Topic: A simple bitcoin Q/A. Learn new and interesting stuff about bitcoin. - page 13. (Read 27371 times)

Blockchain
A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly and it is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network. Originally developed as the accounting method for the virtual currency Bitcoin.

Database
Is a collection of information that is organized so that it can be easily accessed, managed and updated. One of the example on this is spreadsheet. SO it seems Bitcoin has a transaction  Database will record on it.

Blockchain as a permanent database, each time a block gets completed, a new one is generated. There is a countless number of such blocks in the blockchain, connected to each other.
For a blockchain database, each participant maintains, calculates and updates new entries into the database. All nodes work together to ensure they are all coming to the same conclusions, providing in-built security for the network.

correct me if i'm wrong..

A'right here's another question :
Question : What is the Difference Between a Blockchain and a Database?

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This is yet another easy question but again people don't know about this. I am looking for some main points, basic explanation is not what I am looking for!

Thank you for accepting my proposal, bill gator and pugman! I will be happy to help you with this great project. And thank you for the acknowledgement of my answer and rewarding it with a merit.

While researching the subject I was asking myself what would really happen if a "bad person", a saboteur, had managed to gain more Hash Power than the entire network? Would this be the end of Bitcoin? OR Would they be just able to delay a transaction by 10 minutes and that's all they can do? I would appreciate very much if someone could give me an explanation on this. Maybe you can even announce it as another question if you will. Thanks again for this great topic!

In Satoshi's old e-mails they imply that handling as many transactions as Visa should not be a problem.
What does this imply about the development of Bitcoin?
Specifically, what is one parameter that would need to be changed and to what value to accommodate such heavy transaction flow?

Satoshi implies that handling the amount of transactions that Visa processes should not be a problem in time because it was expected that computing power would keep pace with network and transaction growth. There were concerns with blocksize limits at the time because the bigger they got the more power that would be required with both upload steams (to broadcast to the network) and computing power (to process the transactions). The blocklimit was set so that mining operations could not out-power single person operations.

Satoshi's emails re transaction processing imply that higher block limits were anticipated and were an expected development of bitcoin. This is controversial as a number of people see off chain scaling as a better method instead of increasing block size.
At 150,000,000 transactions a day that makes 1,041,667 per block (given it can be mined in 10m), and with a transcation size of around 1kb it would need to be just over 1gb. My understanding is that upload/download speeds should be able to keep pace with this size.

Thanks for that, bill! I did spend some time much earlier on reading up on lore... and was fortunate to have been around last year when even more new emails resurfaced in August. I know a lot of people prefer these to be left alone, but history is always important for simple posterity and the giving of context, especially to those who were (and still are) new to Bitcoin.

If only half the projects that launch now put half the effort Satoshi did into Bitcoin... the idea of having a working solution before the white paper hardly exists these days.


Thank you pugman!

Honestly, I didn't know the right answer. I do some research in google and I found that he published his white paper in some day in 2008, and he already said that he still code for bitcoin. I also read that a legend that says "sometime in 2007" (I mean the time that he begin to write the code for Bitcoin. So, it seems that Satoshi writes the code for Bitcoin first.


For this question, I didn't find any answer until now.

Edit : I got the answer, thanks a lot bill gator.

Page 2 Updates :
Update 1 :

Now that's how you answer a question! Good job buwaytress.

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Sorry but the question has already been answered  .

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Update 2 :

This is entirely plagiarized. I think you have misunderstood from what I meant by research. Research≠Copy pasting.This has also been plagiarized. On top of that someone has merited you for that.

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You are breaking the forum rules here.
Archive: http://archive.is/uSW73#selection-4709.1-5052.22
Sources used: https://hackernoon.com/blockchains-versus-traditional-databases-c1a728159f79n
https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-is-the-difference-blockchain-and-database/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
You have only rephrased the sentences for the sake of it..

