design

Bitcoin storage design — block database, UTXO set, and chain state management

How Bitcoin Core persists blocks, maintains the UTXO set, indexes chain state, manages the mempool, prunes historical data, and bootstraps via assumeUTXO.

Bitcoin security model — attack surfaces, trust assumptions, and defense layers

Bitcoin's threat model mapped end-to-end: what the protocol trusts, what it defends against, how each attack is countered, and where open risks remain.

Bitcoin system design overview — architecture, data flow, and design-document index

High-level system overview of Bitcoin's architecture, layer model, and data flow. Entry point to a 12-page design-document series covering every major subsystem.

Bitcoin wallet and interface design — key management, transaction construction, and RPC

How Bitcoin Core manages keys, constructs transactions, selects coins, estimates fees, and exposes functionality through RPC, REST, and ZMQ interfaces.

Bitcoin transaction design — UTXO model, Script, and signature schemes

Deep-dive into Bitcoin's transaction layer: UTXO lifecycle, transaction structure, Script evaluation, ECDSA and Schnorr signatures, SegWit, and Taproot.

Bitcoin P2P network design — node discovery, message relay, and block propagation

How Bitcoin nodes find each other, exchange transactions and blocks, and resist network-level attacks across the P2P gossip layer.

Bitcoin monetary design — issuance schedule, fee market, and incentive structure

How Bitcoin's 21 million cap emerges from a geometric halving series, how block rewards transition from subsidy to fees, and how the incentive model sustains honest mining.

Bitcoin cryptography design — keys, signatures, hashes, and address derivation

How Bitcoin uses elliptic-curve keys, digital signatures, hash functions, and deterministic derivation to secure ownership without trusted third parties.

Bitcoin consensus design — proof of work, difficulty adjustment, and fork handling

How Bitcoin nodes agree on a single chain: SHA-256d proof of work, the difficulty adjustment algorithm, block validation rules, fork resolution, and probabilistic finality.

Bitcoin ecosystem design — Lightning Network, sidechains, and L1 extensions

How the Bitcoin ecosystem layers above and around the base chain: Lightning payment channels, federated sidechains, L1 envelope extensions, and mining pool architectures.

Bitcoin block and chain design — headers, Merkle trees, and chain selection

How Bitcoin blocks are structured, how Merkle trees commit transactions to block headers, and how the most-work chain selection rule resolves forks.

Bitcoin architecture evolution — Satoshi era v0.1 vs modern v27+ baseline

Cross-cutting architecture comparison across every subsystem: Satoshi's v0.1 (January 2009) side by side with modern Bitcoin Core v27+, with split diagrams and domain tables.