Refers to keeping a reserve of bitcoin offline.
Always created by a miner, it includes a single coinbase. Not to be confused with Coinbase transaction. The coinbase allows claiming the block reward and provides up to 100 bytes for arbitrary data. The problem of coping with this type of failure is expressed abstractly as the Byzantine Generals Problem.Ī special field used as the sole input for coinbase transactions. A failed component may exhibit a type of behavior that is often overlooked-namely, sending conflicting information to different parts of the system. Valid blocks are added to the main blockchain by network consensus.Ī list of validated blocks, each linking to its predecessor all the way to the genesis block.Ī reliable computer system must be able to cope with the failure of one or more of its components. The block header is hashed to produce a proof of work, thereby validating the transactions. The name of the currency unit (the coin), the network, and the software.Ī grouping of transactions, marked with a timestamp, and a fingerprint of the previous block. For example, BIP-21 is a proposal to improve the bitcoin uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme. A set of proposals that members of the bitcoin community have submitted to improve bitcoin. Just like you ask others to send an email to your email address, you would ask others to send you bitcoin to one of your bitcoin addresses.īitcoin Improvement Proposals. It’s really an encoded base58check version of a public key 160-bit hash. It consists of a string of letters and numbers. Thanks also to Andrew Naugler for infographic design.Ī bitcoin address looks like 1DSrfJdB2AnWaFNgSbv3MZC2m74996JafV. Also, thanks to the developers of the San Francisco Bitcoin Developers Meetup group as well as Taariq Lewis and Denise Terry for helping test the early material. I thank Pamela Morgan, who reviewed early drafts of each chapter in the first and second edition of the book, and asked the hard questions to make them better. I owe thanks to my friend and mentor, Richard Kagan, who helped me unravel the story and get past the moments of writer’s block. Eventually, I decided to tell the story of bitcoin through the stories of the people using bitcoin and the whole book became a lot easier to write. I repeatedly got stuck and a bit despondent as I struggled to make the topic easy to understand and create a narrative around such a dense technical subject. Every time I pulled on one thread of the bitcoin technology, I had to pull on the whole thing. The first few drafts of the first few chapters were the hardest, because bitcoin is a difficult subject to unravel. Thank you all for your support without you this book would not have happened. Every idea, analogy, question, answer, and explanation you find in this book was at some point inspired, tested, or improved through my interactions with the community. There are far too many people to mention by name-people I’ve met at conferences, events, seminars, meetups, pizza gatherings, and small private gatherings, as well as many who communicated with me by Twitter, on reddit, on, and on GitHub who have had an impact on this book. More than anything, this book has allowed me to be part of a wonderful community for two years and I can’t thank you enough for accepting me into this community. My work on this book was encouraged, cheered on, supported, and rewarded by the entire bitcoin community from the very beginning until the very end.
It is impossible to make a distinction between the bitcoin technology and the bitcoin community, and this book is as much a product of that community as it is a book on the technology. I emerged from this state of fugue, more than 20 pounds lighter from lack of consistent meals, determined to dedicate myself to working on bitcoin. I became obsessed and enthralled, spending 12 or more hours each day glued to a screen, reading, writing, coding, and learning as much as I could.
The realization that "this isn’t money, it’s a decentralized trust network," started me on a four-month journey to devour every scrap of information about bitcoin I could find. I still remember the moment I finished reading those nine pages, when I realized that bitcoin was not simply a digital currency, but a network of trust that could also provide the basis for so much more than just currencies. The second time I came across bitcoin, in a mailing list discussion, I decided to read the whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto to study the authoritative source and see what it was all about. This is a reaction that I have seen repeated among many of the smartest people I know, which gives me some consolation. My immediate reaction was more or less "Pfft! Nerd money!" and I ignored it for another six months, failing to grasp its importance. I first stumbled upon bitcoin in mid-2011.
0 kommentar(er)
