Location

The event will be hosted at ALCHE:

Alche Pamplemousses, Mauritius | Map

Announcements

Join us for our Third Bitcoin Socratic Seminar! A special thank you to our sponsor Btrust.

Reminders

• We prefer no photos and no videos during the event
• Chatham House Rule
• Leave the meeting space as clean as you found it
• Suggest topics for the next Socratic Seminar! Where to find topics?

Topics

Cryptographic Security in Bitcoin

Duration: 1 Hour

Meetup Agenda

1. Opening & Context (5 minutes)

Objective: Establish why cryptography is the backbone of Bitcoin.

• Bitcoin as a system secured by mathematics rather than institutional trust
• The two core pillars: hashing and digital signatures
• How this session builds on the previous deep dive into transactions

2. SHA-256 and Hashing in Bitcoin (25 minutes)

Objective: Understand how hashing secures blocks and transactions.

• What a cryptographic hash function is
• Core properties: determinism, preimage resistance, collision resistance
• SHA-256 in Proof-of-Work
• Double SHA-256 in block headers
• Hashing in transaction IDs and Merkle trees

Discussion + Walkthrough:

• Examine the structure of a block header
• Identify which fields are hashed
• Explain why double hashing is used

3. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (25 minutes)

Objective: Understand ownership and signature validation.

• Public/private key cryptography fundamentals
• The secp256k1 curve used in Bitcoin
• Private key → Public key derivation
• Overview of ECDSA and Schnorr signatures
• How signatures authorize spending of UTXOs

Conceptual Walkthrough:

• From private key to public key
• From public key to address
• Where signature verification happens in validation

4. Base58 and Address Encoding (5 minutes)

Objective: Briefly introduce encoding and checksum design.

• Why Bitcoin does not use raw public keys directly
• Base58Check and checksum protection
• How encoding improves usability and error detection

• Btrust Builders