general feedback

[amitiuttarwar]

some thoughts as I work my way through the notebooks.

overall I find the exercises really cool. my feedback is mostly polish to get it cleaned up, but the content (that I've seen so far) looks good. you've done a good job breaking it down into manageable components. I also really love the integration of running a node & real life examples (like satoshi's first transaction). it makes the concepts much more tangible which I love since I'm more of a hands-on learner

first-btc-tx notebook

• might help to clarify pre-req concepts. Eg, UTXO is used as a term, but hardfork/softfork is quickly explained. I think adding a section of concepts to know going in could be helpful in setting expectations of what your audience should know, so you can focus on the specifics rather than trying to cover everything
• an idea to consider: I find the colorful text to break up the transaction hex really helpful (eg. used by jimmy song). A quick google search indicates this would be possible in jupyter, but might require an extension.
• is there a way to hide the answers for the “questions” at the end?

p2pkh notebook

• I got an error with the library import because of the nested directory structure. I added a random patch I found on stack overflow to the import list, and it helped resolve the issue "import sys; sys.path.insert(0, '..')\n",. I'm not PRing this (yet) because I haven't researched to understand exactly what it's doing, or figure out if this is a good practice.
• is the reading suggested a pre-reqs, or further reading if interested in learning more?
• the path $HOME/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin is only true for macOS. All other operating systems handle it differently.
• instructions for setup bitcoind in regtest are a bit unclear:
  --> the first command to stop bitcoin-cli should fail if you’re doing this from scratch.
  --> even if application data is in that specified path, I believe there’s an implicit requirement of where bitcoind needs to be located. I got the exercises running directly in terminal, but am not sure what the file architecture is supposed to be between bitcoin-cli and bitcoin-tx-tutorial.
• For more on this step, review the 'Addresses' notebook. -> where is that notebook?

recap

@DariusParvin, based on our conversation in slack, I'm adding the list of open items

• clarify pre-req concepts vs further reading
• use color coded text (like jimmy song)
• hide answers
• grammar edits (done in language, grammar & style edits #6)
• add a link to ‘addresses’ notebook
• add an option for user to specify the path for application data

open questions -

• what are the requirements for where the bitcoin binaries need to be located?