About us

This is a peer-to-peer reading group for technical bitcoin programming books such as Jimmy Song's "Programming Bitcoin". For our meetings, we read a chapter and then present the sections of that chapter to each other, each participant taking responsibility for a section or two. We pause after each section to allow for discussion and questions. At the end of each meeting we decide when we're meeting next. The more you present, the more you learn.

The technique we use is modeled on the practices of the Stanford Bitcoin Club in early 2018, which were later applied to an online reading group of alumni from Jimmy Song's bitcoin programming course in San Francisco in April 2018. The alumni group has been meeting online since May 2018. The Stanford group covered the Princeton textbook on bitcoin that's used on Coursera. The alumni group together has read all of "Mastering Bitcoin" and all of "Programming Bitcoin", plus some sections of the Lightning Network white paper, and is now reading "Grokking Bitcoin".

The San Francisco Bitcoin Reading Group started with Jimmy Song's book "Programming Bitcoin". In October or November, 2019, we plan to continue on with readings on the Lightning Network, including the original white paper, some of the BOLTs, and the open-source O'Reilly book "Mastering the Lightning Network" being written by Andreas Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and René Pickhardt. In addition we hope to have monthly hackergardens where we meet in person to play with code and set up nodes.