It’s worth linking this post on delvingbitcoin.org.
by beige-coffee
Hi All, I’m excited to share Programming Lightning - an educational resource I’ve been working on as part of a Spiral (and, recently, HRF) grant.
Programming Lightning, inspired by Programming Bitcoin (@jimmysong), teaches developers and technically-inclined folks how Lightning works by coding important pieces of the protocol from scratch.
Today, I’m sharing the first module of the larger Programming Lightning course, Intro to Payment Channels, which guides students through building a simple off-chain wallet and Lightning payment channel from scratch. By the end of the course, students’ implementations will pass some of the major BOLT 3 test vectors, meaning they will have successfully implemented functionality such as key derivation, obscured commitment numbers, and HTLC second-stage transactions (success and timeout).
While most exercises can be completed by forking the GitHub repo and running the tests locally, the course is optimized to be completed on Replit. This is because each Repl comes with Bitcoin Core running in the background, allowing students to easily generate Lightning transactions as they complete the exercises and simulate operations such as broadcasting transactions, opening channels, sending payments, and decoding raw transactions.
It’s worth linking this post on delvingbitcoin.org.