Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: sjyi on May 31, 2018, 05:24:11 PM



Title: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: sjyi on May 31, 2018, 05:24:11 PM
I've been studying bitcoin architecture and even though I'm a developer, I am a visual person.  I've been looking for the data and control flow diagrams for entire bitcoin system but have not found them.  There are many diagram that show some portions such as Merkle tree, block composition, but not the entire system data and control flow among different components including wallet, miners and full nodes.

I am taking that project on myself, but was wondering if such a set of diagrams/documents exist.  If you know of such documentation(s), please let me know.

Thanks in advance.

PS: I read Mastering Bitcoin.  Even though that book describe many aspects of bitcoin in great details, it does not provide the overall flow of the operations. 


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: ManaMan on May 31, 2018, 05:54:58 PM
I've been studying bitcoin architecture and even though I'm a developer, I am a visual person.  I've been looking for the data and control flow diagrams for entire bitcoin system but have not found them.  There are many diagram that show some portions such as Merkle tree, block composition, but not the entire system data and control flow among different components including wallet, miners and full nodes.

I am taking that project on myself, but was wondering if such a set of diagrams/documents exist.  If you know of such documentation(s), please let me know.

Thanks in advance.

PS: I read Mastering Bitcoin.  Even though that book describe many aspects of bitcoin in great details, it does not provide the overall flow of the operations. 

I do not think that such full charts and visuals exist for bitcoin.
Mastering Bitcoin is good book for the start and most of the time you would not need to go on the deeper level if you don't want to get your hands dirty and develop new features on top of it. You could check forum/bitcoin wiki and if you still have questions ask them freely here on forum as I am sure that myself and others will gladly help out if we know the answer. As knowing how to read 3rd party APIs, knowing how to use libraries and knowing RPC commands is most of the time enough to build related software that talks with the btc protocol it might really not be needed to know all the aspects of how bitcoin work.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: BitMaxz on May 31, 2018, 06:28:35 PM
What exactly diagram you are looking for?
It's hard to find a bitcoin diagram but maybe this one that you are looking for, check the image below.

https://i.imgur.com/WjJsnRN.png
Or like this one
https://thefutureofbitcoins.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/bitcoin-diagram.jpg

Sorry the forum image code couldn't work so I put the url here so that you can check if this is the diagram that you are looking for.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: buwaytress on May 31, 2018, 07:13:14 PM
Just a few days before, someone was asking about how the Bitcoin blockchain would look like, and one of the responses linked to what I felt was quite an attractive visualisation of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4312629.msg38734846#msg38734846

Or the direct link: https://anders.com/blockchain/

It's fairly straightforward, but you'd need to know a few of the basics behind how Bitcoin works to understand. I'm very mainstream and I got it quite easily, so hope that helps. I'm always having a side interest in visualisations myself and was a bit surprised not to have seen that one until a few days ago.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: sjyi on June 01, 2018, 12:37:07 AM
I've been studying bitcoin architecture and even though I'm a developer, I am a visual person.  I've been looking for the data and control flow diagrams for entire bitcoin system but have not found them.  There are many diagram that show some portions such as Merkle tree, block composition, but not the entire system data and control flow among different components including wallet, miners and full nodes.

I am taking that project on myself, but was wondering if such a set of diagrams/documents exist.  If you know of such documentation(s), please let me know.

Thanks in advance.

PS: I read Mastering Bitcoin.  Even though that book describe many aspects of bitcoin in great details, it does not provide the overall flow of the operations. 

I do not think that such full charts and visuals exist for bitcoin.
Mastering Bitcoin is good book for the start and most of the time you would not need to go on the deeper level if you don't want to get your hands dirty and develop new features on top of it. You could check forum/bitcoin wiki and if you still have questions ask them freely here on forum as I am sure that myself and others will gladly help out if we know the answer. As knowing how to read 3rd party APIs, knowing how to use libraries and knowing RPC commands is most of the time enough to build related software that talks with the btc protocol it might really not be needed to know all the aspects of how bitcoin work.

Yeah, I could not find such a visual aid also but was hoping that others had it already.  I want to be able to comprehend the entire bitcoin system not just a section and also assist others in understanding how the whole thing works.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: sjyi on June 01, 2018, 12:47:25 AM
What exactly diagram you are looking for?
It's hard to find a bitcoin diagram but maybe this one that you are looking for, check the image below.

https://i.imgur.com/WjJsnRN.png
Or like this one
https://thefutureofbitcoins.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/bitcoin-diagram.jpg

Sorry the forum image code couldn't work so I put the url here so that you can check if this is the diagram that you are looking for.

This one https://i.imgur.com/WjJsnRN.png (https://i.imgur.com/WjJsnRN.png) is much closer to what I'm looking for but still not it.  I want to be able to track down what happens when a coin is sent from a wallet to another wallet visually track every component that participate in the transaction taking place.  This would include how a transaction is sent to the network from the wallet.  How a transaction is eventually distributed to the entire network.  How the miners/pool mines the transaction into a block. How the mined transaction is received by the receiving wallet.

I think this is a big undertaking, but I'll start documenting it and ask for the community for the accuracy.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: sjyi on June 01, 2018, 01:30:46 AM
Just a few days before, someone was asking about how the Bitcoin blockchain would look like, and one of the responses linked to what I felt was quite an attractive visualisation of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4312629.msg38734846#msg38734846

Or the direct link: https://anders.com/blockchain/

It's fairly straightforward, but you'd need to know a few of the basics behind how Bitcoin works to understand. I'm very mainstream and I got it quite easily, so hope that helps. I'm always having a side interest in visualisations myself and was a bit surprised not to have seen that one until a few days ago.

The blockchain demo/simulation web page is quite nice.  As like most of the documents I've seen, it focuses on a portion of the overall bitcoin system.  Hopefully I'll give a shot at the simulation page after the visualization is done.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: sjyi on June 15, 2018, 04:49:12 AM
Making progress in diagrams but not ready to release yet.

I'm currently going through the consensus protocol but I can't find from the source files where this is implemented.

Can someone please point me to the file(s) for the consensus protocol?


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: japple19 on July 23, 2019, 11:21:06 PM
Making progress in diagrams but not ready to release yet.

I'm currently going through the consensus protocol but I can't find from the source files where this is implemented.

Can someone please point me to the file(s) for the consensus protocol?

Any updates on this topic? Did you finish your diagrams? I'm interested in the complete system flow including the network.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: Pmalek on July 24, 2019, 07:26:15 AM
Any updates on this topic? Did you finish your diagrams? I'm interested in the complete system flow including the network.
Unfortunately sjyi has not been online here since September 2018 so I doubt he will see your post. You can try to PM him and if he monitors the email address that he registered with on Bitcointalk he will receive a notification. Or check his post history, maybe he mentioned his email somewhere, telegram or some other way of contact.


Title: Re: Bitcoin system diagrams
Post by: LGame on July 27, 2019, 04:58:29 AM
Hi, I found a Bitcoin system diagram from Satoshi Nakamoto on google:
https://thefutureofbitcoins.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/bitcoin-diagram.jpg