Lessons are written for this Guild. They teach a mechanism in plain language before asking the learner to retrieve or apply it.
GUILD GUIDE
Who built this, what changed, and where everything lives.
A transparent guide to the Guild as a learning product. Lesson explanations remain original, while technical claims are tested against named mechanisms and deterministic vectors.
Built to turn reading into durable understanding
Ducat’s Bitcoin Guild is a free, Bitcoin-first learning environment. It combines guided explanation, worked examples, direct manipulation, retrieval, teach-back, and spaced review. Ducat appears as a later specialization after the Bitcoin foundations it depends on.
- Editorial owner
- David Evans
- Technical verification
- Deterministic protocol suite plus independent Codex benchmark review
- Current limitation
- Automated technical review is disclosed and does not pretend to be external human peer review
Calculations, bytes, Script, signatures, transaction structure, and state transitions are checked by deterministic engines rather than opinion.
Examples are labelled as examples. Implemented, proposed, deployed, disputed, and unknown claims are kept distinct.
What changed in the current review cycle
- Thirty live Bitcoin utilities
Added real converters, key and address tools, transaction and PSBT tools, block tools, signature checks, and elliptic-curve operations with canonical default vectors.
- Practical beginner wallet path
Added seven simulated tasks for wallet selection, receiving, payments, fee rescue, recovery, scam defence, and privacy-aware input selection.
- Concept-specific visual models
Added interactive mechanism maps for transactions, Script, Taproot, mining, networking, Lightning, cryptography, keys, privacy, markets, and Ducat vaults.
- Navigation and readability
Added sticky lesson navigation, print support, larger default type, 44-pixel controls, responsive reflow, and visible editorial records.
Start broad, then go as deep as you want
Start here: How Bitcoin works
Follow one payment from a wallet to confirmations before choosing a deeper path.
Use Bitcoin safely: a practical first path
Practise choosing a wallet, receiving, sending, fees, backups, recovery, scams, and privacy with simulated funds before protocol theory.
Foundations of money and computation
Build the mental models needed before touching a transaction.
Mathematics and cryptography
Understand the primitives without treating cryptography as magic.
History, economics, and game theory
Place Bitcoin in its cypherpunk, monetary, and institutional context.
Keys, addresses, wallets, and custody
Control keys safely and understand every encoding layer.
Transactions, UTXOs, and the mempool
Construct, inspect, price, and debug Bitcoin transactions.
Bitcoin Script
Execute locking conditions one opcode and stack item at a time.
SegWit, Taproot, and modern signing
Understand the upgrades that made modern Bitcoin protocols practical.
Mining, blocks, and consensus
Follow a transaction from gossip to deeply buried block state.
Nodes, networking, and Bitcoin Core
Operate and reason about the software enforcing the rules.
Privacy, security, and threat modelling
Protect users against both cryptographic and operational failure.
Lightning, channels, DLCs, and layered systems
Understand off-chain enforcement and its on-chain escape hatches.
Data protocols, Ordinals, Runes, and BitVM
Analyze protocols built from Bitcoin transaction semantics.
Markets, financialization, and risk
Connect protocol mechanics to real financial systems without confusing forecasts with facts.
Bitcoin protocol engineering
Move from understanding to building, testing, and reviewing.
Ducat system architecture
Map every actor, state object, trust boundary, and Bitcoin commitment.
UNIT and the Runes layer
Understand UNIT as one component of Ducat and trace how its token state relates to Bitcoin transactions and vault debt.
Ducat vaults and transactions
Build and inspect every vault action end to end.
Guardian, FROST, DKG, and custody
Understand what Guardians can sign, refuse, coordinate, and never learn.
Ducat oracle and liquidation
Trace price data into a Bitcoin-enforceable liquidation spend.
Ducat economics, LPs, and revenue
Model incentives with explicit formulas and versioned assumptions.
Ducat validation, operations, and governance
Operate the protocol and challenge its security story.
Unclear or incorrect material should be easy to challenge
Use “Save to my weak spots” in a lesson to keep a private reminder about anything unclear. This saves a note for you; it does not send a correction to the editorial owner. Lesson changes should be checked against the underlying mechanism and executable tests before the answer key is changed.
- Exact vector corrections
Corrected displayed SHA-256 digests, a proof-of-work mutation hash, and a hardened derivation-path label after independent review. Added executable regression checks for every corrected value.
- Key validation tightened
Rejected a zero private scalar and malformed public keys in WIF and address tools. Replaced floating-point modular arithmetic with arbitrary-precision integers.