Commodities | Bitcoin Daily | BTCUSD. Bitcoin Watch. Bitcoin Watch. Bitcoin for eCommerce. ($1085.99) Bitstamp - buy and sell bitcoins. Bitstamp - buy and sell bitcoins. How to Buy Bitcoins. How the Bitcoin protocol actually works. Many thousands of articles have been written purporting to explain Bitcoin, the online, peer-to-peer currency. Most of those articles give a hand-wavy account of the underlying cryptographic protocol, omitting many details. Even those articles which delve deeper often gloss over crucial points. My aim in this post is to explain the major ideas behind the Bitcoin protocol in a clear, easily comprehensible way.
We’ll start from first principles, build up to a broad theoretical understanding of how the protocol works, and then dig down into the nitty-gritty, examining the raw data in a Bitcoin transaction. Understanding the protocol in this detailed way is hard work. I’ll describe Bitcoin scripting and concepts such as smart contracts in future posts. It may seem surprising that Bitcoin’s basis is cryptography. My strategy in the post is to build Bitcoin up in stages. This strategy is slower than if I explained the entire Bitcoin protocol in one shot. First steps: a signed letter of intent. Mt.Gox - Bitcoin Exchange. Bitcoin Mining Calculator. Bitcoin Charts / Markets. Bitcoin Mining Hardware - ASIC Bitcoin Miner - Butterfly Labs. What is Bitcoin Mining? Open source P2P money. Bitcoin.cz.