Quick Glossary
This quick glossary contains many of the terms used in relation to bitcoin. These terms are used throughout the book, so bookmark this for a quick reference.
- address
-
A bitcoin address looks like
1DSrfJdB2AnWaFNgSbv3MZC2m74996JafV. It consists of a string of letters and numbers. It’s really an encoded base58check version of a public key 160-bit hash. Just as 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. - bip
-
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. A set of proposals that members of the bitcoin community have submitted to improve bitcoin. For example, BIP-21 is a proposal to improve the bitcoin uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme.
- bitcoin
-
The name of the currency unit (the coin), the network, and the software.
- block
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A grouping of transactions, marked with a timestamp, and a fingerprint of the previous block. The block header is hashed to produce a proof of work, thereby validating the transactions. Valid blocks are added to the main blockchain by network consensus.
- blockchain
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A list of validated blocks, each linking to its predecessor all the way to the genesis block.
- Byzantine Generals Problem
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A reliable computer system must be able to cope with the failure of one or more of its components. A failed component may exhibit a type of behavior that is often overlooked—namely, sending conflicting information to different parts of the system. The problem of coping with this type ...
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