February 2019
Beginner to intermediate
319 pages
6h 56m
English
Content preview from Programming Bitcoin
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Chapter 14. Advanced Topics and Next Steps
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.
Suggested Topics to Study Next
Wallets
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.
Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets
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, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.