Category Archives: Bitcoin

What do bitcoin miners do all day long?

By | April 27, 2016

Long story short, miners literally search for needles in haystacks. The haystack changes in size every 2 weeks depending on how fast or slow each needle is found. Let’s start from the beginning. What is a node? A node is the bitcoin software that forms the backbone of the bitcoin network. Full nodes contains the entire history… Read More »

What exactly is a bitcoin address?

By | April 8, 2016

At a high level, a bitcoin address comprises of 256 1’s and 0’s pushed through some algorithms to result in a ~34 character string that can be given out to receive funds. That’s the short version. Here is the long version. What does a bitcoin address look like? Here is a sample bitcoin address: “18BgGGrBms3eGCRj2Vvrxso4XzWjJEEMBv” A… Read More »

How 59 days was calculated from the Mastering Bitcoin book?

By | March 4, 2016

For some reason I was re-reading a particular section in a book called Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos (http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001802) and came across this paragraph: This means that a valid block for height 277,316 is one that has a block header hash that is less than the target. In binary that number would have more than the… Read More »

What’s in a block?

By | February 26, 2016

Introduction If you’ve spent some time reading up on the fundamentals of bitcoins and the block chain but felt it was way over your head, here it is from another angle. Reading the likes of: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation can be a bit daunting so I’ve created some pretty pictures instead. The secret sauce at… Read More »

Big Endian and Little Endian in Pictures

By | February 12, 2016

You may have come across this image on Wikipedia when reading about endianness. While it is great, in practice when I’m viewing content in memory, it is displayed horizontally instead of vertically. So for those visual people out there, here is another take.       Big endian is defined at placing the Most Significant… Read More »