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Introduction

Course overview

Delving Into Simplicity

Course overview

  • What you will learn
  • Prerequisites
  • Key resources
Welcome to SCR403 — Delving Into Simplicity!
This course is based on the "Delving Simplicity" article series written by Dr. Russell O'Connor, an Infrastructure Tech Developer at Blockstream and the creator of Simplicity. The original articles were published on the Delving Bitcoin forum and form the primary source material for this course. We are grateful for his pioneering work, which made this educational content possible.

What you will learn

This course explores the design philosophy and mathematical foundations behind Simplicity, the next-generation scripting language activated on the Liquid Network in July 2025. It follows the complete five-part article series and is structured in two main content sections:
  1. Foundations of Simplicity — Why blockchain computation demands a fundamentally different language, the three ways to combine operations (sequential, parallel, conditional), and the nine core combinators that form a mathematically complete language
  2. From Data Types to Programs — Building boolean logic, arithmetic, and SHA-256 from first principles; understanding the Failure and Reader side effects that enable blockchain interaction; and learning how programs are committed to Taproot addresses via Commitment Merkle Roots and redeemed with witness data

Prerequisites

This is an expert-level course (approximately 10 hours). You should be comfortable with:
  • Basic Bitcoin scripting concepts (what transaction validation does)
  • Fundamental programming concepts (types, functions, composition)
  • Some familiarity with mathematical notation is helpful but not required. We introduce everything as we go

Key resources

Ready to dive into one of the most elegant pieces of Bitcoin engineering? Let's go!