Day 2 of the Kigali Bitcoin Developer Bootcamp was all about going deeper and getting hands on. π·πΌβ‘
The morning kicked off with an open source Bitcoin mining experience, and it was a great one, especially as this was the first time we have introduced this session at one of our bootcamps.
Using Mujina and BitAxe devices, @dzeg5 gave participants a deeper look at how Bitcoin mining works, and they even mined against Hydra Pool. We watched the transactions appear on https://t.co/WVp8UU1u7A on our private Signet and saw the whole process come to life.
A huge shoutout to the @256FOUNDATION for making this mining experience possible, and to @ryankuester for developing Mujina and helping make open source mining more accessible. π
The afternoon was all about coding.
Participants wrote Python scripts to query their Bitcoin nodes, retrieve and decode transactions, and explore how developers can interact directly with the Bitcoin network. We also looked at SegWit and multisig.
Another packed day of learning, experimenting, and building.
On to Day 3! π₯
Day 3 of our Lightning Developer Bootcamp in Kigali was packed with building, contributing, and learning. π·πΌ
We started the morning with Bitcoin open source, exploring what it means to contribute to open source projects, how to get involved, and how to find a Bitcoin project that fits your interests and skills.
We also covered open source best practices and what maintainers look for when reviewing contributions. Then the participants put everything into practice by making their first open source contributions to two Btrust Builders repositories and seeing their PRs get merged. π
In the afternoon, we shifted gears and dove into the Lightning Network.
We covered the history of Lightning, payment channels, opening and closing channels, HTLCs, payment routing, and onion routing. We then took everything we had learned into Polar and built a practical Lightning network, opening channels, creating invoices, making payments, and routing payments across the network.
We also explored the benefits and challenges of Lightning and the different Lightning implementations available today.
Another day of turning theory into practice.