Set up a full node at home and run it for a while. Turn on logging and watch the messages there. You'll need (at present) about 80 GB of disk space to hold the

Set up a full node at home and run it for a while. Turn on logging and watch the messages there. You'll need (at present) about 80 GB of disk space to hold the blockchain. The full node client will download it for you or you can torrent a recent snapshot of the blockchain and then synchronise from there (quicker). The software you can obtain from here: https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node Or you can use git to pull the source code from GitHub and compile it yourself. I've done both, and found the developers on GitHub friendly and responsive to pull requests, even helpful to a newbie submitting a first pull request. Beware that running a full node will try to eat all your upstream bandwidth. It takes a few days for the Bitcoin network to notice the existence of your new full node, but the number of connections will grow (others asking you for pieces of the blockchain, as well as transaction verifications). You can learn a lot about the Bitcoin ecology this way.