Bitcoin on Huabing Blog

Bitcoin Script

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Bitcoin Script is using to transfer coins instead of just signature and public key address, which allows more flexibilities for Bitcoin transactions.

A Standard Transaction

Let’s say Alice wants to spend some coins she received from a previous transaction, this is how the procedure looks like.

Alice receives some coins from a previous transaction. One of the outputs of that transaction specifies the public key of Alice to indicate that the coins in that output are transferred to Alice.

Actually, it’s the cryptographic hash of the public key in order to lower the risk that attacker might figure out the private key by the public key.

Distributed Consensus

Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Incentives and Proof of Work

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Incentive

The mechanism to motivate nodes join the Bitcoin network and create blocks.

Incentive 1: Block Reward

Creator of block gets to

include special coin-creation transaction in the block
choose reciptient address of this transaction (Of course, it is the miner’s address)

Explanation: Because the coin-creation transaction is just like other transaction in that block, it will only be valid if the created block ends up in the consensus chain, it’s the incentive which encourages the nodes to be honest, otherwise they can’t get their rewards.

Programming Assignment: Scrooge Coin

Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Finally, I got to the most exciting part of week 1 lectures-the programming assignment!

Digital Signature and Public Key as Identities

Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Hash Pointers and Data Structures

Sat, 12 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Hash Pointer

Hash Pointer is comprised of two parts:

Pointer to where some information is stored
Cryptographic hash of that information The pointer can be used to get the information, the hash can be used to verify that information hasn’t been changed

Cryptographic Hash Function

Wed, 09 May 2018 22:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

Hash Function

Hash function is a mathematical function:H(X)=Y

H: A hash function which takes an input value and calculates an output value
X: Input of the hash function, it could be any data of any length
Y: Output of the hash function: a fix-size bit(, it can be 256, 384, 516 …, Bitcoin uses 256)

Introduction to crypto and cryptocurrencies

Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This series of articles are my notes of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” online course.

How did I get into this?

I have noticed the buzzwords “Bitcoin” and “Blockchain” for a while. There are lots of articles, news, and talks around them. It seems that many people believe that cryptocurrency is the future of online payment, some even claim that blockchain would become the fundamental technology of the next generation of the Internet.