7.8 KiB
Chapter One: Introduction to Learning Bitcoin Core (& Lightning) from the Command Line
Introduction
The ways that we make payments for goods and services has been changing dramatically over the last several decades. Where once all transactions were conducted through cash or checks, now various electronic payment methods are the norm. However, most of these electronic payments still occur through centralized systems, where credit card companies, banks, or even internet-based financial institutions like Paypal keep long, individually correlated lists of transactions and have the power to censor transactions that they don't like.
These centralization risks were some of the prime catalysts behind the creation of cryptocurrencies, the first and most successful of which is Bitcoin. Bitcoin offers pseudonymity; it makes it more difficult to correlate transactions; and it makes censorship by individual entities all but impossible. These advantages have made it one of the quickest growing currencies in the world. That growth in turn has made Bitcoin into a going concern among entrepreneurs and developers, eager to create new services for the Bitcoin community.
If you're one of those entrepreneurs or developers, then this course is for you, because it's all about learning to program Bitcoin. It's an introductory course that explains all the nuances and features of Bitcoin as it goes. It also takes a very specific tack, by offering lessons in how to work directly with Bitcoin Core using its RPC interfaces.
Why not use some of the more fully featured libraries found in various programming languages? That's because the goal here is to create a visceral, hands-on experience that makes it easy to begin directly working with bitcoind. By typing in the commands, seeing the results yourself, and perhaps even exploring them beyond the specific walls of this course, you should gain a deep and intuitive understanding of how Bitcoin works, and you should be able to do so without the rigamarole of having to program, compile, and run code. You probably won't be using the command line long-term, but we think it's perfect as a learning tool, which is why we've create a whole sequence of digital-asset and digital-identity courses around that precept.
Even if you later move beyond bitcoin-cli, we suggest you cleave to other well-tested programming libraries rather than rolling one from scratch. Sticking with bitcoind and its RPC interface offers a particularly stable (yet up to date) methodology for working with Bitcoin. That's important because working with cryptocurrency is dangerous. There are no safety nets. If you accidentally overpay your fees or lose a signing key or create an invalid transaction or make any number of potential mistakes, then your cryptocurrency will be gone forever. Much of that responsibility will, of course, lie with you as a cryptocurrency programmer, but it can be minimized by working with the most robust, secure, and safe cryptocurrency interfaces around.
Required Skill Level
You do not need to be particularly technical for the majority of this course. All you need is the confidence to run basic commands on the UNIX command line. If you're familiar with things like ssh, cd, and ls, the course will supply you with the rest.
Overview of Topics
This book is broadly divided into the following sections:
| Part | Description | Skills |
|---|---|---|
| Part One: Preparing for Bitcoin | Understanding the basics of Bitcoin and setting up a server for use. | Command Line |
| Part Two: Using Bitcoin-CLI | Using the Bitcoin-CLI for creating transactions. | Command Line |
| Part Three: Bitcoin Scripting | Expanding your Bitcoin work with scripts. | Programming Concepts |
| Part Four: Maintaing Privacy | Improving privacy (and why it's important) | Command Line |
| Appendices | Utilizing less common Bitcoin setups. | Command Line |
Other topics are currently included in the course but may be moved to parallel courses as time allows:
| Part Five: Programming with RPC | Accessing RPC from C and other languages. | Programming in C | | Part Six: Using Lightning-CLI | Using the Lightning-CLI for creating transactions. | Command Line |
How To Use This Course
So where do you start? This book is primarily intended to be read sequentially. Just follow the "What's Next?" Links at the end of each section and/or click through the individual section links on each chapter page. You'll achieve the best understanding from this course if you actually build yourself a Bitcoin server (per Chapter 2) and then run through all the examples over the course of the book: trying out examples is an excellent learning methodology.
If you have different levels of skill or want to learn different things, you might skip to different parts of the book:
- If you've already got a Bitcoin environment ready to be used, jump to Chapter Three: Understanding Your Bitcoin Setup.
- If you only care about Bitcoin scripting, jump to Chapter Eleven: Introducing Bitcoin Scripts.
- If you just want to read about using programming languages, jump to Programming: Talking to Bitcoin.
- If you conversely don't want to do any programming, definitely skip the programming section while you're reading, and perhaps skip chapters 11-15 on Bitcoin Script. The rest of the course should still make sense without them.
- If you are only interested in Lightning, zap over to Lightning: Understanding Your Lightning Setup.
- If you want to read the major new content added for v3 of the course (2026), read §3.4: Understanding the Descriptor, §3.5: Understanding the Address, §3.6: Creating QR Codes for Addresses, §4.6: Sending Coins to Other Addresses ... [TBD]
Why to Use this Course
Obviously, you're working through this course because you're interested in Bitcoin. Besides imparting basic knowledge, it's also helped readers to join (or create) open-source projects and to get entry-level jobs in Bitcoin programming. A number of Blockchain Commons' interns learned about Bitcoin from this course, as have some members of our programming team.
How to Support this Course
- Please use Issues for any questions. Blockchain Commons does not have an active support team, and so we can't address individual problems or queries, but we will look over them in time, and use them to improve future iterations of the course.
- Please use PRs for any fixes of typos or incorrect (or changed) commands. For command-line or technical changes, it's very helpful if you also use the PR comments to explain why you did what you did, so that we don't have to research it.
- Please Use Our Community discussions area for talking about careers and skills. Blockchain Commons occasionally offers internships, as discussed in our Community repo.
- Please become a patron if you find this course helpful or if you want to help educate the next generation of blockchain programmers.
What's Next?
If you'd like a basic introduction to Bitcoin, public-key cryptography, ECC, blockchains, and Lightning, read the Introducing Bitcoin interlude.
Otherwise, if you're ready to dive into the course, go to Chapter Two: Setting Up a Bitcoin-Core VPS.