I found this question on Stack Exchange and I also would like to know the answer:
I'm looking for a good explanation or reference on the peer to peer aspects of the two main bitcoin actors- the clients(wallets) and miners.
Satoshi's white paper, in section 5. Network, gives a very high level overview of the steps to run on the network, yet what I'm looking for is a description of the handshake sequences, how the peers broadcast, collects new transactions, and how they request missed blocks.
I've read and somewhat understand the protocol at
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification I also have a solid understanding of the crypto, ECDSA, SHA-256, RIPEMD-160, Merkle trees, and Hashcash (and a bit of RPOW) so no need to cover that in particular.
What would be really helpful is a sequence diagram, if anyone knows of one, and a paper or article that goes into more detail than the whitepaper.
Any help, beyond "read the **'ing source code' would be great ;-)
Any takers?
