I've been studying the bitcoin book lately [1]. Slowly but surely I'm getting a better understanding of all the pieces involved. I was inspired by an article I found here on HN, [2]. I saw that and decided I wanted to implement as much of the bitcoin protocol as possible without using any libraries.

I still haven't made too much progress. It was easy to generate private keys. Then I had to implement ECC. That took me quite a while to nail. But now I've got public keys on the curve mentioned in this article. Now I'm still in the process of mapping this into the public key hash. I got the sha256 hash working pretty quickly using just the psuedocode on wikipedia. But public key hashes are ripemd160(sha256(publicKey)), and I'm still having troubles with the ripemd160 hash.

After that, I'll base58 encode the hash. Then there's a couple of BIPs I wanna implement, the HD wallets and the 13 word mnemonics ones in particular.

Basically, I think this stuff's important for me to know. All these math abstractions are chained together in a certain way that gives us cryptocurrency protocols, internet monies. In the process, I get a strong foundation in cryptography as well as domain knowledge of cryptocurrencies.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

[2] http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...