Blockchain and Coins
DER
(Distinguished Encoding Rules) is a restricted variant of BER for producing unequivocal transfer syntax for data structures described by ASN.1. Like CER, DER encodings are valid BER encodings. DER is the same thing as BER with all but one sender's options removed. a subset of BER providing for exactly one way to encode an ASN.1 value
ASN.1
Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is an interface description language for defining data structures that can be serialized and deserialized in a standard, cross-platform way. It's broadly used in telecommunications and computer networking, and especially in cryptography.
bittrex fees on trades
All trades are charged .25% of the profits of the trade. This is calculated by taking the (amount * purchase price * .0025). Any portion of an order that has not execute, will be refunded fully upon the cancellation of the order.
IOC Order
An Immediate-Or-Cancel (IOC) order is an order to buy or sell a stock that must be executed immediately. Any portion of an IOC order that cannot be filled immediately will be cancelled.
BER
Basic Encoding Rules specifies a self-describing and self-delimiting format for encoding ASN.1 data structures. Each data element is encoded as a type identifier, a length description, the actual data elements, and, where necessary, an end-of-content marker.
Bitcoin's public ledger (the 'block chain') was started when and by who?
January 3rd, 2009 at 18:15 UTC presumably by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Difficulty metric in Bitcoin mining
The difficulty is the measure of how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the easiest it can ever be. It is recalculated every 2016 blocks to a value such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been generated in exactly two weeks had everyone been mining at this difficulty. This will yield, on average, one block every ten minutes. As more miners join, the rate of block creation will go up. As the rate of block generation goes up, the difficulty rises to compensate which will push the rate of block creation back down. Any blocks released by malicious miners that do not meet the required difficulty target will simply be rejected by everyone on the network and thus will be worthless.
stale order removal
The maximum lifetime of any order is 28 days. Any order older then 28 days will be automatically canceled by the system and all reserved funds will be returned to your account.
minimum trade size
The minimum trade value for orders is 100,000 Satoshis (.00100000). There is also a minimum trade quantity. For example, DOGE trades at 22 satoshis. The minimum trade quantity is 4500 DOGE and the minimum trade value is 100,000 Satoshis. The smallest order in the book is 100000 DOGE at 1 satoshi each. The largest order in the book is 4500 DOGE at 2 btc each.
bittrex fees on deposits
There are no fees for deposits. Please be aware that some coins require us to move your funds to another address before we credit them. This means the coins network will charge you the normal transaction fee for this send. This is not something we can avoid.
What is the maximum number of blocks?
There is no maximum number, blocks just keep getting added to the end of the chain at an average rate of one every 10 minutes.
What if I'm 1% towards calculating a block and...?
There's no such thing as being 1% towards solving a block. You don't make progress towards solving it. After working on it for 24 hours, your chances of solving it are equal to what your chances were at the start or at any moment. Believing otherwise is what's known as the Gambler's fallacy [1]. It's like trying to flip 53 coins at once and have them all come up heads. Each time you try, your chances of success are the same.
How is it possible for the chain to have temporary splits?
Two miners discover two different right answers for the same block at the same time
reward metric in bitcoin mining
When a block is discovered, the discoverer may award themselves a certain number of bitcoins, which is agreed-upon by everyone in the network. This number halves every 210,000 blocks Additionally, the miner is awarded the fees paid by users sending transactions. The fee is an incentive for the miner to include the transaction in their block. In the future, as the number of new bitcoins miners are allowed to create in each block dwindles, the fees will make up a much more important percentage of mining income.
DER is widely used for digital certificates such as
X.509
Even when all 21 million coins have been generated blocks do not run out?
Yes. The blocks are for proving that transactions existed at a particular time. Transactions will still occur once all the coins have been generated, so blocks will still be created as long as people are trading Bitcoins.