I would encourage you to research Satoshi's exact quotes on this sort of thing. Your answer is correct, they wrote the code for Bitcoin before releasing the whitepaper. I am unsure about all of the times of release, and which hit public eye first; but at least from their perspective and words this is what happened :


I would suggest anyone to read some of their original e-mail threads (most of my questions come from sources such as this) : http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/

It's funny that you worded it almost exactly the same as them, talking about solving problems, etc.

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Question :

In Satoshi's old e-mails they imply that handling as many transactions as Visa should not be a problem.
What does this imply about the development of Bitcoin?
Specifically, what is one parameter that would need to be changed and to what value to accommodate such heavy transaction flow?


Hint: Controversial
Hint 2: Light Math

Just to say, I didn't know the answer to this. My first assumption was that he wrote the code first (as the whitepaper has some excerpts of coding) but now looking online I see that v0.1 was released on Jan 8 2009... meaning to say the whitepaper was published at least two months before the first version release...

My guess is that the whitepaper still had to be completed after he compiled his first coding, so would still believe it had to be written first. He had to solve the problems Bitcoin aimed to do (direct, trustless p2p payments)... the whitepaper was not so much a proposal for a way to find the solution, but a proposal to use his creation as the solution.

If I'm wrong, and the whitepaper was, indeed, published first... then he did it to gauge the cypherpunk community's interest to decide if the code was worth completing.

Note: I use third person "he" but only figuratively.

P.S. Thanks for this initiative guys! I'm sure I'll learn from the responses.

I did not mean to ignore your proposal, but yes that would be excellent. Pugman replies to posts above (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.30525496), they even responded to you. I will run it by pugman, since it is their thread, but it should not be a problem for us to simply send you a PM when somebody needs a merit or I could keep a little list of people that need their Post # merited. This would help us keep this running without any concern, I appreciate it and accept.

That being said, yes your answer is also correct so I've given you a merit. This means do not attempt to answer the next question.

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Question :

Did Satoshi write the Bitcoin Whitepaper or write the code for Bitcoin first?
Why did he choose the one he did to do first?

Since my proposal was ignored I will try my luck in answering the question because I need merits too.



Yes, Bitcoin does have a solution and it is called the proof-of-work algorithm. So to alter "the message" (a block of transactions in our case) as in the classic Byzantine Generals problem and to make it look authentic by guessing a new nonce, one would need to use more Hash Power than the entire network. Since the current Hash Rate is around 23 million TH/s, to achieve that they would need to buy 1.5 million of Antminer S9.


Btw my proposal remains in force in case you'll find it helpful.

I had to read your answer like 15-times, because I just couldn't grasp the wording for some reason. Must've just been reading it wrong, or something. After running it through my head a bunch of times, I've realized that you're correct just using different language than I was expecting. I was mostly looking for something along the lines of "It checks the signatures of the transaction against previous blocks". Sounds like you understand though, so I'll give it to you.

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What this means, since I'm running my questions differently is that the next question is simply going to be the other unanswered question.

Question B)

Does Bitcoin have an adaquete solution to the Byzantine Generals problem?
Why not or what is it?

Hint : Don't over complicate  your answer

When a node receives a block, it checks all the previous transactions that tally with the wallet that the sender or the transaction request creator used to send bitcon by means of the reference that each one has as inputs.
The network node has a special record of unspent transactions to speed up the process of checking.

Not the answer I was looking for and I'm pretty sure this is not correct. This would be an "outcome" of what is performed, I suppose.  My question(s) still remain unanswered to my satisfaction; feel free to give them a try anyone!

killyou72 is hilarious for just asking their question, but I can see how that could easily be confusing.

This is a great initiative!

I'm going to monitor this thread on a daily basis because I find it very interesting to read.

Please do not lock this thread on account of running out of sMerits. Since I have 100+ of them left I would be happy to give my merits to those who you find worthy.

I'm not sure I know how to do it the right way (I mean making people know that they were merited by you actually) but I think you guys can figure it out.

Keep up the great work!

