Blockchain Commons Receives 2026 Learning Bitcoin Grant from HRF

In previous years, Blockchain Commons has won grants from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) to support our internship program and our work on FROST. We were delighted to win another grant in 2026 to support a large-scale revamp of Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line.

Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line is one of Blockchain Commons’ oldest initiatives, predating the formation of the organization. The foundational work on the project was supported by Blockstream, where Christopher Allen was working as Principal Architect at the time. The earliest parts of Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line simply showed how to get Bitcoin installed and running on your local machine, an idea that we’ve returned to a few times, in our Bitcoin Standup Scripts (which are also being updated, making them fully usable again) and Gordian Server.

However, Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line quickly grew from that foundation to become a full course on Bitcoin, explaining how it worked, and demonstrating all of its intricacies. The command-line part of the course, which largely focused on bitcoin-cli, offered hands-on examples so that a learner could follow along, increasing the impact of the learning. The ultimate goal of this expanded course was to help bring new developers into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

We’ve been very proud of the course over the years because of its obvious impact. Hundreds of forks and thusands of stars on GitHub told us that the course had gained traction. But it was really when we started to meet developers (including some of our interns) who had gotten into Bitcoin programming due to the course that we knew that our work had been successful. We’d accomplished our goal, but a bigger challenge lay ahead …

The problem was that Bitcoin was constantly evolving. Each new release of Bitcoin Core, of which there tend to be a few a year, offered new features, deprecated old features, or brought in whole new paradigms that had been decided upon by the Bitcoin community. That meant that the course was constantly being outdated. Shortly after we moved the course over to Blockchain Commons under lead tech writer Shannon Appelcline, we released a full 2.0 edition. Then, with the support of interns, we released an updated 2.1 edition in 2021, followed by translations into Portuguese and Spanish later in the year.

Since 2021, Bitcoin has incorporated major updates such as Signet, Taproot, and descriptor wallets, while Segwit (just coming into wider usage when we last wrote) has become the default address type. Learning Bitcoin was not updated for these advancements because our patrons were interested in other work, from Animated QRs to post-quantum cryptography. The course remained a terrific resource, but slowly grew more out of date.

That’s why we’re so thrilled by HRF’s 2026 grant. It gives us the opportunity to bring one of Blockchain Commons’ most prestigious projects up to date. We’re planning it as a year-long effort (intermingled with our other work). Our TODO details all the work: we’re going to be updating to major new features, rechecking all of the code, and then (as time allows) improving the pedagogy with some new visual learning. If you want to follow along with the work, you can find it in the lbtcftcl-v3.0 branch (but be aware, it’s literally a work in progress!).

Updating Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line is an exciting project, and we hope the course will once more be a gateway to bring new Bitcoin developers into our ecosystem when it’s done. We thank HRF for the opportunity!