Blockchain-Developer-Resources

A list of opininated links to resources useful to blockchain and bitcoin developers.

Bitcoin

Non-Technical Introductions

Technical Introductions

Technical Videos

How Bitcoin Works in 5 Minutes (Technical) (5m:25s) by Curious Inventor
How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood (22m:24s) by Curious Inventor
Mechanics of Bitcoin (1h:19m:49s) by Princeton Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course
Programming Bitcoin Youtube Channel by Murray
Coding Multi-Signature Addresses by D'Angelo

Technical Books

Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos LLC

Technical Articles

[Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and its Applications in Bitcoin (http://cs.ucsb.edu/~koc/ecc/project/2015Projects/Malvik+Witzoee.pdf) by Arnt Gunnar Malvik and Bendik Witzoee
Programming Bitcoin Transaction Scripts by Kofler
Developer’s Introduction to Bitcoin by Buterin
How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood by Driscoll
Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol by Shirriff
Bitcoin mining the hard way: the algorithms, protocols, and bytes by Shirriff

Tutorials

Cryptographic Currencies Crash Course (C4) by Aljosha Judmayer and Edgar Weipp
The libbitcoin Tutorial by Taaki
How to Parse the Bitcoin Blockchain by Ratcliff
Signing Offline Transactions by Maxwell
2 of 2 escrow example by Maxwell
2 of 3 multisig example by Andresen
How to decrypt messages in the blockchain from btcmsg by ripper234

Sidechains

Sidechains are new blockchains, but are backed by Bitcoin rather than being an altcoin. Using "two-way pegging" these sidechains provide a method for developers to make changes and play around with blockchain rules in a separate blockchain, while keeping these coins linked to Bitcoin.

Introduction

Ask Dr. Bitcoin: What are Side-Chains
Introduction To Sidechains and Blockchain 2.0
Sidechains, Treechains, the TL;DR by Sanders
Side Chains: The How, The Challenges and the Potential by Buterin
Sidechain Technical Feasibility Discussion (discussion)
Alternative Chains / merged mining

Concepts

The Initial Two-Way Pegging proposal by Adam Back
Blockstream Whitepaper Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains
Tree-chains preliminary summary by Todd

Tutorials

Sidechains: Alpha Sidechain Tutorial

Projects

Sidechain Elements Project - Open source github project investigating and experiment with various bitcoin sidechain concepts

Altcoins

Introduction

A Treatise on Altcoins

Tutorials

How To Clone Scrypt Based Altcoins for Fun and Profit by shakezula

Projects

CoinGecko has charts for a number of altcoins, but more importantly, attempts to measure developer and user community activity.

Javascript & Bitcoin

At Blockchain University we use a number of Javascript based examples to teach the more technical details of Bitcoin. You are not required to have an in-depth knowledge of Javascript, but learning some basics is very useful.

Setting Up on Mac

If using a Mac, you'll need some basic knowledge how to use the Terminal and the Mac's command line interface, and you'll need to install brew, node and git. A basic tutorial on how to do this is at https://github.com/ChristopherA/intro-mac-command-line

You can also use this script which sets up your Mac automatically, but the above teaches you how do to do it manually https://github.com/blockchainu/prepare-osx-for-blockchain-webdev

Introduction to Javascript

Javascript is in both server (node) and client (browser) development. Some basics of Javascript are common to both. Here are some resources for learning about Javascript that are generally applicable to both platform.

Learn Javascript - a free online book with interactive exercises.

Introduction to Node & Javascript

Server-based Javascript typically uses Node. These Javascript learning resources are node specific:

I like the command-line based nodeschool.io tutorials, as they require you to both use the command line and to create real working code. These are the basic interactive tutorials, but there are many more available.
Learn javascripting basics npm install -g javascripting
Learn Node basics: npm install -g learnyounode
Learn git: npm install -g git-it

Online courses on Javascript

Most of these courses teach general Javascript, but tend to be more client-side Javascript oriented.

Free online courses:

Code Academy: Javascript is an online interactive course that comes highly recommend. The course says 10 hours, but one of our students reported that it took him about 17 hours over 5 days, and found Q&A forum and glossary both helpful.
How to Learn JavaScript Properly
Introduction to Computing Principles
Introduction to JavaScript Development

Some non-free online courses:

Node.js Essential Training

General Javascript Books and eBooks

Some general Javascript online books in eBook (in rough order of preference)

Local-client Javascript Tools & Playgrounds

These tools can be cloned from github to allow you to use your browser to play around with various bitcoin capabilities:

Bip32 Generator git clone https://github.com/bip32/bip32.github.io.git ; cd bip32.github.io ; open index.html lets you create Bip32 Deterministic Heirarchical Keys (prefix xpub* and xprv*) based on a simple brainwallet (aka arbitrary mnemonic) passphrase.
Bip39 Mnemonic Code Converter npm install bip39 ; npm run compile lets you create Bip39 mnemonics (typically 12 words) used for deterministic keys, typically for Bip32.

Bitcore.js

Bitcoin 101 - Getting Started With Bitcore - A Full JavaScript Implementation of Bitcoin
- https://github.com/wobine/blackboard101/blob/master/BitcoreDayOne.html - code for the above
Bitcoin Quick Tools - Simple browser-based app (loaded locally) that is Bitcore.js. Has key and address generator and simple transaction tool. Useful working example of browserfy bitcore.js code.

Testnet Faucets

You'll need bitcoin testnet coins while developing apps with bitcoin. List in rough order of reliability and number of coins offered.

Sidechains Elements Project Testnet Faucet - 10 BTC per day per ip
TP Faucet - 1.9 BTC per request

Bitcoin Standards

BIP32 - Bitcoin Deterministic Heirarchical Keys
Good article on Deterministic Wallets
Discussion of BIP32 Advantages and Flaws
The BIP0032 Standard
Bip32 Generator git clone https://github.com/bip32/bip32.github.io.git ; cd bip32.github.io ; open index.html lets you create Bip32 Deterministic Heirarchical Keys (prefix xpub* and xprv*) based on a simple brainwallet (aka arbitrary mnemonic) passphrase.
Blockstack Keychains JS

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