
Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol - kens
http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html
======
gwillen
Do not, do not, DO NOT, try writing raw transactions at home. You will fail
and you will lose a lot of money.

If you must: \- Use testnet! If you don't know what testnet is, you have no
business writing live raw transactions. \- ALWAYS validate your transaction
first by having bitcoind pretty-print it, and checking the output carefully,
before sending.

~~~
userbinator
What someone does with their money (virtual or not) is their choice, and not
for you to decide...

~~~
owenversteeg
It's solid advice, as it's very easy to lose money writing transactions
manually.

------
wmf
Be careful if you try this at home; a lot of people have lost money this way.
(Not sending change is a common mistake.)

~~~
M4v3R
To elaborate on that. If not very careful, you can end up sending a big fee,
since the fee is calculated in the following way:

sum of all inputs values - sum of all outputs values

"Change" is an output that you control to which you will send the remaining
amount. Failing to do so will end up sending all remaining value as
transaction fee, which then goes to the miners.

If you end up doing that (as I did few months ago) you still have a chance
though - through blockchain.info you can get information about who mined the
block in which your transaction was included. If you're lucky, it will be one
of the big pools. You can then try to contact them and ask to send the amount
back to the originating address. In my case BTC Guild was nice enough to do
exactly this.

~~~
yetfeo
With pools moving towards paying miners the transaction fees it becomes more
difficult to recover from mistakes like this. The pool would have to contact
the miners that received the fees to recover them.

------
aaron-lebo
If you want something in a similar vein, Khan Academy has some good videos
describing the protocol and not just a high-level overview (though there is
that, too).

[https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-
fi...](https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-
finance/money-and-banking/bitcoin/v/bitcoin-overview)

------
bluesign
One of the best articles I've ever read about bitcoin.

~~~
kidgorgeous
Came in here just to say that. Thank you for whoever posted this and more
importantly, whoever wrote it.

~~~
timmclean
It looks like they're one and the same, so the karma is going to the right
place :)

------
ck2
I've always wanted to learn how to query a coin network for things like
current difficulty and total hashrate without running a full blown wallet to
get a console.

Is this documented anywhere perhaps? I cannot seem to find.

This helps a little
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification)

but very low level and no mention of hashrate

~~~
kens
Try [https://blockchain.info/stats](https://blockchain.info/stats) for stats
from the past 24 hours. That site also has a whole lot of historical charts.

------
35524532525
Linking to a thread about a paranoid blog/rant, regarding:

"Bitcoin is a cryptographic botnet"

    
    
      Bitcoin, I believe after reviewing the protocol 
      description here is a US gov’t black op.
    

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7165893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7165893)

Possibly worth discussing, since it's reactionary slant was directly provoked
by OP's topic.

Seems to have gotten buried. Possible deliberate forum sliding?

[http://lunaticoutpost.com/Topic-Technique-1-FORUM-
SLIDING](http://lunaticoutpost.com/Topic-Technique-1-FORUM-SLIDING)

The only reason I might suggest considering this botnet premise is due to
hardware mining.

ASICs are pretty much the norm for mining now, and near as I can tell, there
hasn't been much discussion regarding all the custom hardware floating around
lately.

~~~
wmf
Not familiar with the crackpot index, huh?

BTW, the behavior of ASICs is well understood and has been audited by the
authors of mining software (who are independent from the ASIC vendors).

