Bitcoin Development Philosophy is a guide for Bitcoin developers who already understand the basics of concepts and processes such as Proof-of-Work, block building, and the transaction life cycle, and who want to level up by gaining a deeper understanding of Bitcoin’s design trade-offs and philosophy. It should help new developers absorb the most important lessons of over a decade of Bitcoin development and public debate, while providing them with a useful context for evaluating new ideas (good ones and bad ones!).
Table of contents overview:
Your feedback and contributions are most welcome! Instructions for building and contributing can be found in [appendixbuild].
As stated above, this is a practical guide for Bitcoin developers. However, Bitcoin is a broad and complex subject and we couldn’t possibly cover all of its aspects here. With this book, we hope to discuss the necessary features to get your development activity started as well as to enable you to further explore it on your own.
There are lots of people involved in Bitcoin; as some of them have opposing opinions, here you may find resources that express contradictory ideas. However, we always attempt to stick to the domain of facts, where opinions do not matter.
The main author of this book is Kalle Rosenbaum, and Linnéa Rosenbaum contributed as a co-author. This work was commissioned and funded by Chaincode Labs, a development center that runs educational programs for developers who want to learn about Bitcoin development.
Kalle is the author of Grokking Bitcoin (Manning Publications) and is a seasoned software developer. He’s been working professionally with Bitcoin-related development since 2015.
Linnéa has a Ph.D. in Electronic Systems. She is the Swedish translator of The Little Bitcoin Book and co-translator of The Bitcoin Standard. She is also on the board of the Swedish Bitcoin Association. Her background is in firmware development with a recent shift towards software development.
The book is sectioned into chapters, each covering a pivotal topic within Bitcoin. Every chapter guides you through the relevant information related to the chapter’s focus, with the addition of links and QR codes that will take you to articles or videos that we recommend reading or watching. The reported material was written by individuals who have studied Bitcoin development for a long time.
The links refer to external resources on platforms we cannot
control. We have therefore saved the linked articles locally in this
repository, along with the information on where it was copied from and when. The
resources are collected in a separate
document (sources/sources.adoc) and organized by the chapter they are
linked to. The links found in the chapters refer to the original
sources, which should be found online, but in case you don’t have an internet connection, the links
appear dead, or the information seems severely changed, you can read the
content locally instead.