I built a website that organizes bitcoin tutorial videos from across youtube \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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I built a website that organizes bitcoin tutorial videos from across youtube www.bitcointutorials.org/

9699 sats \ 10k boost \ 34 comments \ @ihatevake 22h bitcoin

Over the past ~2 months, I've been building a website that categorizes and sorts through all the bitcoin tutorial videos across youtube, allowing users to filter by specific "tags" that correspond to a wallet, a signing device, app, node implementation, or tool. The goal of this site is to make learning bitcoin more accessible to someone new to this space.

I don't know how to code, the furthest I've gotten is halfway through a python course, and then I quit, so the entirety of this site was vibe coded using Claude Code.

THE INSPIRATION:

One of the things I've realized is that we already have a lot of great wallets, signing devices and tools in bitcoin right now. I also don't believe self-custodying bitcoin is too hard for anyone to learn. In this regard, there is an abundance of resources, particularly videos on youtube that walk people through the process, step by step. Many of us are familiar with BTC Sessions' content, but there are actually many, many other youtubers that also do tutorial content. However, getting someone new to bitcoin to those resources is somewhat difficult, because in many instances they don't even know where to start. Also, we have a unique challenge with how different tools interact with one another; for example, someone could use a Seedsigner with Sparrow Wallet connected to Bitcoin Core on their desktop; or they could use a SeedSigner with Nunchuk Wallet; or they could use Bitcoin Keeper with a Foundation Passport. Every one of these setups has unique idiosyncrasies. Unless they're actively listening to 40 hours per week of bitcoin podcasts, most people aren't even aware of the sheer number of wallets and tools available.

THE GOAL:

The purpose of bitcointutorials.org is to make it easy to sort by the tags that you are interested in, thereby finding tutorial videos explaining the combination that works for you.

The tags on this site are divided into 9 main categories: Signing Devices, Wallets, Nodes & Servers, Mining, Lightning Network, Services & Exchanges, Tokens, Ecash, Privacy & Security, and Advanced Features.

Signing Devices aka hardware wallets are designed to hold your private keys segregated from an internet-connected device, and sign transactions in a secure environment. Examples include ColdCard, Jade, Passport Core, and Trezor.
Wallets are any phone or computer application used to construct bitcoin transactions. These include Sparrow, Specter, Aqua, Breez, Muun, Minibits, etc. It can range from on-chain BTC to off-chain features like lightning, ecash, or even statechains.
Nodes & Servers can be bitcoin full node implementations (Core/Knots) or indexers (Electrs/Fulcrum) or node-in-a-box packages like Start9 and Umbrel.
Mining can be home miners like Bitaxe or Avalon Nano 3S or mining pool protocols like Braiins and DATUM.
Lightning Network covers everything in this ecosystem, such as Core Lightning, LND, Alby, etc. There is also a general "Lightning" tag that is tacked onto videos covering Lightning-enabled wallets.
Services & Exchanges are, for the most part, places to buy and sell bitcoin, but also includes apps like Fountain and payment processors like IBEXPay or BTCPay Server.
Tokens covers Liquid, USDT and Testnet bitcoin.
Ecash is Fedimint and Cashu. These tags are applied to any wallets using these protocols.
Privacy & Security are general tools that help you acquire/use bitcoin privately, or tools to help you secure your private keys, like BIP 85 Child Seeds or Seed XOR.
Advanced Features are things on the cutting edge of bitcoin, like FROST, Taproot Assets or Statechains.

THE PROCESS:

This all began with me manually watching nearly 800 youtube videos, one by one, and individually tagging them in an excel spreadsheet by what tags were used in that video. This perhaps could have been done by AI, but I knew that it wouldn't be done right, so I chose to do it myself. It was an exhaustive, laborious process, and took about two weeks to get the initial ~600 videos done for the first batch. I also found myself having to rename a lot of youtube videos to make their content a lot clearer, because youtubers have an awful habit of creating clickbait titles that don't explain the true content within.

The video_template.csv file (which can be found on the project github) has 744 videos right now, structured by video name, creator's name, date, the youtube id, and the tags applied to that particular video.

Once I had version one of the site up, I knew I had to keep iterating to make it more visually appealing and easier to navigate.

