When I joined the Btrust Builders Program, I already had some prior exposure to Bitcoin — having gone through month 1 of the BOSS program and Code Orange's Bitcoin Dojo exercises. What followed was weeks of hands-on work with the Bitcoin CLI, and eventually, real contributions to the Bitcoin open source ecosystem. Here's an account of how it went.

Getting Started

The first two chapters of the material (Learning-Bitcoin-from-the-Command-Line) covered installing Bitcoin Core, configuring a node, and understanding the basics of elliptic curve cryptography and public key cryptography. In practice, setting up the .conf file and deciding which node to run took significantly more time than I expected. Running multiple nodes simultaneously on the same system added another layer of complexity the material didn't fully prepare me for.…