Maand: juli 2012

Each blocked is hashed twice. Why isn’t one application of SHA256 enough?

If I want to prove that I wrote a particular document before a certain point in time, it would be sufficient to generate the sha256 hash of the document and somehow arrange for that hash to appear in the blockchain.

Is there an easy way to do that simply by sending a transaction and leaving it to the miners to arrange for it to get into the blockchain for me?

One way that occurs to me is that I can treat the hash as a private key (bitaddress.org will tell me the address and private key that corresponds to any given input), and send a Bitcoin to the corresponding address. Then when I publish the document anyone can go through the same process and see the date of the transaction in the blockchain.

That seems a little convoluted. Is there a simpler way? Ideally free, not computationally intensive, and not requiring any special software to make the timestamp or to verify it.

What is the meaning of the term “unspent output” in the Bitcoin protocol?

The current rpc interface only allows you to see either
1. The balance of the entire wallet
2. How much was received by an address (which is okay… if you never spend)

Basically, I want to know how to get the balance of a specific address in my wallet. I’ve searched high and low and cannot find anything.

BitCoin Wiki (Transactions) states:

…1 BTC = 100,000,000 Satoshi…

Yet BitCoin Wiki (FAQ) states:

…”satoshi”… is smallest denomination currently possible

In the future when the protocol decides to support more decimal places, will the value of “satoshi” change to match the smallest denomination then possible?

Or will the value of “satoshi” fixed at 0.00000001 BTC?