David Case gets technical with Bitcoin masterclass coding sessions

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Here’s another useful resource for Bitcoin developers or those interested in becoming one. David Case of 1Sat Ordinals and Yours Wallet is livestreaming his own coding sessions on the X social media platform as the “BSV Coding Livestream” series. For those with some understanding of Bitcoin’s back-end, it’s highly recommended viewing.

Case is one of the most experienced Bitcoin developers working today, and (as he notes himself) it’s likely his code has broadcast and recorded more transactions to a blockchain network than anyone else’s. He has personally broadcast around 1.2 billion of them. This means any work-in-progress he records and streams should be regarded as a Bitcoin masterclass—not at the meta-level, as some similarly-named series have been, but at a more granular one.

✋✋✋ I have pushed more transactions on a public blockchain than anyone else on the planet, and I don’t trade crypto. I’m motivated by proof of work and transparency. I don’t have plans, but I have expertise.

— David Case ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (@shruggr) November 14, 2024

“(David Case) is my favorite BSV builder… I think he is the biggest name in our community,” one Bitcoin entrepreneur commented as I watched the streams.

While David’s videos have a tutorial angle, they’re not formal tutorials per se. That is, there’s no formal structure or specific learning point. However, as basic livestreams of an actual coder at work and thinking out loud, they’re great for learning the thought/logic processes and personal preferences that go into building a project, as well as some of the tools used. 

“I’m just streaming while I work. There is no specific point to any of them. These are not produced or prepared for media. It’s like Twitch with coding instead of video games,” Case said.

“I’m not efficient at documentation, and things change fast. I don’t plan things out on paper, but I think through my work by coding it up. This struck me as a means of documenting and building at the same time. It definitely takes more concentration to narrate while working, but it’s something I’d like to keep getting better at.”

If you missed any of these livestreams while they were live, luckily, they’re all saved in Case’s X account, and we’ve included a few of them here to make them easier to find.

The first is a three-part series titled “BSV Custom Multi-script Dev.” Initially, this involves setting up and creating an sCrypt contract for a Bitcoin transaction using the Visual Studio Code IDE (with some assistance from Copilot). It is essentially a regular pay-to-public-key hash (P2PKH), or in other words, an address owning an output. However, a validator is required to sign off on the transaction for it to be transferred. Essentially, this is a multisig transaction, but Case demonstrates the nuances that make it different in this situation: What extras need to be added on top of the basic details and what data needs to be passed into the locking/unlocking scripts.

BSV Coding Part 1

Apart from getting a better idea of all the data being fed into more complex BSV and token transactions, you’ll also see what other resources developers need to get going, like sCrypt-cli, the TypeScript SDK, and debuggers. Beginners who enjoy being thrown in at the deep end can still benefit from this, but for others, it’d definitely help to have prior experience with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Script, at least at the conceptual level.

BSV Coding Part 2

BSV Coding Part 3: 

Once more, but simpler https://t.co/BDZzm34ERB

— David Case ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (@shruggr) November 12, 2024

Case notes that BSV’s Typescript SDK “is very much SPV-first,” which is perhaps better suited for ready-to-go projects rather than one just starting out. On that note, one of the more interesting aspects of these streams is when something Case writes doesn’t work. All coders will be able to empathize with this feeling, but it makes Bitcoin somehow less daunting when you can hear (out loud) a skilled developer’s thought processes and attempts at solutions before everything finally clicks.

“I swear that once you get the hang of these things, it’s not that hard, but it’s been a while since I worked with an sCrypt contract,” he says in “custom multi-script” Part 2.

Of course, it does all click in the end. And from the initial series, things get more complex. Case continues to add new streams, dealing with ever-more advanced topics. Check out his X feed and bookmark it since there will likely be many more. Here’s a teaser:

“I’m in the process of refactoring the 1Sat Indexer to use Postgres, or rather to support an interfaced protocol we can plug in to different databases, as we need.”

Watch: Python SDK—Essential tool for BSV developers