Bitcoin Curriculum

Subject	Topic	Sources
Introduction	White Paper	Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Introduction	If I'd Known What We Were Starting (2017)	If I'd Known What We Were Starting
Introduction	Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree (2017)	Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
Introduction	What is blockchain anyway?	SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: A Special Presentation By Matt Corallo of Blockstream
Introduction	The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain	The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain∗†
Introduction	Proof of work	The Anatomy of Proof-of-Work, Bitcoin Developer Reference
Introduction	Difficulty adjustment	What keeps the average block time at 10 minutes?
Introduction	byzantine generals problem	The Byzantine Generals Problem
Introduction	Running a full node	Full Node Question
History & Philosophy of Bitcoin	What is consensus? (Consensus Algorithms, Blockchain Technology and Bitcoin UCL (2016))	Consensus Algorithms, Blockchain Technology and Bitcoin UCL - by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Soft Forks & protocol overview	On Unstoppability of Softforks	On Unstoppability of Softforks
Soft Forks & protocol overview	Upgrading the protocol
Soft Forks & protocol overview	Example soft forks	Softfork wiki page
Soft Forks & protocol overview	Forking signaling and Activation	Forks, Signaling, and Activation
Soft Forks & protocol overview	Fork categorization (soft, hard, evil, etc.)	Better Fork Terminology, Forced Soft Forks
Soft Forks & protocol overview	Flag day upgrades	UASF: User Driven Protocol Development
Soft Forks & protocol overview	IsSuperMajority signaling	BIP 65
Soft Forks & protocol overview	BIP9 signaling	BIP9: versionbits In a Nutshell, BIP 9
Soft Forks & protocol overview	BIP148 and BIP149	BIP 148, BIP 149, UASF BIP148 Scenarios and Game Theory,User Activated Soft Forks: the BIP 148 alternative
Soft Forks & protocol overview	BIP91	BIP 91
Security Models	Overview	overview-of-security-concerns,Danger! Bitcoin Threat Models Bitcoin’s Security Model: A Deep Dive, Weaknesses, Speed-Security Tradeoffs in Blockchain Protocols
Security Models	Checkpoints, assumevalid, minimumchainwork	Bitcoin's Diversity of Use-Cases and Security Models,Dave Harding Tweet on assumed valid blocks and minimum chainwork
Security Models	Defining SPV and lightclients	Light Clients
Security Models	BIP 37 (bloom filters)	BIP 37, On the Privacy Provisions of Bloom Filters in Lightweight Bitcoin Clients
Security Models	Neutrino	BIP 157, Neutrino: The Lighter Side of Lightning, Index for BIP 157 block filters #14121,Exploring Neutrino
Security Models	Committed bloom filters	Committed bloom filters for improved wallet performance and SPV security
Security Models	Fraud proofs	fraud-proofs, fraud proofs.md, Bitcoin Wizards Fraud Proof thread, Improving SPV security with PoW fraud proofs
Security Models	Committed UTXO hashes	UTXO set commitment hash
Security Models	Assume UTXO	Assume UTXO FAQ
Mining	Poisson distribution/Progress-free-ness	The Poisson Distribution and Poisson Process Explained
Mining	Block arrivals in the Bitcoin blockchain	Block arrivals in the Bitcoin blockchain
Mining	Fee Sniping	nSequence and opt-in ReplaceByFee
Mining	Selfish Mining	On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward, Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable, How to Mine Bitcoin Profitably - 2015, Why Bitcoin Mining Pools Aren’t Incentivized to Broadcast Blocks Quickly, Optimal Selfish Mining Strategies in Bitcoin, If There Is an Answer to Selfish Mining, Braiding Could Be It
Mining	Default next-block selection
Mining	51% attacks	Bitcoin’s Attack Vectors: 51% Attacks
Mining	BetterHash	BetterHash Mining Protocol(s)
Mining	No Reward Mining Overview	On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward
Mining	Pool overview	Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems
Mining	Pool Hopping -> PPLNS	PPLNS
Mining	PPS As a Real-World Business Solution	Pooled mining
Mining	Trustless Pools	P2Pool
Mining	Payment Channel Payouts	Payment Channel Payouts: An Idea for Improving P2Pool Scalability
Mining	ASICBoost	AsicBoost ­ A Speedup for Bitcoin Mining,The Problem with ASICBOOST, Inhibiting a covert attack on the Bitcoin POW function
Mining	BCH Mining/Difficulty Adjustment	Bringing Stability to Bitcoin Cash Difficulty Adjustments, Bitcoin Cash Difficulty Adjustments, Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm Update
Mining	Network partitioning attacks and network level privacy attacks
Mining	Tumblebit	TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub
Attacks	Dust attacks	Bitcoin’s Attack Vectors: Dust Attacks
Consensus approaches	On consensus	On consensus
Consensus approaches	GHOST	The GHOSTDAG protocol, Secure High-Rate Transaction Processing in Bitcoin, Modified GHOST Implementation
Consensus approaches	Braiding	Braiding the blockchain
Consensus approaches	BFT	Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals: Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Consensus approaches	Bitcoin-NG/PoW+BFT	Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol
Consensus approaches	PoS	Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals, Proof of Work & Proof of Stake, Proof-of-Stake & the Wrong Engineering Mindset
Consensus approaches	Sidechains	Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains, Sidechains,Proof-of-Work Sidechains
