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Comment by sidmitra | Hacker News Reader

Just curious as to how you got started into this? Are there any references you'd recommend. I have a typical Web dev background(+ some machine learning from college). Been investing in crypto for a bit and would love to learn and implement some basic blockchain concepts on my own. I've also been looking at Solidity.

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Really it's just a lot of googling and looking for good tutorials that explain how the Bitcoin protocol works. Whenever you hit a concept you don't understand, google it.

The Bitcoin Developer Documentation is gold: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation

Start by defining your basic objects, and then begin adding their methods, just like you would any sort of program. The basic objects here are the Blockchain, Transactions, and a Client to interact with the chain. The rest is just implementing rules for how these objects work together.

There's an old Bitcoin in Python project called ArtForz's Bitcoin "half-node" (or maybe "half-a-node") which is a compressed, single file, easy-to-follow simplified Bitcoin node. No wallet functions, just the basic networking and validating.

Actually, I found a copy here: https://pastebin.com/ZSM7iHZw

It's public domain, and it may help you figure things out (it did for me).

The main hurdle is understanding the message types: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Message_ty...

Once you understand these, it's pretty much all serializing, deserializing, validating, and passing these around over TCP/IP sockets. And then building the chain. And then adding wallet functions.

It's been a while since I've done this so now I'm thinking of building another one in some new language.

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