Introduction

Welcome to Designing Bitcoin Contracts with Sapio, the official manual and best starting place to learn how to make Smart Contracts for Bitcoin. Sapio is an in-development tool that empowers Bitcoin Developers to craft smart contracts in an intuitive, safe, and composable way. Sapio challenges the notion that you can't make complex smart contracts for Bitcoin, and opens the floodgates for a myriad of new ideas to be defined easily.

Who is Sapio For?

Sapio is for anyone who wants to build with Bitcoin. That spans students demonstrating research concepts, corporations working on custody solutions, and developers improving open source solutions. Sapio is not a Solidity equivalent. The programming model is very different. But it does help anyone trying to solve a transactional protocol for Bitcoin solve it elegantly.

Sapio is currently alpha quality software. You should think very carefully before using Sapio with any real money. There will be kinks to untwist, wrinkles to iron out, and bugs to squash. Hopefully you, dear reader, will even be able to help with that! Sapio is not -- at present -- for the faint of heart.

What will I learn if I read this book?

This book is intended to teach you how to think about programming Sapio contracts. The book contains some exercises (that are heavily encouraged) that should instigate your understanding of how to build smart contracts for Bitcoin.

If you go through the chapters in order and complete all the exercises you should develop a firm grasp of how to use Sapio, how it works, and how it will progress over time. You will also have sufficient understanding to contribute back meaningfully to the open source project.