Bitcoin protocol engineering

Move from understanding to building, testing, and reviewing.

Follow these 8 lessons in order, or choose the topic you need. Each lesson combines an explanation, a worked example and practice inside the Guild.

1. Raw transaction construction

   Engineers serialize fields, compute sighashes, sign inputs, and inspect witnesses without relying solely on wallet abstractions.

   Open lesson

2. Regtest workflows

   A private deterministic chain enables instant mining, reorgs, policy experiments, and repeatable failure tests.

   Open lesson

3. Functional and unit testing

   Good tests isolate consensus logic, RPC behavior, wallet state, serialization, and end-to-end node interactions.

   Open lesson

4. Fuzzing and property tests

   Generated inputs uncover parser and state-machine edge cases while invariants catch broad classes of failure.

   Open lesson

5. Rust and TypeScript Bitcoin libraries

   Library abstractions accelerate work but must be checked against serialization, network, sighash, and script semantics.

   Open lesson

6. Reading Bitcoin Core

   Trace behavior from RPC or P2P entry points through validation and state updates while respecting lock and ownership boundaries.

   Open lesson

7. BIP design and review

   Protocol proposals need precise motivation, compatibility, activation, test vectors, security analysis, and reference behavior.

   Open lesson

8. Responsible deployment

   Signet, testnet, regtest, feature gates, monitoring, rollback constraints, and disclosure processes reduce real-funds risk.

   Open lesson