Bitcoin Core Principles

Class 1: Introduction & The Philosophy of Decentralization

• Topics:

1. Course Introduction: What is "Bitcoin Core Principles" and why is it crucial?
2. Defining Decentralization: Moving beyond a buzzword to a concrete set of trade-offs.
3. The Pillars of Decentralization: The symbiotic relationship between nodes, miners, developers, and users.
4. Centralization Pressures: Identifying the constant threats and centralizing forces that must be resisted.
5. ‍The Role of the Individual: How every user and node operator contributes to the system's core value proposition.

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Class 2: The Economic Properties: Scarcity & Immutability

• Topics:

1. ‍The Code of Scarcity: Examining the GetBlockSubsidy function and the Halving mechanism as the enforcer of the monetary policy.
2. The Philosophy of Absolute Scarcity: Why a fixed supply of 21 million? The economic and philosophical reasoning.
3. The Philosophy of Immutability: Understanding transaction finality and why "code is law" is so critical to Bitcoin's function.
4. The Mechanism of Immutability: How Proof-of-Work, block depth, and the "timechain" concept create a history that is computationally impractical to alter.
5. Threats and Debates: Exploring the "tail emissions" debate and the risk of chain reorganizations ("reorgs")

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‍Class 3: Transactional Properties: Fungibility, Privacy & Scalability

• Topics:
  

1. The Philosophy of Fungibility: What does it mean for money to be interchangeable, and why is Bitcoin's transparent ledger a threat to this property?
2. The Pursuit of Privacy: Examining techniques like CoinJoins that aim to break transaction history heuristics and restore fungibility.
3. The Scalability Trilemma: The philosophical trade-off between decentralization, security, and transaction throughput.
4. On-Chain Scaling & Privacy Enhancements: How upgrades like SegWit and Taproot improve efficiency and privacy at the base layer.‍
5. Layer 2 Scaling: Understanding the Lightning Network as a philosophical solution to the scalability problem that preserves base-layer decentralization.

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Class 4: The Process of Change: BIPs, Consensus, and Bitcoin Core

• Topics:

1. The Philosophy of Change: Why is changing Bitcoin so hard? The principle of "strong consensus" and resistance to contentious forks.
2. The Bitcoin Core Project: Understanding its role not as a company, but as a reference implementation and a focal point for open-source development.
3. The BIP Process: Dissecting the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) as the formal pathway for proposing changes, from idea to activation.
4. Mechanisms of Consensus: Examining how changes are activated, including miner signaling (like BIP 9) and the "voice of the user" (User Activated Soft Forks).
5. ‍Case Study in Consensus: Analyzing a real-world proposal (like BIP 119 OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY) to see the philosophy and process in action.
   

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Class 5: The Developer's Ethos: Guiding Principles and Long-Term Vision

• Topics:

1. Recap: The Four Pillars of Philosophy: A synthesis of Decentralization, Scarcity, Immutability, and the Process of Change.
2. The Developer as Conservator, Not Creator: Exploring the guiding principles of humility, responsibility, and adversarial thinking.
3. The Philosophy of Ossification: Presenting the counterintuitive but crucial idea that the ultimate goal of base-layer development is to stop.
4. The Future is Layered: Envisioning a future where the "finished" base layer acts as a foundation for a vibrant ecosystem of innovation on higher layers.