Mastering Bitcoin: Chapters 7 & 8

2024-04-03

Mastering Bitcoin

Join our vibrant reading discussion group as we dive into Mastering Bitcoin, the ultimate technical guide to understanding Bitcoin. Perfect for those eager to deeply grasp the intricacies of Bitcoin, this group combines a fun and supportive environment for learning complex technical concepts.

Each week, we'll explore a different pair of chapters, enriching your self-reading experience. We'll provide thought-provoking questions ahead of each session to guide your reading and fuel engaging discussions. Our meetups are not just about discussing the book; they're about building a community of Bitcoin enthusiasts and builders.

Discover, discuss, and delve into the world of Bitcoin with us. Your journey towards mastering Bitcoin starts here!

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How It Works

We recommend that you read up on the event format before you attend.

This Session

In this session, Bryan Nonni will lead us through a discussion of:

Chapter 7: Authorization & Authentication
Chapter 8: Digital Signatures

Study Questions

These questions are provided to help guide your thinking as read the material. We'll try to answer these together when we meet to discuss the chapter.

Chapter 7: Authorization & Authentication

Explain the difference between authorization and authentication in bitcoin
What is Script? Describe its attributes.
What is statelessness and why is it important?
What is turing completeness? Why is this an important concept?
Is Script turing complete? How does this impact bitcoin?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Script?
Walk through an example of running the P2PKH script
What is the "oddity" in OP_CHECKMULTISIG?
Can it be "fixed"? Why or why not? Explain the "fix"
Why is it described as an "oddity" and not a bug or future upgrade?
Why does "bare multisig" suck? ;)
How does P2SH improve base multisig?
For P2SH, what is initially on-chain and what is on-chain later?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of P2SH?
What are "fake UTXOs" and how was it fixed?
How can someone "burn" bitcoins (unspendable)?
How does OP_RETURN work?
What is the difference between a timelock on a tx vs. an output?
Why is OP_DROP included in the script for CLTV and CSV?
Explain the differences between tx time lock, CLTV and CSV?
Why does conditional logic in Script look backwards?
When to use OP_IF vs. VERIFY control flow in a script?
What are P2WPKH and P2WSH? How do they work? How do they differ from P2PKH and P2SH? Why are they better?
What is segwit v0 and segwit v1?
What is the difference between native and wrapped/nested segwit?
Why is wrapped/nested used?
What are MASTs? Explain what that is and why its better than conditional logic (OP_IF)?
Let's walk through a diagram of a MAST in the book.
What was the original MAST and does it differ from the MAST we use today?
What is taptweak/key tweaking? Why is it important / beneficial?
What is a scriptless multisig? What is the process for achieving this?
Difference between script and scriptless multisignatures?
What are the downsides of scriptless multisigs?
What is Taproot? What are its key attributes? Why is it beneficial? How does it work (at a highlevel)?
Any significant downides of Taproot? Why is this the case?
What is an internal key vs. a taproot output key?
What is a keypath spend vs. a script path spend?
What is tapscript and what are its major differences from script?

Chapter 8: Digital Signatures

What are the 3 purposes of signatures in Bitcoin?
Why are signatures unique and important?
Where do signatures "live"?
How is a signature produced?
What is needed to verify a signature?
What are the "messages" being signed in bitcoin?
What is SIGHASH? List the types and describe their function.
How can a bitcoin node distinguish between different SIGHASH types?
What was the quadratic sighash problem? How did BIP143 fix this?
What is the importance of ANYONECANPAY? How is it used to enable segwit?
Explain the advantages of schnorr and corresponding disadvantages of ECDSA?

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