europe: Mastering Bitcoin Programming the Open Blockchain

Chapter 1 Introduction

GitHub Bitcoin page: https://oreil.ly/BdOwl
You may connect your node instead to an alternative network, such as a free satellite data provider like Blockstream satellite: https://oreil.ly/cIwf3
The data is returned in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), a format that can be easily be "consumed" by all programming languages but is also quite human readable.

Two signatures algorithms are currently used in Bitcoin, the schnorr signature algorithm and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).
Multiple parties can collaborate to construct transactions and sign only one input each.
In Bitcoin's use of digital signature algorithms, the "message" being signed is the transaction, or more accurately a hash of a specific subset of the data in the transaction, called the commitment hash. The signing key is the user's private key.

The first transaction in a block is a coinbase transaction which allows the miner of a block to collect their reward for producing the block. Unlike other transactions, a coinbase transaction doesn't spend the output of a previous transaction and is also an exception to several other rules that apply to other transactions. Coinbase transactions don't pay transaction fees, don't need to be fee bumped, aren't subject to transaction pinning.

Bloom filters are used to filter the transactions (and blocks containing them) that a lightweight client receives from its peers, selecting only transactions of interest to the lightweight client without revealing exactly which addresses or keys it is interested in.

Merkle trees are used extensively by lightweight clients. Lightweight clients don't have all transactions and do not download full blocks, just block headers. In order to verify that a transaction is included in a block, without having to download all the transactions in the block, they use a merkle path.

hoard: réserve
clearinghouse: bureau central
tug-of-war: tir à la corde
emergent consensus: consensus is an emergent artifact of the asynchronous interaction of thousands of independent nodes, all following simple rules.
Jing's specialized hardware is connected to a server running a full node.
The goal is now to find a header that results in a hash less than the target.
The digest is a digital commitment to the input

RGB's documentation https://rgb.tech
Both RGB and Taproot Assets are protocols built on top of the Bitcoin protocol. The only asset natively supported by Bitcoin is bitcoin.
Taproot Asset's documentation
The preimage is just the data that is used as input to a hash function.
The LN was first described by Joseph Poon and Thadeus Dryja in February 2015 https://oreil.ly/NM8LC
Basics of Lightning technology (BOLT) https://oreil.ly/lIGIA
Creating a payment channel requires a funding transaction, which must be committed to the Bitcoin blockchain.
The LN implements an onion-routed protocol based on a scheme called Sphinx: https://oreil.ly/fuCiK
Unlike Tor (an onion-routed anonymization protocol on the internet), there are no "exit nodes" that can be placed under surveillance.
Each participant knows only the previous and next node in each hop.
LN payments are much more private than payments on the Bitcoin blockchain, as they are not public.
What will you do with the knowledge you have gained?
You can run a full node to validate the Bitcoin payments you receive, build applications that make it easier for other people to use Bitcoin, or help educate other people about Bitcoin and its potential.