Bitcoin Forum

Getting started in the world of Bitcoin can be a little confusing.
I'd like to know what is the concept that confuses you the most and why.

Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and Merkle tree.

the thing that confuse me is the same thing that is not necessary to learn, to have a grasp about bitcoin

i guess something in deep about the mining activity or the hash fuction

Hardest thing? Getting in-depth use of the Core wallet. There are many commands in there that I don't quite understand, and I've been trying to for the last 6 months. However, I still can't get a good grasp of it. :(

when i started to know about bitcoin, at first i was very confused about the whole thing , on how it works especially mining. i think it was mostly because i have heard that mining is solving a mathematical formula and being rewarded to do so which is a wrong and confusing explanation by the way.

Maybe about getting in-depth to understand about mining algorithm which can solve a bicoin block and can earn bitcoin from it.

well, i know everything that matters to me regarding daily use. that's the most important. what i would want to know at some point is to send/create a raw transaction. still haven't manage to do it.

for me its every bitcoin's technical aspects, as in everything because until now , all i know about bitcoin is - "it is money" :D i am not a techy person but i am trying to, just to go with the flow and hopefully i can manage to understand those stuffs

The future adoption (or lack thereof). There are huge strides being made but it's hard to pull myself away from what seems like minimal day to day change in interest and adoption.

at first the whole thing was confusing for me. because it is being done without any centralization and it is p2p. but i had a friend who explained it all to me so i started off easy.
now what i want to understand about bitcoin is the code, this is just a curiosity of mine because i am a fan of coding and do it as a hobby on the side, but since it is complicated and i am not so good at it, it has been hard and confusing to me so far.

Decentralized  ???
and bitcoin networks things ( fee, node, etc ) but as long as I can use it to purchase or earning bitcoin, there is no need to know further except if you want to be bitcoin expert

I can't make a connection between transactions and blocks and miners
please explain for me the mining idea

The hardest thing for me was to understand BIP101 and Bitcoin XT. I can't go very technical in the mining process either but it would be okay for anyone looking to only use Bitcoin for payment.

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Transactions are crafted and broadcasted to the network, relayed by thousands of nodes. Bitcoin takes a special approach against double spending (reusing an input twice). Miners try to solve a hard equation that gets harder every 2 weeks on average when there are more people with powerful mining machine or ASIC. If miners include your transaction when they find a block and you would gain one confirmation.

How the principle is working. If you understand it then the world of decentralized information storage is open for one.

Nobody will ever understand Bitcoin completely except maybe devs and Satoshi himself. There are so many things I don't understand. That's cool as well since some of the things I don't even try to understand. I just let them be and if I need them for something one day, I just ask questions.

Yeah, it's true that I don't try and understand things that I don't understand about bitcoin, but I'm sure that there are plenty bitcoin enthusiasts who know pretty much everything about bitcoin and have been following it since the release. :)

The most difficult thing I found out was that how are bit coin addresses created, I am no expert in encryption and am a student right now so it was difficult for me to understand ecdsa and other certain things.

When I started learning about bitcoin, I wasn't worried about mining, nodes and hashes. I was a first time user and I was confused about the input, output and change address concept. When I receive coins into my address, I thought the coins are mixed together, but they remain separate as unspent outputs. If I want to send them, I cannot choose the exact amount to send. Instead, the wallet automatically picks the unsent outputs more than the required amount and send the extras to another new address. Once I get used to it, it really isn't difficult.

Sorry but I am quite sure that nobody understands everything except the devs maybe! :) Even Andreas Antonopoulos said in one of his interviews that's impossible to learn everything about Bitcoin and that even he hasn't learnt everything.

I guess probably because Bitcoin evolves daily and will continue to do so for a long time to come!

the conjunt in general, i mean what bitcoin is in general, when you can understand that is a trully and real economic system pretty fair, when you see that this can work is like, omg this is awesome!

btw at least that was my case, the mining activity or the hash fuction was the most hard things to understand in this system, and i still learning... :P

From where do they come from.
Im new and I dont really get it.

Why dont more people use it? It is very strange.

Too many sheeple i guess, or just simpleton morons, yet we got hundreds of millions of people on the internet and so few in bitcoin...

What is the meaning of Hash.
Why some blocks are generated in 50 minutes and some are in 2 min gap.
Why some blocks are filled with only 500KB when it can accommodate up to 1MB of transactions.
Some blocks contain only mining reward transaction - why

Basically mining is the difficult part for me to understand.

To me, how could Bitcoin go trusted so fast?
I mean people most likely do not trust if you go at them and say "hey bro wanna buy some virtual currency money?" but bitcoin passed that stage. it is great.

At some point they will have no choice, other currencies are far worse, and all it takes is 1 google search to find bitcoin isnt it?

Bitcoin will thrive!!!

Why are people in the newbie section opening up 10 threads/day about the same topic, instead of using the search box in the upper-right corner.

It is a very hard thing to understand indeed...

Like many other people I also do not understand what is mining. But I have some idea what is the need of it. Our transactions are carried by mining process. But, to use bitcoin we need not to understand the mining part.

I didn't understand the cold storage, off-chin transaction, decentralization, mining and actually what will be sent when i do bitcoin trnsaction, what will is hidden the bitcoin private key? and everything on the bitcoin.  ??? Doubts because, i cannot understand even someone explain because, this is not my profession.  :-X

Additional to what I've already mentioned, I'm currently studying the algorithm in which bitcoin is based on. Also, Merkle trees and ECC is a difficult thing to understand, especially if you don't have a basic knowledge on cryptography. But these things shouldn't be a concern to the average user--most of these terms involve users with a developer skill or has the knowledge to understand such things.

the hardest part for me is probally the hd multisignature wallets, i mean i get how it generates alot of private keys. but is that an infinite number? cuz there arent infinite private keys in total.  ??? ???

