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by jere 4572 days ago
Amazing post. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of Bitcoin, yet this is the first time I've even heard of an associated scripting language. I can't wait for the post detailing that. Here's the wiki article for now: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
2 comments
buss 4571 days ago
The scripting language is the reason I'm betting on bitcoin in the long run. The scripting language lets you do so many interesting things with it (escrow, wills, and surely lots of things I can't envision).

Check out this video about bitcoin contracts which talks about the scripting language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mD4L...

Unfortunately, if I understand correctly, non-standard transactions are not accepted by most miners currently, which means the interesting things in the previously linked contracts video wouldn't work. This should improve over time as new transactions are proposed and added to the list of standard transactions. The bitcointalk forums, while having a lot of noise, also has interesting discussions about new transaction types.

Bitcoin combined with its scripting language is just too good of an idea to go away, and I think we'll start to see more interesting transactions within a couple years.

edit: Forgot to mention that everyone who is manic about bitcoin never even mentions the good ideas in the actual protocol, they only focus on the crazy price swings. Learning about the backing technology is the best way to feel confident about bitcoin's future.

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sp332 4572 days ago
Someone is running a competition right now. To win, you have to find a collision using various hash functions. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=293382.0 The rules of the competition are encoded in the bitcoin transaction using Script. For example:

  OP_2DUP OP_EQUAL OP_NOT OP_VERIFY OP_SHA1 OP_SWAP OP_SHA1 OP_EQUAL
which means SHA1(x) == SHA1(y) AND NOT (x == y)
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