Hello- To any and all devs associated with Bitcoin or derivative alt coins:
I am studying the Bitcoin protocol and thus far have been unable to locate a true "whitepaper" that discloses the entire project in a language-independent fashion.
The extent of what the devs seem to have published is: 1) The source code, obviously, 2) A vague summary published here along with a Wiki:
http://bitcoin.org/en/developmentWhat I am looking for are true, honest-to-goodness whitepapers like you would find if you google it for the SHA algorithm, for example.
Some of the details that appear to be lacking from the aforementioned sources include how the transactions are combined to be hashed (specifics), how the nonce is incremented, etc.
If the answer is just: "There are no whitepapers, look at the source," that's fine. I would just imagine with such vast amounts of money dependent on bitcoin, that such a whitepaper would be pre-requisite to any major businesses using it for serious transactions.
In the summary describing Bitcoin, the authors are quick to cite SHA-256 as being secure, but just because one step in a process is secure does not make the whole thing secure. I am trying to determine if anyone has made an extensive study of the source and attempted to provide justification that the SHA-256 algorithm is being employed in a fashion that still guarantees security for the overall system.
Again, I understand that it's open source and that "all the details are out there" for anyone willing to comb through it, but even open source protocols typically have language-independent whitepapers.
Thanks to anyone who can help point me in the right direction!
