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Comment by msgilligan | Hacker News Reader

This is reminds me of Ken Shirriff's 2014 "Bitcoins the Hard Way" blog post that also used Python to build a Bitcoin transaction from scratch: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi...

(The subtitle of the blog is "Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever" and it is full of fascinating articles, several of which have been featured here on HN)

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Thanks for the nice mention of my blog. I was wondering if anyone remembered my old bitcoin article :-)

It's a classic. You will be forever remembered for your timeless contributions to the collective consciousness!

The retro-computing stuff I see you guys doing on CuriousMarc's youtube channel blows my mind.

We do

I go back to it twice yearly

Shameless self-promotion but there's also this post I wrote in 2017 if anyone interested in a slightly different take (but a very similar write up to the OP): https://www.samlewis.me/2017/06/a-peek-under-bitcoins-hood/

Cool that this article implements the cryptography primitives, though!

e: Funnily, like the article, I also stored some BTC in a wallet and challenged people to (manually) take/steal it. At the time it was worth $10 USD.. now it's worth $123 USD!

> The 'dumbcoin' jupyter notebook is also a good reference: "Dumbcoin - An educational python implementation of a bitcoin-like blockchain" https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/julienr/ipynb_playground...

https://github.com/yjjnls/awesome-blockchain#implementation-... and https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains#pytho... list a few more ~"blockchain from scratch" [in Python] examples.

... FWIU, Ethereum has the better Python story. There was a reference implementation of Ethereum in Python? https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/programming-language...

Ken's blog is great, as well as his work with CuriousMarc. Here's when he tried mining bitcoins by hand.

http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...

No, the hardest way is using pencil and paper to mine a block :)

https://gizmodo.com/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper-164...

technically it said “the hard way” not “the hardest way”. also, computing a hash != mining. mining needs forming the block and computing the hash

That's basically just a SHA256 hashing on pen and paper, doesn't have much to do with how bitcoin works.

To be fair, performing sha256 hashing is kind of the only work that Bitcoin is doing, from a kilowatt hour’s perspective.

Same guy, Ken Shirriff

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