I started applying color codes to each category, and the tags within it. I also began collecting the .png icon files for each project's logo. Later versions of the site allowed you to filter by more than one tag. With my latest version of the site (v4.0), I have created "info boxes" that contain links to each projects website, github, X and nostr, icons as to what computing platform that application is available on (Mac/Windows/Linux/iPhone/Android), and a short description of the tool.

There are, of course, many, many other optimizations made along the way, but I finally feel like bitcointutorials.org is in a place that it can be promoted as a helpful resource for both newcomers and people actively involved in the space.

THE FUTURE:

One current drawback to the site is that it is, ultimately, built on a CSV file categorizing all the videos, and another CSV file for all the relevant social links. This works, but may get slow and unwieldy as the amount of content on the site grows. I am considering moving to a proper database like SQL down the road.

Of course, I am always hunting for more videos to add, and ways to improve the design of the site.

CONTRIBUTIONS:

Bitcointutorials.org is full open source under the Apache 2.0 license and Creative Commons 4.0. Anyone is welcome to fork the site, and host it on your own domain. I'd love nothing more than for hundreds of similar sites to pop up, so that any bitcoiner, anywhere can easily find what they need to learn proper self-custody.

If you have any improvements, or stumbled across videos I may have missed, please go to our project github (https://github.com/vake21/bitcointutorials.org) and place a pull request.

Thanks!

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200 sats \ 7 replies \ @DarthCoin 15h

Really nice indeed. I have only one aspect that I do not like, but is not really about you. All videos are from Youtube. That means a noob when will open the page, and select a video, first will be bombarded with crap ads about AI and all the bullshit inserted by YT because all these YT influencers are subscribed to that crap to monetize their channels. Being embedded, sometimes you can't even skip the ads. Clearly the noob will not know what is going on.

I will suggest that if you can:

download yourself the videos and upload them to a CDN or something, or host yourself
put alternative YT links like Invidious
alert the viewer that maybe will be some ads

I really do not understand why all these youtubers do not post on https://bitcointv.com all those tutorials.

121 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 14h

download yourself the videos and upload them to a CDN or something, or host yourself

Already archiving all of them

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @DarthCoin 14h

Maybe just upload them to https://lightning.video from where you can also embedd the video in any other website.

123 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 14h

I'll make a place for people to fetch archived videos in case youtube goes insane, bans accounts and so on. If people want to redistribute, they can do that.

Give me a few days because everything must be streamed now that there's a war between goog and yt-dlp, so it's slow af

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 13h

yeah downloading from yt is hell of a job, I am doing it sometimes and upload to nostr CDNs or lightning.video

146 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 13h

fetch.sh:

#!/bin/sh
# pass youtube ID as arg

# prevent downloading the same shit twice
mkdir -p vids
if [ -f vids/$1.mp4 ]; then
  echo "Skipping $1: already exists.";
  exit 0;
fi;

# ALWAYS create new onion circuit
echo -e 'AUTHENTICATE "yourcontrolpass"\r\nsignal NEWNYM\r\nQUIT' | nc 127.0.0.1 9051;
sleep 2;

# if fails, put the vid in the dead letter queue
yt-dlp -t mp4 -o vids/$1.mp4 --proxy socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050 https://youtu.be/$1 || echo $1 >> dlq.txt

edit in your TorControl password.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

Sure! I started with youtube because, frankly, it's where the network effects of video hosting are. People know and are familiar with youtube. Sometime we have to keep in mind that bitcoiners like us are a little weird than most with our esoteric tools :-/

I'll probably avoid self-hosting the videos, because I don't want to run into any legal/copyright issues, but I'm open to looking at other sites (Rumble, bitcoin tv, zap.stream, etc.), provided they have good embedding options.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 15h

Perhaps @DarthCoin they are slaves to the fiat debt rentseeking paradigm whereby they can harvest rent from YouTube!

202 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 15h

Good work!!!

This works, but may get slow and unwieldy as the amount of content on the site grows. I am considering moving to a proper database like SQL down the road.

Keep the CSV, it's much more accessible and transparent than a database and accessibility is key. We're talking semi-static data as long as you keep vetting videos anyway. If you need better runtime performance, you can make a pre-rendering step where you build a working static site off of the latest "production" commit, and publish the generated site instead of the "source code".