In Bitcoin, a private key is usually
a 256-bit number (some newer wallets may use between 128 and 512 bits), which can be represented one of several ways. Here is a private key in hexadecimal - 256 bits in hexadecimal is 32 bytes,
binary tree
a data structure in which a record is linked to two successor records, usually referred to as the left branch when greater and the right when less than the previous record.
an appcoin system is
a decentralized, consensus mechanism
Merkle trees in Bitcoin use
a double SHA-256, the SHA-256 hash of the SHA-256 hash of something
to be considered valid, individual blocks must contain
a proof of work
TLV encodings allow
a receiver to decode the ASN.1 information from an incomplete stream, without requiring any pre-knowledge of the size, content, or semantic meaning of the data.
private key
a secret number that allows bitcoins to be spent; Every Bitcoin wallet contains one or more private keys, which are saved in the wallet file. The private keys are mathematically related to all Bitcoin addresses generated for the wallet.
the hashcash algorithm requires the following parameters
a service string, a nonce, and a counter.
canonical form
a standard way of presenting that object as a mathematical expression.
When a private key is swept,
a transaction is broadcast that sends the balance controlled by the private key to a new address in the wallet. Just as with any other transaction, there is risk of swept transactions to be double-spending.
All bitcoin miners whether CPU, GPU, FPGA or ASICs are expending their effort creating hashcash proofs-of-work which act as
a vote in the blockchain evolution and validate the blockchain transaction log
what is a merkle tree
binary trees of hashes
hashcash-SHA256^2
bitcoin
DER can be considered what type of form of BER?
canonical form
generation transaction, aka
coinbase transaction a record of which Bitcoin addresses or scripts are entitled to receive the reward.
What does Bitcoin use to sign signatures
elliptic curve digital signature algorithm
Whenever Nonce overflows (which it does frequently), the...
extraNonce portion of the generation transaction is incremented, which changes the Merkle root.
The first bitcoin block is known as the
genesis block
Bitcoin uses what proof of work function
hashcash
Because transactions aren't hashed directly
hashing a block with 1 transaction takes exactly the same amount of effort as hashing a block with 10,000 transactions.
The Hashcash proof-of-work function was invented
in 1997 by Adam Back, and proposed for anti-DoS uses including preventing: anonymous remailer and mail2news gateway abuse, nym name squatting on nymservers (replyable pseudonymous remailer severs), as well as general email anti-spam and general network abuse throttling.
X.509 is
in cryptography, a standard that defines the format of public key certificates
In bitcoin the service string is encoded
in the block header data structure
the service string includes
includes a version field, the hash of the previous block, the root hash of the merkle tree of all transactions in the block, the current time, and the difficulty.
he mathematical problem in each block is extremely difficult to solve, but once a valid solution is found,
it is very easy for the rest of the users in the network to confirm that the solution is correct
Bitcoin mining is so called because
it resembles the mining of other commodities: it requires exertion and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate that resembles the rate at which commodities like gold are mined from the ground.
Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish
legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.
hashcash-Scrypt(iter=1)
litecoin
For any given block there are
many solutions but only one is needed
Miners get incentive to include transactions in their blocks because
of attached transaction fees
Transactions are hashed...
only indirectly through the merkle root
End-of-contents octets in BER are
optional and only used if the indefinite length form is used. The Contents octet may also be omitted if there is no content to encode like in the NULL type.
the ledger in the blockchain is
past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks.
bitcoin transaction output
records which determine the new owner of the transferred Bitcoins, and which will be referenced as inputs in future transactions as those funds are respent.
bitcoin transaction input
records which reference the funds from other previous transactions
Changing a block requires
regenerating all successors and redoing the work they contain. This protects the block chain from tampering.
When mining bitcoin, the hashcash algorithm does what?
repeatedly hashes the block header while incrementing the counter & extraNonce fields. Incrementing the extraNonce field entails recomputing the merkle tree, as the coinbase transaction is the left most leaf node. The block is also occasionally updated as you are working on it.
Mining a block is difficult because
the SHA-256 hash of a block's header must be lower than or equal to the target in order for the block to be accepted by the network.
What does it mean that bitcoin varies the difficulty
the amount of work required to create one block
The 'length' of the entire block chain refers to
the chain with the most combined difficulty, not the one with the most blocks This prevents someone from forking the chain and creating a large number of low-difficulty blocks, and having it accepted by the network as 'longest'.