That doesn't show how to correct the error

and I should be able to use the gen without internet. so I shouldnt have to use that website

so I got rid of the error by adding the calc address to my C directory

now I get this error

https://postimg.org/image/vq3tdd3qr/

I shall update and reply to every person here :
Update 1:I am sorry but you have failed to read the OP and you have broke 2 rules :Your post is thus disqualified and shall be deleted.

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Update 2:
Thanks for your feedback Joe. I have kept the first post as reserved only to add questions and answers. I would let you know this rather be in services board than in beginners and help, I don't expect much users to participate there. Feel free to join the contest.

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Eddie, segwit addresses are of two types. One is bech32(starting with bc1) and the other is P2SH(starting with 3). Note that not all addresses starting with 3 are segwit. Multisig address also start with 3 if I'm not mistaken. So please make some edits and change the answer so that I can quote your answer, do answer bill gator's question too. But otherwise you seem to know what the concept is.

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Update 3:
Hey, you can check blankcode's video here, pretty helpful.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=570voL9fPp0

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Did you check with the syntax? Do clarify your code with that of here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.321135
Also check this link out: https://legacysecuritygroup.com/index.php/projects/recent/12-software/35-oclvanitygen-compiling-and-use
Github code: https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen
If issue of yours is yet not solved,try asking the technical experts here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0

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I think you have mistaken the purpose of the thread. Sure you can ask questions but this is more of a question/answer  to encourage users to learn with the working/functioning of bitcoin. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. Do participate in answering our questions.

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Update 4:
Sure you can handout the merits to users who answer the questions correctly. We'll just announce that if we run out of merits,some one else is free to merit the users. Thanks for your feedback.
Sorry I had a couple of really busy and hectic days. You were not ignored.

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Congratulations.

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Nevermind.

How do I properly use oclvanitygen, I keep getting these errors


https://postimg.org/image/tvqyvjw4z/


https://postimg.org/image/lq8wxcxlf/

I would have liked to know why/how the data was able to be compressed or for there to be less data. You are correct though! I encourage you to read a little bit more into it, so you know exactly what is different about Segregated Witness and the old way of doing things. Unless I'm mistaken, it requires less verification checks to confirm transactions with equal precision. I've given you a merit for this. This means do not participate in the next question, give someone else a chance.

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I'm going to run my questions a little bit differently, in the hopes that we can bring even more variance in how things go in here; offer more users a chance at the merit through variance.

You can choose to answer at least one of my questions; but if you answer multiple questions you will still be considered for merit even if one of your questions was already answered (as to not punish you for working/researching longer). Sometimes there will be a mandatory question and then an additional two-questions for you to choose one to answer for a total of two answers. For now, just choose Question A or B to answer (feel free to answer both).

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Question A)

When a node receives a block, what does it check for to verify the validity of transactions within it?
What are these checked against?

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Question B)

Does Bitcoin have an adaquete solution to the Byzantine Generals problem?
Why not or what is it?

I'm not a coder but I'll take a crack at it..

Typically from what I see a legacy addy starts with a 1 and a segwit addy starts with a 3.. Not that this is the end all be all..
As far as I understand, segwit vs legacy transactions use a different code to wright transactions so the data that must be saved in the blockchain to confirm these segwit transactions is more compressed or just smaller than the amount of data you have to save in the blockchain for a legacy transaction to confirm the same/similar transaction.. 

You save on miner fees paid in this way because fees are based on how much data you have to write to the blockchain, or space taken up in a block..
Space is very limited so the less space you take up with your TX the less you have to pay and the more TXs will fit per block in total..
This makes fees paid per TX cheaper and more room for more TXs per block therefore higher throughput capacity total for all of Bitcoin.. Though we haven't scene a very big change because the space savings aren't drastic and hasn't yet been thoroughly adopted by users (including myself)..

I haven't really been sending around a lot of BTC lately due to craziness and the places I use are all still using legacy addys so to be honest I have not used segwit yet..
When I have the option to choose my fees paid I use a somewhat low fee as compared to the current going rate and supplement them with the accelerators available..



You are right but it is quite technical, you can only get a layman's explanation from me