December 2014
Beginner
298 pages
8h 5m
English
Content preview from Mastering BitcoinBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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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 starting with a “1” (number one). Just like you ask others to send an email to your email address, you would ask others to send you bitcoin to your bitcoin address. - bip
- Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. A set of proposals that members of the bitcoin community have submitted to improve bitcoin. For example, BIP0021 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.
- confirmations
- Once a transaction is included in a block, it has one confirmation. As soon as another block is mined on the same blockchain, the transaction has two confirmations, and so on. Six or more confirmations is considered sufficient proof that a transaction cannot be reversed.
- difficulty
- A network-wide setting that controls how much computation is required ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.