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @ihatevake OP 2h

Good point, I might keep it this way then. Depends on how well the site loads after I hit, like, 1000 videos.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 2h

If you get in trouble, ask for help. Maybe not from Claude but from us. We'll help <3

42 sats \ 3 replies \ @030e0dca83 17h

I didn't find any fundamental videos, e.g. how does mining work, what eliptic curve, what is sha256 hashing function, etc

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

There are some more general videos, check out the tag "Seed Phrases (General)" and "Signing Devices (General)," however, I'm trying to keep the list of videos a little more lean and focused. I'm not sure the typical noob needs to know mining in-depth, or elliptic curve cryptography, or SHA 256. But I'm open to adding more, general videos, particularly if they have very hands-on key management advice.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @X3NO533D 16h

Yes, some videos that just explains "what is bitcoin"

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

I figure, if someone is already on a site called bitcointutorials.org, they're already at least vaguely familiar with what bitcoin is.

233 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 21h

This is really great! I was able to find a ton of stuff covered here. (Only problem is no SN tutorials, but that's cause there aren't many out there...are there any?)

200 sats \ 1 reply \ @QzF2MSjBFUmw 10h

I will share your website, thanks to you !

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

Thank you!

200 sats \ 0 replies \ @hasherstacker 15h

Honestly, this is awesome!

200 sats \ 1 reply \ @GreaterthanFiction 21h

Well done! Great effort to put this together

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

🙏

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @X3NO533D 16h

It's awesome. But like someone mentions, a section with fundamentals would be great. Also, a possibility to share the results, as I already looked through to help some friends but had to take each video link separate.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 18h

Wow great work, thanks for sharing!

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @PictureRoom 20h

Super cool.

Something I've noticed is when I select two filters (say, alby and boltz) nothing shows. But when each is selected individually, content is available for both.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

Filter work on an AND basis, meaning, if two filters are applied, the only videos shown will be those that contain BOTH tags.

The creators don't work this way, though, you can select multiple creators and it'll show videos from all of them.

0 sats \ 8 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 15h

There is so much bullshit.

Just read The Bitcoin Standard and go from there.

Most of what you need to know is there in one book.

You can download it free.

https://ia601407.us.archive.org/10/items/the-bitcoin-standard-the-decentralized-alternative-to-central-banking_202205/The%20Bitcoin%20Standard%20The%20Decentralized%20Alternative%20to%20Central%20Banking%20.pdf

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @ihatevake OP 2h

Yes, all we need to do is yell "fiat is ruining everything" at people, and they'll get it.

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 2h

You clearly have not ever read The Bitcoin Standard.

I suggest you do if you want to gain a basic understanding of the subject.

The most part of the book is a historical and theoretical study of money, which is a prerequisite to understanding Bitcoin.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @ihatevake OP 58m

I've read The Bitcoin Standard hundreds of times. I can recite The Bitcoin Standard, word from word, from memory. When I got married, my wife and I swore our vows while holding a copy of The Bitcoin Standard. Every Christmas, I buy my friends and family a copy of The Bitcoin Standard, even if they've already read it. My dog's name is The Bitcoin Standard. I shook Saifedean Ammous' hand once, 7 years ago, and still have yet to wash that hand.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 54m

Sarcasm and parody are not rational or logical arguments. They are just cheap avoidance of the issues raised.

How does your website guide give people a better more comprehensive introduction to understanding Bitcoin than simply reading TBS would?

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @ihatevake OP 50m

Nothing. My favorite chapters in The Bitcoin Standard are where he explains how seed phrases and private keys work, how to set up a bitcoin wallet, how to construct and broadcast a transaction, how and why to use multisig, how to mine bitcoin....

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 44m

Sounds like you missed the central purpose and message of TBS. Your favourite chapters are just rote user manuals, not the wider philosophical understanding of the real nature, context and value of Bitcoin. Before you learn how to use a tool, understand what its purpose is.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ihatevake OP 29m

Yes, before I use a hammer to nail something into the wall, I spend 30 minutes pondering the history of hammers, their purpose, and the deep philosophical meaning of hammers.

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