Understanding Bitcoin Source

Understanding Bitcoin Source is a Socratic style seminar where we’ll dive into different aspects of the Bitcoin protocol and it’s relevant source code.

Bitcoin Core will be used as our reference; we'll build and run it together to gain a better understanding of its inner workings. The examination of other implementations, such as btcd and the unmaintained bitcore, will also serve as study material.

For the first seminar we’ll be delving into Bitcoin Script, starting with the interpreter in the first implementation of Bitcoin and later run through the logic of the interpreter contained in the current source. We’ll also execute a script live using gdb to step through the code, and step through the code paths of widely used opcodes. Finally, we’ll demonstrate sample scripts and use cases, review disabled opcodes, and consider some of the proposed covenant opcodes.