Long story short, miners literally search for needles in haystacks. The haystack changes in size every 2 weeks depending on how fast or slow each needle is found. Let’s start from the beginning. What is a node? A node is the bitcoin software that forms the backbone of the bitcoin network. Full nodes contains the entire history… Read More »
At a high level, a bitcoin address comprises of 256 1’s and 0’s pushed through some algorithms to result in a ~34 character string that can be given out to receive funds. That’s the short version. Here is the long version. What does a bitcoin address look like? Here is a sample bitcoin address: “18BgGGrBms3eGCRj2Vvrxso4XzWjJEEMBv” A… Read More »
For some reason I was re-reading a particular section in a book called Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos (http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001802) and came across this paragraph: This means that a valid block for height 277,316 is one that has a block header hash that is less than the target. In binary that number would have more than the… Read More »
The full title is actually: The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order. Excellent reading. 300 odd pages of delightful insight on the past, present and future. Recommend reading
Introduction If you’ve spent some time reading up on the fundamentals of bitcoins and the block chain but felt it was way over your head, here it is from another angle. Reading the likes of: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation can be a bit daunting so I’ve created some pretty pictures instead. The secret sauce at… Read More »
You may have come across this image on Wikipedia when reading about endianness. While it is great, in practice when I’m viewing content in memory, it is displayed horizontally instead of vertically. So for those visual people out there, here is another take. Big endian is defined at placing the Most Significant… Read More »
This is all about endianness. That is, how the bits are arranged in memory. You can arrange these bits in memory 2 ways. In big endian or in little endian. Go to wikipedia for some background but esssentially big endian is the way the decimal system works and little endian is the reverse of this.… Read More »
If you have had the pleasure of delving into the block chain, you may have come across the term magic number. This is the first 4 bytes of every block in the block chain and is defined as: Network Magic value Sent over wire as main 0xD9B4BEF9 F9 BE B4 D9 testnet 0xDAB5BFFA FA BF… Read More »
There are lots of articles around how Bitcoin addresses are created. Most of the time you’ll be shown a few command lines to run and magically the results appear. For example, >> bitcoin-cli getnewaddress will output a new Bitcoin address in the command line of the Bitcoin-qt application but how does it work under the… Read More »
Very hands on with lots of screen shots. Unfortunate with lots of references to Mt Gox. 166 pages with good references. Readable in a few hours.