CS 251 - Lecture 2 and HW1 Notes
- you can generate a secret key / signing key, and then you can trace the public key from signing key, and the P2PKHBA (Pay 2 Public Key Hash Bitcoin Address) from the public key
Validating a scriptSig involved appending a scriptPubKey to it and running the combined script to ensure it outputs a True.
the sum of bitcoin in the unspent outputs cannot exceed the input.
On to Homework 1, which is basically a simple python-bitcoinlib walkthrough for the most part to create signed transactions.
I have to say, the starter code is annoyingly bad. No comments, no file headers, no description of inputs and outputs, no test cases. I guess this is the difference between real world coding and university classes... There are some clear mistakes in the starter code, which have to be debugged slowly. And this code must be several years old, so they basically didn't bother to update it for the errata. Probably every year the TAs teaching the class have to issue corrections...
Some useful notes and links
Peter Todd's examples are probably the most suitable tutorials at the right level of abstractions
petertodd
And I give up... It's not impossible to understand or do the exercises... but it's just not very useful... I find myself wanting to rewrite all of the Bitcoin homework code, with proper headers and sample code. But at the same time, no one seems to use this stuff anymore. Bitcoin development is basically dead.