How This Started

You just sent a first transaction. So did I.

Mine did not start with a book. It started with an online friend.

I wanted to send a payment myself, not through an app I did not understand. He sat with me, over the internet, and we built a transaction using a small JavaScript library called bsv.js. Line by line. A destination. An amount. A signature. Then we sent it.

That was the door.

After that I bought a few books and read up on bitcoin. I read a lot of documentation and source code too. I made prototype interactions and test payments, first with that JavaScript library, then with Elixir and the bsv-ex library. Small amounts. Test networks. The same loop you just did, over and over.

I kept reaching for patterns that did not really exist yet: ways to send, receive, and read payments that the tools did not offer. So I kept going.

Eventually I ran a node—a computer that keeps a copy of the shared record and talks to the others. I used it to receive transactions, process them, move them, and read them.

This book is the front door I wish someone had handed me. When you are ready to do more of the how, the notebooks at livewallet.app are the next room. The book itself lives at livewallet.app/bitcoin-book.

I started the same way you just did: one careful send, with someone willing to sit with me.