Bitcoin Script | River Glossary (2024)

FAQs

What is Bitcoin answers? ›

Bitcoin is an innovative payment network that leverages peer-to-peer transactions to remove the need for a central bank. Bitcoin has revolutionized the core principles of value exchange by showing that a network of fully independent nodes can operate payments in a trustless and secure way.

Bitcoin Script Limits

Bare scripts have a size limit of 10k bytes by consensus. However, standardness rules explicitly specify the kind of locking scripts allowed and the scripts are much smaller (e.g. P2PKH is 25 bytes, P2SH is 23 bytes, etc).

Bitcoin's scripting language is called a stack-based language because it uses a data structure called a stack. A stack is a very simple data structure that can be visualized as a stack of cards. A stack allows two operations: push and pop. Push adds an item on top of the stack.

Bitcoin Magazine's official glossary of terms provides definitions for the words and phrases you're most likely to come across as you learn about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

Summary: As of 2024, there are about 420 million cryptocurrency users globally. Of these, approximately 1.5 million individuals possess more than 1 Bitcoin, which is just 0.36% of all cryptocurrency users.

Bitcoins can be split into smaller units to facilitate smaller transactions. A satoshi is the smallest denomination of bitcoin, equivalent to 100 millionth of a bitcoin.

The maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins will be reached around the year 2140, after which no new bitcoins can be mined. The 21 million Bitcoin limit also has important implications for the process of Bitcoin mining.

P2SH is a locking script that allows you to lock up bitcoins to the hash of a script. This allows you to use custom locking scripts for your bitcoins, whilst also allowing you to provide the sender with an address to send the bitcoins to (instead of them having to use the full custom locking script).

First we pop an item from the Script Stack and then push it onto our Execution Stack . So as the first step , we pop the value 1 from our script stack and push it onto the execution stack as follows. We then pop the value 2 from our script stack and push this onto the execution stack .

What coding language is Bitcoin? ›

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym for whoever penned the original Bitcoin whitepaper and is the identity credited with inventing Bitcoin itself.

A seed phrase is a sequence of random words that stores the data required to access or recover cryptocurrency. Seed phrases are generated by crypto wallets and are crucial for the safety of digital assets. It's essential to keep a seed phrase safe and private as it can be used to regain access to a crypto wallet.

A 12-word seed phrase acts as a key to unlock access to a crypto wallet and is also the ultimate recovery tool for wallets on the blockchain.

Dirty cryptocurrency, similar to "dirty" money, refers to digital assets that are associated with criminal transactions or illegal activities.

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency that uses blockchain technology to support transactions between users on a decentralized network. New Bitcoins are created as part of the mining process, as a reward to people whose computer systems help validate transactions.

Ultimately, investing in bitcoin is a personal decision, whether you're buying ETFs or actual digital coins. If you decide to invest, you should have an already diversified portfolio of assets like index funds. You typically don't want to invest money in speculative assets you can't afford to lose.

Bitcoin Cash is a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system that does not rely on any central authority like a government or financial institution. As such, it represents a fundamental redesign of the very nature of money.