Author: Peter Todd 2013-10-22 07:49:41
Published on: 2013-10-22T07:49:41+00:00
In an email exchange between Martin Sustrik and Gregory Maxwell on October 22, 2013, Jean-Paul Kogelman shared a link to the Bitcoin protocol specification wiki. However, Maxwell warned that the information in the wiki was incomplete. Sustrik, who had no prior knowledge of Bitcoin, noted that the document was difficult to understand as it started with "Hashes" without any explanation of what they were. He compared the wiki to well-written Request for Comments (RFC) documents that start with an introduction, description of the problem, conceptual model of the solution, and then dive into details. Sustrik offered to help with writing such a document and requested help from core developers to answer questions and review the document. However, Peter Todd cautioned against writing RFCs due to the consensus nature of Bitcoin, which makes people think that the standard is the RFC, rather than the code. He suggested that one of the best introductions to Bitcoin is the Khan Academy videos, followed by reading the source code, which is simple and readable. Nonetheless, he reminded that the implications of the codebase are anything but simple, and even Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin, may not have understood it all that well by the time he left the project.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T17:54:52.186908+00:00