If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’ve learned a lot about Bitcoin’s inner workings, and hopefully you are inspired to learn a lot more. This book has only scratched the surface. In this chapter, we’ll go through some other topics you might want to explore, how to bootstrap your career as a Bitcoin developer, and ways to contribute to the community.
Creating a wallet is a challenging task because securing private keys is very difficult. That said, there are a bunch of standards for creating wallets that can help.
For privacy purposes, reusing addresses is very bad (see Chapter 7). That means we need to create lots of addresses. Unfortunately, storing a different secret for each address generated can become a security and backup problem. How do you back them all up in a secure way? Do you generate a ton of secrets and then back them up? What if you run out of secrets? How do you back them up again? What system can you use to ensure that the backups are current?
To combat this problem, Armory, an early Bitcoin wallet, first implemented deterministic wallets. The idea of a deterministic wallet is that you can generate one seed and create lots and lots of different addresses with that one seed. The Armory-style deterministic wallets were great, except people wanted some grouping of addresses—so, the hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet standard, BIP0032, was born. BIP0032 wallets have multiple layers and keys, each with a unique derivation path. The specifications and test vectors are defined in the BIP0032 standard, so implementing your own HD wallet on testnet is a great way to learn.
Additionally, BIP0044 defines what each layer of the BIP0032 hierarchy can mean and the best practices for using a single HD seed to store coins from a lot of different cryptocurrencies. Implementing BIP0044 can also be a way to understand the HD wallet infrastructure a lot better. While many wallets (Trezor, Coinomi, etc.) implement both BIP0032 and BIP0044, some wallets ignore BIP0044 altogether and use their own BIP0032 hierarchy (Electrum and Edge being two examples).
Writing down and transcribing a 256-bit seed is a pain, and fraught with errors. To combat this, BIP0039 describes a way to encode the seed into a bunch of English words. There are 2,048 possible words, or 211, which means that each word encodes 11 bits of the seed. The standard defines exactly how the mnemonic backup gets translated to a BIP0032 seed. BIP0039 along with BIP0032 and BIP0044 is how most wallets implement backup and restoration. Writing a testnet wallet that implements BIP0039 is another good way to get a taste for Bitcoin development.
Payment channels are the atomic unit of the Lightning Network, and learning how they work is a good next step. There are many ways to implement payment channels, but the BOLT standard is the specification that lightning nodes use. The specifications are in progress as of this writing and are available at https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/.
A large part of the Bitcoin ethic is contributing back to the community. The main way you can do that is through open source projects. There are almost too many to list, but here’s a sample:
The reference client
An alternate implementation of Bitcoin in C++
A Golang-based implementation of Bitcoin
A JavaScript-based implementation of Bitcoin, maintained by purse.io
A Python library for Bitcoin
A Java library for Bitcoin
A JavaScript library for Bitcoin
A Bitcoin payment processing engine written in C#
Contributing can be very beneficial for a lot of reasons, including future employment opportunities, learning, getting good business ideas, and so on.
If at this point you’re still wondering what projects would be beneficial for you, what follows are some suggestions.
It’s hard to understate the importance of security in Bitcoin. Writing a wallet even on testnet will help you understand the various considerations that go into creating a wallet. UI, backups, address books, and transaction histories are just some of the things that you have to deal with when creating a wallet. As this is the most popular application of Bitcoin, creating a wallet will give you a lot of insight into users’ needs.
A more ambitious project would be to write your own block explorer. The key to making your own block explorer is to store the blockchain data in an easy-to-access fashion. Using a traditional database like Postgres or MySQL may be useful here. As Bitcoin Core does not have address indexes, adding one will make it possible for you to allow lookups of UTXOs and past transactions by address, which is what most users desire.
A Bitcoin-based shop is another project that helps you learn. This is particularly appropriate for web developers as they typically know how to create a web application. A web application with a Bitcoin backend can be a powerful way to avoid third-party dependencies for payment. Once again, it’s advised that you start on testnet and use the cryptographically secure libraries that are available to hook up the plumbing for payments.
A utility library like the one built in this book is another great way to learn more about Bitcoin. Writing the BIP0143 serialization for the signature hash of Segwit, for example, can be instructive in getting used to protocol programming. Porting the code from this book to another language would also be a great learning tool.
If you are interested in getting into this industry in more depth, there are lots of great opportunities for developers. The key to proving that you know something is to have a portfolio of projects that you’ve done on your own. Contributing to an existing open source project or making your own project will help you get noticed by companies. In addition, programming against the API of any particular company is a great way to get an interview!
Generally, local work is going to be a lot easier to get as companies don’t like the risk profile of remote workers. Go to local meetups and network with people that you meet there, and the local Bitcoin jobs will be a lot easier to come by.
Similarly, remote work requires that you put yourself out there to be noticed. Besides open source contributions, go to conferences, network, and create technical content (YouTube videos, blog posts, etc.). These will help quite a bit in getting noticed and getting a remote job.
I’m excited that you’ve made it to the end. If you are so inclined, please send me notes about your progress, as I would love to hear from you! I can be reached at jimmy@programmingblockchain.com.