Bitcoin Developer Network

Tutorials for educating the next generation of Bitcoin developers

Bitcoin script 101

In this tutorial we will be looking into the scripting language used by bitcoin. Bitcoin script is a simple forth-like stack based language, basically meaning that it operates using a first-in-last-out principle (FILO) upon a stack based data structure.

Bitcoin wire protocol 101

Ever wonder how bitcoin nodes talk to each other? Well, in this tutorial we'll be covering the raw details behind the TCP based bitcoin wire protocol, which could be considered lesser known than the more popular RPC interface.

Calculating the Merkle Root for a block

This tutorial is written to simplify the understanding of how bitcoin uses merkle trees for verification of transaction into a block. A merkle root is created by hashing together pairs of TXIDs, which gives you a short yet unique fingerprint for all the transactions in a block.