Most multi-signature wallet addresses only require two out of three private keys in order to spend the balance in it.


^Source (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address#Multi-signature_addresses)

Cold storage = offline storing private key

Off chain transaction = Transaction that is resolved inhouse and then broadcaster later on the blockchain. Ex: Faucetbox

Mining = Securing/ Broadcasting the transactions to the entire network

Private key= Secret key that is used to access your money

For me as new comer it is about mining. I never give any try yet and I am lazy to learn about it as well at the moment. I may be find more diffulties later when I understand bitcoin deeper.

That's right.
More reference: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3712/how-can-i-create-a-multi-signature-2-of-3-transaction

When we mine bitcoin it us said that in order to fund a block we or our system has to solve some kind of problem. What kinds of problem are they? Now for solving those problems we are getting paid so does the solution if those problems help in advancement in certain industry, technology or does it help us to learn about the universe we live in??

Suit yourself:
http://en.bitcoinwiki.org/Mining

Or just chekc the mining board of the forum...

the hardest thing is to understand how the bitcoin works and how the mining works besides that using it is really easy in my opinion and it does not require any knowledge

How miners work. And SHA-256

It is all so confusing!!!

Maybe if you would use a wiki or something, it takes less than 15 min to read through and it will make you understand it imediately.

Dont be lazy guys.

Understanding what happens while a transaction takes place took me a lot of time to understand in the beginning. Since I knew how that works out I was able to understand how a double spend can work.
Bitcoin is so much different to the fiat money world. And in that case understanding the bitcoin basics can take a few weeks to some months for some persons. But it's definitily worth to study it.I'm sure this will pay off in the future in some way.

The hardest thing about bitcoin is everything is so new. Too many things I don't know where to start learning.

Try starting from the wiki page

https://en.bitcoin.it/

The hardest part for me was actually kinda recent it was following the Malleability Attacks.  I find it odd someone who has spend a lot of time to craft this getting to know the inner workings would want to hurt bitcoin.   (http://cointelegraph.com/news/115374/the-ongoing-bitcoin-malleability-attack)

It makes me wonder if they are trying to get BTC at a lower price and quick profit.  Or if someone who just does it to get attention like DDOS attacks.

I hope we learn more about the person or persons doing it and their motive.

Mining is the hardest thing for me.i still don't understand it so i finally ignored.

Any certain part of mining?  There are lot's of us miners here on this board.

We might be able to help, chances are good :)

Yep probably some organized pump and dump cartels trying to manipulate price, they push it down , buy it up , then unload for profit.

Seems like an easy way to manipulate the market because its very susceptive, until they get caught obviously.

Back then, the whole thing about the new words i just know in bitcoin. Like blockchain, private key, mining, etc.

Most words is very new, so little need time to understand it. But now i know that little by little.

ok so i have a question about mining. i understand that new btcs are generated when a block is mined. what is the difference between block mining and miners that confirm transaction? are they the same thing?

maybe the hardest thing for me its about how to earn the bitcoin... ???

Can you explain me more about doublespend? I send some bitcoins using blockchain.info but it double spend accidentaly. There was already a trasaction but my balance was still there. I have to send twice it to get confirm.

doublespend is when you spend the same input twice. probably in your blockchain wallet it reflects a possible malleablity attack on 1 of your transactions. try to check your balance at other block explorer

Is every btc send normally done in 2 transactions?

how is it mined and how the blocks are solved or something like that :D

One confirmations should be enough. But 6 confirmation is a much better.

The hardest thing for me is that why does it have so difficult mining algorithm. It goes against decentralization, it should be an easier algo.

For me the hardest thing at the beginning was to sign a message.
I was thinking that i must have any plugin or additional software to do that.
Then i didn't understand the halving method but found in wiki that is explained in detail.

I am starting to have a new one that is my hardest thing to understand.  I cannot understand why anyone would use faucets.  Making cent's per hour is horrible pay I just don't see it being enough to even be enjoyable.

I am surprised how faucets always get brought up in beginner thread.  It makes me wonder if people don't realize it's cents for hours of work.  Or if they are being pushed by people who have faucets and rotaters. 

Don't know if we will ever get that anwser though.

Hah,the thing about faucets is a really good question,well maybe in the beginning people don't have much btc to start with and the end up using faucets to earn some btc,however I also think that may be not the best option right there.

Technically, waiting for a few minutes, ensuring that it has proporgated well and having a good amount of fee would be more than enough to accept a low amount 0 conf transaction. It is still quite hard for people to reverse it.

The future.

I wish I could understand what the future holds for Bitcoin. Will it get political and perverse? Will it fade or fail? Will it be eclipsed by something new? Will it gain strength and value at a slow and steady clip?

Mining secure's the bitcoin network by making it difficult for people "to redo" the calculations and create another bitcoin "chain"

Imagine there are X bitcoin chains, where they connect imaginary squares, if they mine, they add more squares if they didnt mine anyone could remake the main bitcoin "chain"and re-do all transactions that were in the squares. <- explainitlikeImFive

Mining is done to secure transactions by ensuring the transactions included in the blocks do not spend the same output with another transaction that has confirmed before. The deeper it gets, the harder it is to reversed. However, if the transaction is included in the block after the last checkpoint, it is possible to reverse it by 51% attack as you're able to build a new chain faster than anyone else on he network.  It doesn't yield much profit either.

Mining ensures a stable distribution of the coins. If it were to get distributed at the start, people would hold monopoly. It also allows users to make an effort by mining to gain those coins.