course

We’ve looked at gossip protocols in the abstract. It’s now time time to apply those abstractions to Bitcoin’s own P2P network.At a high level, almost all cryptocurrencies inherit the same P2P network design from Bitcoin. With Gnutella as background, you should now be fully equipped to understand Bitcoin’s networking layer. It’s really quite similar to Gnutella, with a few augmentations that we’ll cover in this lesson. Entering the networkSo far we’ve analyzed gossip networks at steady state. But… … More

Gnutella was one of the very first decentralized file sharing protocols to emerge after the death of Napster. It was most popularly implemented in the file sharing application LimeWire.The LimeWire application. Credit: WikimediaAs a fairly simple gossip-based P2P protocol, Gnutella’s networking design is a good blueprint for understanding Bitcoin. In this lesson, we’ll start by delving into the theory of gossip protocols. We’ll then cover Gnutella’s design. Then, in the assignment, you’ll get to… … More

If we want to understand how cryptocurrencies work from the ground up, we’ll need more in our toolkit than just cryptography. For a cryptocurrency to work, it needs more than just cryptographic security—it also needs to be decentralized. Satoshi learned a great deal from the history of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking that played out in the early 2000s. Those lessons inform the design of Bitcoin’s network layer.In this module, we’ll explore Bitcoin’s networking model and how it achieves two of its … … More