A deep dive into Bitcoin's protocol internals — from UTXOs to Taproot to the Ordinals debate. Written from a "confused → understanding" perspective, with real transaction examples you can verify yourself.
No price talk. No trading. Pure protocol.
| # | Topic | What You'll Learn |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | UTXO Model | How Bitcoin tracks ownership without accounts |
| 02 | Script System | Bitcoin's stack-based programming language |
| 03 | SegWit | Witness data, weight units, and why it changed everything |
| 04 | Taproot | Schnorr signatures, MAST, and privacy upgrades |
| 05 | Ordinals & Inscriptions | How NFTs and tokens work on Bitcoin |
| 06 | The BIP-110 Debate | The "spam war" — what's at stake |
| 07 | Node Setup | Running Bitcoin Knots/Core on Windows |
| 08 | Satoshi's Timeline & Core History | From genesis block to current maintainers — who built Bitcoin and who stewards it now |
| 09 | Wallets & Self-Custody | Key generation, hardware wallets, multisig, PSBTs, seed storage, and inheritance planning |
| 10 | Mining & Hardware | From CPU to 1,160 TH/s ASICs — mining economics, pools, Stratum V2, and the AI pivot |
| 11 | The Bitcoin Network | P2P layer: node types, block propagation, compact blocks, eclipse attacks, Tor/I2P |
| 12 | The Future of Bitcoin | CTV, OP_CAT, covenants, Silent Payments, BitVM, RGB, Ark, and the ossification debate |
- Satoshi's Words — 19 verified, verbatim quotes from the white paper and BitcoinTalk forums
- CLI Commands — Useful
bitcoin-clicommands for exploring the blockchain - Examples — Real decoded transactions from mempool.space
- The Pizza Transaction — 10,000 BTC for two pizzas (P2PKH)
- First BRC-20 Deploy — The
orditoken (Taproot inscription) - Large Image Inscription — Witness data "abuse" in practice
Every claim in this guide can be verified with a Bitcoin node and bitcoin-cli. The goal is to understand why Bitcoin works the way it does, not just what it does. Each chapter builds on the last:
UTXOs → Script → SegWit → Taproot → Ordinals → BIP-110 → Node Setup → History
→ Self-Custody → Mining → Network → Future
Chapters 1-8 build linearly. Chapters 9-12 expand the picture: how to hold your keys, how mining works, how the network operates, and what's being built next.
- Basic understanding of public/private key cryptography
- A Bitcoin node (Core or Knots) — see Chapter 07 for setup
- Willingness to read hex and JSON
- Read sequentially — each chapter builds on the previous
- Run the CLI commands — verify everything yourself
- Decode the example transactions — seeing real data makes it click
- Use mempool.space as a visual companion — paste any txid to see it rendered
Query your own node with bitcoinlib-rpc — a typed Python wrapper for Bitcoin Core RPC:
pip install bitcoinlib-rpc
bitcoin-mempool # Fee buckets, congestion analysis
bitcoin-block 939290 # Pool ID, SegWit/Taproot adoption
bitcoin-tx <txid> # Full decode + inscription detectionSee the Tools section for details.
Found an error? Open an issue or PR. This is a living document.
CC BY-SA 4.0 — Share and adapt with attribution.