Glossary

Hexadecimal

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Hexadecimal is an encoding scheme which uses a 16 character alphabet, including digits 0-9 and letters A-F. Upper and lowercase letters are interchangeable, and most data represented in hexadecimal should begin with a ‘0x’ prefix. Most byte data is represented in hexadecimal, including Bitcoin public keys, transactions, hashes, and scripts.

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Encoding
The Bitcoin protocol uses several encoding schemes to represent data, chosen by data type to balance human readability against conserving disk space.
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Byte
A byte is a string of eight bits (ones and zeros), usually shown in hexadecimal. A thousand bytes make a kilobyte; a million bytes make a megabyte.
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Public key
A public key is used to receive bitcoin. When bitcoin is sent to a public key, only the owner of the corresponding private key will be able to spend it.
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Hash function
A cryptographic hash function is a one-way, random mathematical function. Hash functions underlie Bitcoin's security model in several ways.
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Bitcoin script
Script is the language Bitcoin uses to decide who can spend a given UTXO. It is intentionally limited so anyone can run a node and validate the chain.
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