Bitcoin stores the nonce in
the extraNonce field which is part of the coinbase transaction, which is stored as the left most leaf node in the merkle tree (the coinbase is the special first transaction in the block)
Moreover, it is extremely unlikely for two people to have the same Merkle root because
the first transaction in your block is a generation "sent" to one of your unique Bitcoin addresses. Since your block is different from everyone else's blocks, you are (nearly) guaranteed to produce different hashes. Every hash you calculate has the same chance of winning as every other hash calculated by the network.
Mining is
the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions.
he process of "mining" is essentially
the process of competing to be the next to find the answer that "solves" the current block.
The body of the block contains
the transactions
encodings under BER are
type-length-value encodings or TLV encodings
the proof of work in a block is
verified by other Bitcoin nodes each time they receive a block
creating minimum tick sizes with Bittrex
On a per market basis, we will be instituting minimum tick sizes that are based on the current price of the market. The target is to have minimum trade sizes that are near 0.1% of the current price. The current minimum tick size is 1 satoshi. For example, Ethereum trades at 0.0577 Bitcoin. Bids and asks can only be placed in 0.0001 increments. So the next level on the bid side of the orderbook will be 0.0576 and 0.0578 on the ask.
bittrex fees on withdraws
Our intention is to not make any profits on withdraws. However, each coin has a network transfer fee that is built into the coin. This means that we must charge a small amount to cover this fee. You can view the fee for a coin by clicking the - next to the coin to bring up the withdraw window which shows the fee.
Bitcoin uses:
SHA256(SHA256(Block_Header))
Nonce
The "nonce" in a bitcoin block is a 32-bit (4-byte) field whose value is set so that the hash of the block will contain a run of leading zeros. The rest of the fields may not be changed, as they have a defined meaning.
Fill or Kill Order
A Fill-Or-Kill order is an order to buy or sell a stock that must be executed immediately in its entirety; otherwise, the entire order will be cancelled (i.e., no partial execution of the order is allowed).
Good till Cancelled Order Definition
A Good-Til-Cancelled (GTC) order is an order to buy or sell a stock that lasts until the order is completed or cancelled.
Three most significant DER encoding restraints
1. Length encoding must use the definite form Additionally, the shortest possible length encoding must be used 2. Bitstring, octetstring, and restricted character strings must use the primitive encoding 3. Elements of a Set are encoded in sorted order, based on their tag value
What are the three main components of ECDSA?
1. private key: A secret number, known only to the person that generated it. A private key is essentially a randomly generated number. In Bitcoin, someone with the private key that corresponds to funds on the public ledger can spend the funds. In Bitcoin, a private key is a single unsigned 256 bit integer (32 bytes). 2. public key: A number that corresponds to a private key, but does not need to be kept secret. A public key can be calculated from a private key, but not vice versa. A public key can be used to determine if a signature is genuine (in other words, produced with the proper key) without requiring the private key to be divulged. In Bitcoin, public key are either compressed or uncompressed. Compressed public keys are 33 bytes, consisting of a prefix either 0x02 or 0x03, and a 256-bit integer called x. The older uncompressed keys are 65 bytes, consisting of constant prefix (0x04), followed by two 256-bit integers called x and y (2 * 32 bytes). The prefix of a compressed key allows for the y value to be derived from the x value. 3. signature: A number that proves that a signing operation took place. A signature is mathematically generated from a hash of something to be signed, plus a private key. The signature itself is two numbers known as r and s. With the public key, a mathematical algorithm can be used on the signature to determine that it was originally produced from the hash and the private key, without needing to know the private key. Signatures are either 73, 72, or 71 bytes long, with probabilities approximately 25%, 50% and 25% respectively, although sizes even smaller than that are possible with exponentially decreasing probability.
2016 blocks are solved in approximately
2 weeks
Current block count
491,100
Network targets how many blocks being solved per hour
6
Signatures also use
DER encoding to pack the r and s components into a single byte stream (OpenSSL produces this also by default)
What process essentially ensures that funds must be spent by their owners?
Each input must have a cryptographic digital signature that unlocks the funds from the prior transaction. Only the person possessing the appropriate private key is able to create a satisfactory signature;
ECDSA
Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm or ECDSA is a cryptographic algorithm used by Bitcoin to ensure that funds can only be spent by their rightful owners.
