Certified Bitcoin Professional (CBP) Exam Prep Course

Explore money's functions—unit of account, store of value, medium of exchange—and its properties, then trace its history from barter to coins, fiat, and digital ledgers.

Explore what a ledger is and how centralized authorities historically managed ledgers, highlighting trust and integrity challenges in digital money and the move toward non-state currencies like Bitcoin.

Explore major milestones shaping Bitcoin's history, from early digital cash ideas and Hashcash to the genesis block, Silk Road, Mt. Gox, SegWit, Lightning Network, and notable price events.

Compare centralized and decentralized systems, and explain how decentralized consensus emerges from independent ledger verification, block creation by mining nodes, block verification, and chain selection by proof of work.

Explore how altcoins and token types arise on blockchains, including cryptocurrencies, utility tokens, stablecoins, security tokens, and NFTs. Identify examples like Bitcoin, Ether, Tether, and how tokens meet market demands.

Understand custodial versus non-custodial exchanges, the role of price discovery, and the risks of data breaches and counterparty exposure, while exploring crypto-to-crypto, crypto-to-fiat, otc, and peer-to-peer trading.

Explore the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption, including public and private keys, key exchange implications, and how Bitcoin relies on ecdsa for key generation and security.

Explore how cryptographic hash functions secure Bitcoin data by producing fixed-length checksums, enabling data integrity through signature verification, and supporting address creation with RIPEMD160 and mining with SHA256.

Understand how bitcoin addresses relate to private and public keys, how 256-bit private keys generate digital signatures, and how sha256/ripemd160 hashing creates addresses, encoded in base58.

Examine soft and hard forks in blockchain, including backwards compatibility, consensus changes, and real examples like SegWit, Bitcoin Cash, and code forks such as Litecoin.

Explore the differences between full nodes and light clients, how full nodes validate transactions and blocks, and how SPV and Merkle proofs enable lightweight verification.

Understand what a bitcoin wallet is and how it stores access keys to unlock spendable bitcoin on the blockchain. Learn how addresses, UTXOs, and wallet types shape wallet functionality.

Explore wallet import formats including WIF, backups, and recovery. Learn mnemonic seeds (BIP-39) and private keys, secure storage, and cross-wallet restoration.

Discover passphrase encrypted wallets and how they protect private keys and mnemonic backups, using BIP-39 derivation and hardware wallets as a 2-factor safeguard.

Understand what a blockchain explorer is and how it lets users query address and transaction data. Compare public and private explorers, data sources, and the limits of trust and accuracy.

Explore how mining secures the network, issues new bitcoin, and records transactions through proof-of-work, block rewards, and coinbase transactions.

Explore how bitcoin's difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks to keep an average ten-minute block time, and how blocks link via previous hashes and SHA-256 proof-of-work.

Learn how merchants can accept bitcoin for goods and services, issue payment requests via addresses or QR codes, manage confirmations, and guard against race attacks and double spends.

Explore bitcoin exchanges and their types—centralized custodial, decentralized non-custodial, OTC, and peer-to-peer—plus order books, bids and asks, and the spread.

Sign up at cryptoconsortium.org, enroll in the CBP exam, and pay with bitcoin via wallet at the current BTC price.

Review course material and use the forum to prepare for the certified bitcoin professional exam; the 75 multiple-choice and true or false questions require 70% to pass in 20 minutes.