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Fork categorization	A complete history of Bitcoin’s consensus forks
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Extension blocks	Auxiliary block: Increasing max block size with softfork, How Bitcoin Extension Blocks Are Backward Compatible — and How They’re Not
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Hard forks: Potential dangers	Network Partitioning
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Replay protection	Replay Attacks Explained, How to Protect Against Replay Attacks, 2017_optin_replay code on btc1
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Wipeout protection
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Light nodes	Lightweight node wiki page
Consensus Changes & Hard Forks	Current research (spoonnet, etc)	Spoonnet: another experimental hardfork
Cryptography	The 3 Seminal Events In Cryptography	The 3 Seminal Events In Cryptography
Cryptography	An Overview of Public Key Cryptography	An Overview of Public Key Cryptography
Cryptography	Finite fields, Elliptic Curves, ECDSA, Schnorr	Finite fields, Elliptic Curves, ECDSA, Schnorr Cryptography - John Newbery
Cryptography	Bitcoin, Chance and Randomness	Bitcoin, Chance and Randomness
Cryptography	libsecp	State of Cryptography
Cryptography	State of cryptography for blockchains beyond ECDSA and sha256	State of cryptography for blockchains beyond ECDSA and sha256
Cryptography	On Bitcoin Security in the Presence of Broken Crypto Primitives	On Bitcoin Security in the Presence of Broken Crypto Primitive
Cryptography	zero knowledge proofs	Introduction to SNARKs
Cryptography	Bulletproofs	How Bulletproofs Could Make Bitcoin Privacy Less Costly, Bulletproofs: Faster Rangeproofs and Much More, Bulletpoints on bulletproofs, From Zero Knowledge Proofs to Bulletproofs Paper,Building on Bulletproofs
Cryptography	Commitment schemes; pedersen commitments	Cryptography, Non-Interactive and Information- Theoretic Secure Verifiable Secret Sharing
Cryptography	Schnorr	Simple Schnorr Multi-Signatures with Applications to Bitcoin, Liars, cheats, scammers and the Schnorr signature
Cryptography	Diffie-Hellman	Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange: A Non-mathematician’s explanation
Cryptography	Ring Signatures	Ring signatures
Cryptography	RSA	How RSA Works With Examples
Cryptography	MORE.... accumulators, etc
Transactions	Understanding a Raw Bitcoin Transaction	Understanding a Raw Bitcoin Transaction
Transactions	Understanding a Raw Bitcoin Transaction the hard way	Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol
Transactions	Working with Transactions	https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-transactions
Transactions	Transaction format	bitcoin/src/script/ismine.cpp
Transactions	Script	Bitcoin Developer Reference, Advanced Bitcoin Scripting: Transactions & Multisig
Transactions	Signing transactions	Why the signature is always 65 (1+32+32) bytes long?
Transactions	Data structures and serialization
Transactions	Softforks using the script language
Transactions	Standardness	Bitcoin Developer Reference, The Bitcoin Non-standard, The Bitcoin Non-standard
Transactions	Standard transaction types
Transactions	0-conf transactions	0-conf series: Support for zero-confirmation transactions at Bitcoin ATM. To be, or not to be., Solving the 0-conf problem using forfeits
Transactions	PSBT	Andrew Chow: Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions BIP 174, Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions, PSBT Howto for Bitcoin Core, Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction (PSBT) format
Transactions	SIGHASH_NOINPUT	BIP sighash_noinput
Transactions	Compacted Transactions	Compacted Transactions
Transactions	Mempool	How the Mempool Works, Transaction Pools, Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network - John Newbery
Blocks	Blocks overview
Blocks	Merkle Trees	Bitcoin Developer Reference, Weaknesses in Bitcoin’s Merkle Root Construction
Blocks	Data structures in validation	Validation costs and incentives
Blocks	On disk data structures
Blocks	Re-orgs	Handling Re-orgs & Forks - Bryan Bishop
Blocks	Pruning	Block file pruning, Add autoprune functionality PR #5863
SegWit	SegWit	Understanding Segregated Witness, Segregated Witness, Bitcoin Protocol Design: Segregated Witness Revisited, Segwit, Segregated Witness Benefits, Segregated Witness Costs and Risks, The Long Road to SegWit: How Bitcoin’s Biggest Protocol Upgrade Became Reality
SegWit	SegWit and scalabilty	segregated witness (segwit) and deploying it for Bitcoin
SegWit	Tx malleability	Transaction Malleability Explained, Transaction Malleability Explained, 2014, The Who, What, Why and How of the Ongoing Transaction Malleability Attack, Dealing with malleability, Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox
SegWit	SegWit and blocksize	Understanding Segwit Block Size
SegWit	Bech32	New address type for segwit addresses
SegWit	Wallet Development	Segregated Witness Wallet Development Guide
Wallet	HD wallet	Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets, Multi-Account Hierarchy for Deterministic Wallets, HD Wallets Explained: From High Level to Nuts and Bolts
Wallet	Wallet BerkeleyDB key value store, data file, environment, logs, flushing	Migration from Berkeley DB to LevelDB
Wallet	Wallet key types: Regular, watch-only, hd	Wallets and Accounts and Keys, Oh My!
