If a person sends a transaction to another person, and Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer application, how will the transaction get to the rest of the Bitcoin community? How does everyone have the same blockchain?
Does every system know about every other system in the network? If so, how?
When someone would like to make a transaction, their software has to choose which of their UTXOs to spend. Here are a few different ways that one might prioritize which UTXOs get spent.
What the trade-offs are for the different ways of prioritizing spending of UTXOs? Are some faster? Do some make make the block chain less big (grow less quickly)? Do some make the UTXO set smaller? What about making it so that the user has to pay the least fees? Taking all these factors into consideration, is there a method that is generally accepted to be the best way?
On possibility, which I like, is to spend the most UTXOs possible while still staying in the 1kb minimum fee limit. That way if nodes that prune the blockchain of STXOs (spent transaction outputs), they can prune more and it makes the blockchain smaller for them. Although, this might cause a small amount of bloating for nodes who keep the whole block chain, so it’s a tradeoff.
I noticed in the bitcoin wiki script page (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script) that there were two opcodes named:
OP_TOALTSTACK
OP_FROMALTSTACK
It looks like there is another stack that can be used separately as a data store, simply pushing and popping data. I’ve never heard of this before, but it seems like a very useful feature.
Can anyone verify that this is what the alt stack is actually meant to be used for? If not for just pushing and popping data, what is it for? Do any specific use cases come to mind?
I just pulled from the bitcoin github and compiled, and noticed that there were three executable generated:
bitcoin-cli bitcoin-tx bitcoind
I have not heard of bitcoin-tx before, what is it? What are the main similarities/differences between these three executables?
In addition, I would be interested to find out if there are any plans to further develop these into different, complementary, executables.
Thank you!
I would like to view a chart where all bid/asks are combined from the various exchanges, instead of keeping multiple tabs open for each exchange. Is there a website that allows this kind of meta-overview?
I’m just learning about Bitcoin and if I understand its conception properly, mining bitcoins means validation of transactions by computing a hash which should satisfy some preset condition. In other words, mining == servicing network and getting money for it.
If Satoshi was the first user, how did he earn his bitcoins if there were no transactions?
I understand, that in the very beginning some geeks were involved in the network, so maybe 5 or 10 persons’ (first testers) transactions and their validation (mining) generated a lot of bitcoins, because of the low difficulty and high reward. But how did the very first coins get rewarded?
When people talk about possible changes to how Bitcoin works they sometimes say a particular change can be implemented as a soft fork. What does that mean? How does this compare to a hard fork?
While reading bitcoin source I found this short comment:
// Height first in coinbase required for block.version=2
(From https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/miner.cpp#L338).
Why this is required? Does it prevent some misuse or attack?
I found that this change was introduced in BIP-0034. In relevant pull request it is justified by following points:
Putting the height in the coinbase is desired for at least two reasons:
- It guarantees that every subsequent block and transaction hash is unique.
- It can be used to better reason about plausible difficulty for not-yet-connected blocks.
But for me this explains nothing: I don’t see how adding height guarantees unique block hashes and I don’t understand what is “plausible difficulty for not-yet-connected blocks”.
Is it any iPhone App that I can use to buy / sell / transfer easily Bitcoin? I want to be able to download from Apple’s App Store.