Bitcoin Address

A Bitcoin address is similar to a physical address or an email. It is the only information you need to provide for someone to pay you with Bitcoin. Addresses are anonymous and do not contain information about the owner. A bitcoin address can be obtained for freeusing specialized Bitcoin software. Bitcoin address example: 14qViLJfdGaP7EeHnDyJbBGQysnCpwk3gd. Addresses can be generated at no cost by any user of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Client

A type of end-user software for receiving and/or interacting with data from the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin clients function as wallets and can sign transactions. Some clients function as light nodes and others as full nodes.

Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core is free and open-source software that serves as a bitcoin node (the set of which form the bitcoin network) and provides a bitcoin wallet which fully verifies payments. It is considered to be bitcoin's reference implementation. Initially, the software was published by Satoshi Nakamoto under the name "Bitcoin", and later renamed to "Bitcoin Core" to distinguish it from the network. It is also known as the Satoshi client.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a design document for introducing features or information to Bitcoin. The BIP should provide a concise technical specification of the attribute and a rationale for the feature.

Bitcoin Network

The bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer payment network that operates on a cryptographic protocol. Users send and receive bitcoins, the units of currency, by broadcasting digitally signed messages to the network using bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet software. Transactions are recorded into a distributed, replicated public database known as the blockchain, with consensus achieved by a proof-of-work system called mining. Satoshi Nakamoto, the designer of bitcoin, claimed that design and coding of bitcoin began in 2007. The project was released in 2009 as open source software.

Block

A bitcoin block is a permanently recorded file containing information on transactions. Each block includes the cryptographic hash of the prior block in the blockchain, linking the two. The linked blocks form a blockchain. If you think of blockchain as a big spreadsheet in the cloud, then each row in the spreadsheet might be a block.

Block Explorer

A Block Explorer is a web application to view and query blocks on the Blockchain. The primary function is to allow anyone with an Internet connection to track bitcoin transactions or interactions, regardless of his or her level of knowledge and expertise.

Block Reward

The successful miner finding the new block is allowed by the rest of the network to reward themselves with newly created bitcoins and transaction fees. As of 11 May 2020, the reward amounted to 6.25 newly created bitcoins per block added to the blockchain, plus any transaction fees from payments processed by the block. To mine half of the supply of bitcoins took four years but the remainder will take another 120 years, because of an artificial process called "bitcoin halving" according to which miners are compensated by fewer BTC as time goes on.

Blockchain

A blockchain, originally block chain, is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree). By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of its data. This is because once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks.