CS120: Bitcoin for Developers I

Let's start right at the beginning. What is Bitcoin? 

It certainly is software, but it's also more than that. It's a digital currency, but it's not like the digital currencies that came before it. Bitcoin is the first of its kind, a truly decentralized digital currency that uses economics to incentivize a decentralized ecosystem around it. 

Wrapping your head around the Bitcoin ecosystem can be a challenge. We'll begin by diving into what Bitcoin is, and its history so far.

When trying to understand what Bitcoin is and does, it's helpful to start with an understanding of the context in which it was build and the problem it was trying to solve. There were many digital currencies before Bitcoin, but Bitcoin was the first decentralized digital currency. Creating a digital currency without a central authority was the problem that was being solved for. 

Bitcoin was first introduced to the world On October 31, 2008, with the publishing of the Bitcoin white paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The paper gives insight into the motivations and architecture of the system. Much of what is covered in the paper are topics that we will dive into in later units. So, we recommend reading through it briefly now and coming back to it often throughout your studies. 

One of the core components of the Bitcoin system is the peer-to-peer network that it runs on. While peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks existed before Bitcoin, understanding what is happening on the Bitcoin P2P network is fundamental to understanding Bitcoin. 

To grasp what is happening on the Bitcoin network, read this chapter that discusses what the computers, or nodes, on the Bitcoin network are doing. It covers node functions such as running a wallet, mining, maintaining a copy of the blockchain, and routing. We'll get more in-depth on wallets and mining in later sections. Here you'll want to focus on the last two functions mentioned, maintaining a record of all transactions made on the network by keeping copies of all blocks in the blockchain and validating and propagating transaction data.

Very understandably, given the name, when people visualize the Bitcoin network they often picture individual coins moving around a network. However, when you dig into the software you'll find that the concept of individual coins does not exist in the Bitcoin program. What does exist is software that helps the network to manage a shared ledger, the blockchain. It's a ledger that keeps a track of the inputs and outputs of transactions. The unit that the software calculates transactions in is what has become known as a "satoshi" which is 0.00000001 of what we generally think of as a Bitcoin. 

This chapter covers transactions and starts by explaining transaction inputs and outputs, and unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs.