Bitcoin Deep Dive
For curious builders who want to verify the details: transactions, consensus, wallet standards, nodes and Lightning.
21 lessons · About 5 hours including practice. Comfort with Foundations, basic arithmetic and technical vocabulary. All lessons remain open.
What you’ll take away
Trace Bitcoin’s technical rules and distinguish consensus, policy and operational assumptions.
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Three chapters.
Twenty-one new perspectives.
Follow the path or jump to a question. No lesson is locked. Finish with a capstone you can explain to a friend.
Look under the hood
Transactions, commitments and the chain of work.
Read the whitepaper as an argument
Follow the problem, assumptions and proposed mechanism.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEHashes and Merkle commitments
Learn what a compact commitment establishes—and what it does not.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEUTXOs, change and accounting
Read a transaction as a set of consumed and created outputs.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEScripts describe spending conditions
Understand programmability without assuming an account-based model.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETESignatures and what they authorize
A valid signature is only as meaningful as the message it covers.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEBlock headers and the chain of work
Trace how compact headers bind a transaction history.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEDifficulty, hashrate and noisy observations
Separate a protocol target from an inferred network measurement.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEFollow the rules
Incentives, policy, wallet standards and signing.
Issuance, fees and incentives
Understand rules without converting them into a price promise.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEMempools and policy are not consensus
Understand why nodes can disagree about pending transactions.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEFee changes: RBF and CPFP
Understand two mechanisms before relying on a rescue button.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETESegWit and transaction weight
Connect a structural change to practical fee accounting.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETETaproot and Schnorr: useful, not magical
Understand spend paths and the boundaries of privacy gains.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEHD wallets and derivation paths
Understand reproducible keys without mistaking xpubs for harmless data.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEPSBT: separate construction from signing
Follow a portable transaction through distinct responsibilities.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEVerify the system
Recovery, nodes, Lightning and a payment traced end to end.
Descriptors make a wallet policy portable
Preserve the information that turns keys into the intended outputs.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEFull nodes, pruning and verification
Understand the difference between validating history and retaining every byte.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEReorganizations and lightweight evidence
Understand why history observations have different strengths.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETELightning channels and HTLCs
Follow conditional payments without assuming trusted routing intermediaries.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETELightning liquidity has direction
Capacity is not the same as the ability to receive.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETESoft forks, proposals and human coordination
Distinguish code, signaling and actual rule enforcement.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETECapstone: trace a payment end to end
Build a technically honest verification map.
14 MIN WITH PRACTICE · COMPLETEAI-assisted material · Lesson sources checked October 1, 2026. Independent curriculum review is pending. All progress is self-reported practice, not a credential. No real funds, recovery words or transactions are needed.