Bitcoin/Blockchain basics

bitcoin white paper
- pretty lightweight proposal (digital signatures, prevent double spending, privacy linked to public key remaining anonymous, what's proof of work etc)
- doesn't go into too much detail except looking at the probability of attacker generating an alternate chain
3Blue1brown video- But how does bitcoin actually work?
- similar to bitcoin whitepaper except well articulated; still no implementation detail
karpathy's blog- A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python (summary)
- hackernews thread
  - ken shirrif's similar article
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies ( coursera, book [recommended by Raj]
mastering bitcoin (oreilly book) [recommended in karpathy's blog] (plus I have oreilly subscription)
basic/simple questions
using elliptic curve for crypto: paper

Other questions?

whats lightening network? (comment from hn)
what is tether?
how's ethereum different and for that matter, how are all other crypto currencies different?
bitcoin privacy issue? how's monero fixing it? -> see medium article by @rajrkane; he gives a nice overview
who are the major players?
what are the new startups doing?

vvksh commented 2 years ago

Elliptic curve; generator (point); private key is an integer; public key (point) = G*private key
public key is representated as [prefix+x+y] (all concateneted); however, this representation (uncompressed) is wasteful; you can do with just storing x and whether y was odd or even (positive or negative) as you can compute y from the elliptic curve equation. (but will be square root so +/-) -> this is called compressed representation
Need to get a wallet address; which is derived deterministically from public address by hashing twice; ripemd160(sha256(public_key))-> base58encoding = wallet_addr
Every transaction has input and outputs; where sum(outputs) < input ; remainder is paid to the miner

vvksh commented 2 years ago

basic/simple questions related to bitcoin

is it mathematically possible to solve block problem every time?
whats the incentive for running a full node?
if a wallet generates a wallet address independently from a network, can it be duplicate?
when new transactions are flowing into the network, where is it getting saved? is there a temporary table/database? what if the transaction isnt picked up by in a block, is there a TTL?