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Common "Bitcoin" terms that are NOT in the whitepaper -- And what they refer to
4358 sats \ 15 comments \ @birdeye21 2 Sep 2023 bitcoin
  • Blockchain (It's a timestamp server)
  • Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin just replaces trust with CRYPTOgraphic proof)
  • Fork, hard fork, soft fork (Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism)
  • MINING (we're just CPU maxxing, yo)
  • Halving (Satoshi compares Bitcoin's issuance to that of gold miners, without going into the numbers)
  • 21 million (nope, nowhere, because total supply is irrelevant as long as it's fixed)
  • Supply (nope, nowhere, because it's irrelevant as long as it's fixed!!)
  • Seed phrase (Private keys)
  • Decentralized (Satoshi preferred distributed!)
It's amazing how much complexity the human mind adds to things.
We're our own worst enemy -- sometimes.
Am I missing any words?
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799 sats \ 1 reply \ @BBitcoinUSA 2 Sep 2023
Great post, thank you. I vote to replace Decentralized with Distributed
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18 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 2 Sep 2023
i agree, just a 'softer' sounding way to describe it imo
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1326 sats \ 1 reply \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 2 Sep 2023
Seed phrases didn't come about until BIP39, right? Some of these terms like the blockchain may be missing from the whitepaper, but they existed at the genesis block. Whereas seed phrases literally didn't exist til later. Please correct me if I'm wrong!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 3 Sep 2023
i think u right, seed phrases and private keys are not the same thing
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654 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 2 Sep 2023
There is no "hard money" in the whitepaper. The idea of Bitcoin even being a monetary system was very far away at this point.
There are (of course) no sats or satoshis in the whitepaper. Really shows how far we have come when the literal unit of denomination we now use in vocabulary wasn't even there
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938 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 2 Sep 2023
I don't have the whitepaper pulled up (I should get it tattooed on the inside of my eyelids tbh) but I'd guess:
  • ASIC
  • Layer 2
  • sidechain
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @sahil 2 Sep 2023
Yup!
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @fredosha 3 Sep 2023
We create jargons to set ourselves apart.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 2 Sep 2023
Saylor
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @endothermicdev 2 Sep 2023
It's fun seeing how much has changed since the whitepaper. I wouldn't say these additional terms are inherently bad - HD wallets were invented later, so seed phrase couldn't have been used at the time. It was a really useful tool! Before that a wallet would just generate a batch of random addresses and they had to all be backed up.
Mining and forks kind of make sense to defer technical discussion and creation of terminology until the network was actually operating and growing.
The other terms definitely tend toward meme and influencer fodder.
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7 sats \ 1 reply \ @Michelson_Morley 2 Sep 2023
Feel the need to correct a couple of these, I don't know if you intended your parentheses to be definitions but since they might be:
"Blockchain" isn't a timestamp server, it's a list of time-ordered database entries (eg. transactions) that can be made and agreed upon without relying on a central bookkeeper (eg. a bank).
And "mining" is exactly this: Guessing numbers. CPUs aren't well suited really, since they're made for general calculations, and that's why specialized number-guessers (ASICs) predominate the mining game.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @birdeye21 OP 3 Sep 2023
they're not really definitions just highlighting what's being referred to in the white paper when people say these common terms
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22 sats \ 2 replies \ @Fabs 4 Mar
Don't take it personal, but that's a pretty poor job you've done there.
I get that you'd like to simplify things, but the above doesn't achieve that.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @birdeye21 OP 4 Mar
feel free to include your feedback :) I am not the brightest 🥴
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22 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 4 Mar
Well, simply work out the technical definitions of the above, and simplify things using your own explanation of said definitions.
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