Wallet	Wallet key management: Keypools, key metadata, address metadata	Understanding keypool in Bitcoin Core
Wallet	Wallet transaction tracking, mempool and block notifications
Wallet	Wallet rescan	How to rescan / reindex wallet?
Wallet	Wallet transaction creation: ATMP
Wallet	Wallet transaction metadata, getbalance, time received, confirmations, IsTrusted
Wallet	Wallet upgrade
Wallet	SegWit wallet development	Segregated Witness Wallet Development Guide
Wallet	Fees, fee estimation	The Fee Market Explained, How wallets can handle transaction fees
Wallet	RBF	Opt-in Full Replace-by-Fee Signaling, 0-conf series: Support for zero-confirmation transactions at Bitcoin ATM. To be, or not to be.
Wallet	Coin selection	Coin Selection, Coin Selection - Milan 2016, An Evaluation of Coin Selection Strategies
Wallet	Hardware wallets with Bitcoin core	Using your hardware wallet with Bitcoin Core
Scripts & Contracts	Scripting & Transactions	Scripts - general & simple with John Newbery
Scripts & Contracts	Scripting & Transactions - P2PKH, P2SH, P2WPKH, P2WSH, Bech32	P2PKH, P2WPKH, P2SH, P2WSH - Greg Sanders, Bitcoin Multisig and P2SH Transactions with Andreas Antonopoulos
Scripts & Contracts	Script Descriptors	Script descriptors, Support for Output Descriptors in Bitcoin Core
Scripts & Contracts	P2EP	Improving Privacy Using Pay-to-EndPoint
Scripts & Contracts	Smart Contracts on a Dumb Chain; Mimblewimble	Behind MimbleWimble
Scripts & Contracts	Smart Contracts on a Dumb Chain; scriptless scripts	Scriptless Scripts, Scaling Bitcoin Kaizen Workshops - Scriptless scripts, adaptor signatures and their applications
Scripts & Contracts	Payment Channels	Understanding Payment Channels,Bitcoin Protocol Design: Payment Channels Revisited, Bitcoin script v2.0
Scripts & Contracts	Malleability	See SegWit Section
Scripts & Contracts	MAST	What is a Bitcoin Merklized Abstract Syntax Tree (MAST)?, Merkleized abstract syntax trees (MAST), MAST stuff
Scripts & Contracts	Signature aggregation
Scripts & Contracts	ZK SNARKS	SNARKS,Introduction to SNARKs, STARKs: Proofs with Polynomials
Scripts & Contracts	ZK STARKS	Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity, STARKs: Thank Goodness It's FRI-day,STARKs: Into the Weeds, ZK-STARKs — Create Verifiable Trust, even against Quantum Computers
Scripts & Contracts	Discreet Log Contracts	Discreet Log Contracts, Discreet Log Contracts: invisible smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain
Scripts & Contracts	Miniscript	Miniscripts - SBC '19, Miniscript,Policy
Scripts & Contracts	State of script	Restrictive endorsements
Fungibility & Scalability	The current state of Bitcoin fungibility (2019)	Restrictive endorsements
Fungibility & Scalability	On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains	Summary / The fundamental tradeoff, On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains
Fungibility & Scalability	Why fungibility is important	fungibility-and-scalability, Fungibility overview
Fungibility & Scalability	Fungibility as an attack vector	Bitcoin’s Attack Vectors: Fungibility
Fungibility & Scalability	Privacy	Different Approaches to Privacy on the Blockchain, Privacy, Privacy,How much privacy is enough? Threats, scaling, and trade-offs in blockchain privacy protocols, Privacy surrounding the Blockchain
Fungibility & Scalability	Chain analysis	Chainalysis Live Demo - NY Demo Day - Empire Startups, Let's talk about ChainAnalysis, The Bitcoin Big Bang
Fungibility & Scalability	P2P fingerprinting
Fungibility & Scalability	tx origin analysis	A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
Fungibility & Scalability	Coinjoin	Coinjoin wiki page
Fungibility & Scalability	Confidential Transactions	Confidential Transactions,Bitcoins with Homomorphic Value,Confidential Transactions,A Primer to Confidential Transactions, Finessing Commitments
Fungibility & Scalability	Tumblebit	TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub, Tumblebit,Tumblebit for the Tumble Curious
Fungibility & Scalability	Coin Jumble	Coin Jumble
Fungibility & Scalability	Mixnets	This Binance Labs-Backed Crypto Startup Wants to Anonymize Everything
