An Introduction to Bitcoin
Lecture notes on Bitcoin in preparation for a Autumn 2018 course on cryptocurrencies at IIT Bombay
Version 0.1 (Oct 4, 2017): Download PDF
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Elliptic Curve Cryptography
- Groups
- Fields
- Elliptic Curves over Real Numbers
- Elliptic Curves over Finite Fields
- ECDSA
- Cryptographic Hash Functions
- SHA-256
- RIPEMD-160
- P2PKH Addresses
- The Blockchain
- Rewarding Blockchain Updation
- The Block Header
- Mining
- Bitcoin Transactions
- Bitcoin Ownership
- Double Spending Attacks
- Blockchain Integrity
- The 51% Attacker
- Summary
- Bitcoin Transactions
- Block Format
- Pre-SegWit Regular Transactions
- Pre-SegWit Coinbase Transactions
- Bitcoin Script
- Pre-SegWit Standard Scripts
- Pre-SegWit Signature Generation
- Transaction Malleability
- SegWit Standard Scripts
- SegWit Regular and Coinbase Transactions
- SegWit Signature Generation
- Block Size and Sigop Limits
- Contracts
- Escrow
- Micropayments
- Decentralized Lotteries
- Bitcoin Development
- Bitcoin Improvement Proposals
- Hard and Soft Forks