Sublime

This odd behavior is probably an unintentional consequence of a design decision in early Bitcoin software. As a practical matter, it means developers of Bitcoin software need to remember to reverse the order of bytes in transaction and block identifiers they show to users. In this book, we use the term internal byte order for the data that appears

Bitcoin's shared ledger can be likened to the Rai stones of Yap Island discussed in Chapter 2, in that the money does not actually move for transactions to take place. Whereas in Yap the islanders would meet to announce the transfer of the ownership of a stone from one person to the other, and the entire town would know who owned which stone, in Bi

Many Bitcoin implementations use the libsecp256k1 cryptographic library to do the elliptic curve math.

After years of innovative trial and error by many programmers, and through relying on a wide range of technologies, Bitcoin was the first engineering solution that allowed for digital payments without having to rely on a trusted third‐party intermediary. By being the first digital object that is verifiably scarce, Bitcoin is the first example of di

bitcoins are received to an output script that acts like a public key, and bitcoin spending is authorized by an input script that acts like a signature.