Fungibility & Scalability	Schnorr	EVERYTHING about Schnorr Signatures with Jonas Nick, Schnorr Signatures for Bitcoin - BPASE '18, Flipping the scriptless script on Schnorr, Schnorr Signatures
Fungibility & Scalability	Bellare-Neven	Multi-Signatures in the Plain Public-Key Model and a General Forking Lemma
Fungibility & Scalability	Threshold Schemes	Threshold cryptosystem, Threshold signatures and accountability
Fungibility & Scalability	Signature aggregation	Signature aggregation for improved scalablity., Technology roadmap - Schnorr signatures and signature aggregation,BLS Multi-Signatures With Public-Key Aggregation
Fungibility & Scalability	MuSig	Key Aggregation for Schnorr Signatures, MuSig: A New Multisignature Standard, Simple Schnorr Multi-Signatures with Applications to Bitcoin
Fungibility & Scalability	Taproot	Taproot and graftroot, Taproot: SegWit version 1 output spending rules
Fungibility & Scalability	Graftroot	Graftroot: Private and efficient surrogate scripts under the taproot assumption
The P2P Network	Overview of the p2p network	Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network - John Newbery
The P2P Network	Re-Introduction to net/net_processing
The P2P Network	Threading Model
The P2P Network	CConnman, CNode -> CNodeState Migration, CNode Future
The P2P Network	Network magic and handshake (version, service bits, feefilter, sendcmpct, etc.), service bits
The P2P Network	Transaction propagation	On Bitcoin and Red Balloons (incentives)
The P2P Network	Headers-first sync'ing
The P2P Network	Advances in Block propagation	Advances in block propagation
The P2P Network	Compact blocks	Compact Blocks FAQ, Greg Maxwell: Advances in Block Propagation, Compact Block Relay
The P2P Network	Relay networks, FIBRE	Relay networks, The Future of The Bitcoin Relay Network, WHAT IS FIBRE?
The P2P Network	Deanonymization in the Bitcoin P2P Network	Deanonymization in the Bitcoin P2P Network
The P2P Network	Dandelion	Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity,Dandelion++: Lightweight Cryptocurrency Networking with Formal Anonymity Guarantees,What is the tradeoff between privacy and implementation complexity of Dandelion (BIP156)
The P2P Network	Peer discovery	Network Discovery
The P2P Network	Topology Discovery	Discovering Bitcoin’s Public Topology and Influential Nodes,TxProbe: Discovering Bitcoin's Network Topology Using Orphan Transactions
The P2P Network	Peer connectivity
The P2P Network	BGP Hijack	Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies
The P2P Network	Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network (2015)	Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network, Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network
The P2P Network	DoS concepts (net splits, etc)	(https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Denial_of_Service_.28DoS.29_attacks), (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1738/what-would-happen-if-a-portion-of-the-bitcoin-network-was-separated-from-the-res), (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8738/feasibility-of-a-high-horsepower-attack-based-on-difficulty-4x-adjustments)
The P2P Network	Denial-of-Service Prevention	Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, DoS countermeasures may facilitate network fragmentation attacks
The P2P Network	SPV nodes	Future of SPV tech
The P2P Network	MiniSketch	Minisketch: Reducing Bitcoin Node Bandwidth Requirements, Minisketch: an optimized library for BCH-based set reconciliation
Chain Forks and Failures	OP_EVAL, OP_CHV and Taproot
Chain Forks and Failures	A history of consensus changes in Bitcoin
Chain Forks and Failures	BIP 66 Fork and spy mining	Strict DER signatures, What is SPV mining, and how did it (inadvertently) cause the fork after BIP66 was activated?
Bitcoin Core Architecture	Architecture overview	An overview of Bitcoin Core architecture - James O'Beirne
Bitcoin	Learning-Bitcoin-from-the-Command-Line	The best way to learn to learn deeply about bitcoin is to avoid GUIs (even bitcoin-qt), and instead learn it from the command line.
Bitcoin Core Contribution	Contributing to Core	Contributing to Bitcoin Core,Introduction to Bitcoin Development, Contributing to Bitcoin Core, a personal account