Learn foundations of Bitcoin

[meeDamian]

[practical] build a bitcoin transaction "by hand"

Desc: using private keys from testnet build a valid transaction for it

@meeDamian's note: Either me or Ryan can help with that (if we're not too busy with sth else :P). I can bring the cheat-sheet from Jimmi Song's seminar. Ryan has Mastering Bitcoin book.

[justinmoon]

One thing I really enjoyed building recently is a simple bitcoin network crawler.

Basically a simple version of https://github.com/ayeowch/bitnodes.

You need to learn to decode and encode network messages, interpret version / addr network messages, and employ some concurrent programming techniques to make the crawler fast by talking to many peers at once.

[meeDamian]

@superquest I've done something very similar here: https://github.com/meeDamian/bc1toolkit/tree/master/bc1isup :)

Basically, a tool to quickly check whether a Bitcoin node is up and get some basic info about it ^^