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Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition
book

Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition

by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
June 2017
Beginner to intermediate
411 pages
11h 3m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition

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

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

A list of validated blocks, each linking to its predecessor all the way to the genesis block.

Byzantine Generals Problem

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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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491954379Errata Page