In order to analyse a block, obviously the first thing that we need is - a block. Fortunately, this is not difficult. We can either use the block explorer hosted by blockchain.info to get the second block in the blockchain in raw or JSON or use curl to retrieve the block from the command line, … Continue reading Understanding bitcoin blocks
Browsing the MIT Technology Review, I recently found an article on the potential threat that quantum computing means for the bitcoin protocol in its current form. This article is in fact a review of a paper that appeared last October on the arxiv preprint server. If you use your favorite search engine and search for … Continue reading Quantum computing and the Blockchain
In my recent posts in this series, I have walked you in detail through two of the basic objects that make up the bitcoin blockchain - participants, represented by public / private key pairs, and transactions. Time to look at the third major ingredient - blocks. What are blocks and why are they necessary? When … Continue reading Bitcoin mining – an overview
In the one of the the last posts in this series, we have been able to successfully verify an existing bitcoin transaction. With the understanding of how this works, we should now be able to conversely create a transaction from scratch, sign it and publish it in the bitcoin network. Given an amount that we … Continue reading Creating and signing a bitcoin transaction from scratch
In the last post in my series on bitcoin and the blockchain, we have successfully "dockerized" the bitcoin core reference implementation and have built the bitcoin-alpine docker container that contains a bitcoin server node on top of the Alpine Linux distribution. In this post, we will use this container image to build up and initialize … Continue reading Setting up and testing our bitcoin network
When we are playing with bitcoin transactions, we need some playground where making a mistake does not cost us real bitcoins and therefore money. In addition, we might want to play around with more than one bitcoin server to see how networkings works and how the messages are exchanged in the bitcoin peer-to-peer network. There … Continue reading Building a bitcoin container with Docker
If you have followed my blockchain posts so far, you know how to create bitcoin transactions by assembling transaction inputs and transaction outputs into a transaction data structure and serializing it. However, there is one subtlety that we have ignored so far - what exactly do you sign? You cannot sign the entire bitcoin transaction, … Continue reading Signing and verifying bitcoin transactions
