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.

   35 minutes · Open lesson

2. Regtest workflows

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

   45 minutes · Open lesson

3. Functional and unit testing

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

   55 minutes · Open lesson

4. Fuzzing and property tests

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

   65 minutes · Open lesson

5. Rust and TypeScript Bitcoin libraries

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

   35 minutes · 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.

   45 minutes · Open lesson

7. BIP design and review

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

   55 minutes · Open lesson

8. Responsible deployment

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

   65 minutes · Open lesson