pay with bitcoin :D