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The Bitcoin Script Language
An elegant solution to change management
The world is changing and developers are not perfect. The first iteration of any software always has some flaws or shortcomings that need to be adjusted after a while. For those two reasons, it is important to have a mechanism for change management. In the case of APIs of central services, you typically have an API version and a deprecation schedule.
But what do you do in a distributed system? How do you keep the system flexible and secure?
Bitcoin has an elegant solution to this problem: Bitcoin Script! After reading this article, you will understand it. Let’s go!
Anatomy of a Bitcoin Transaction
New bitcoins are mined with every block that gets added to the blockchain until about the year 2140. Who has access to which bitcoin is determined by tracking unspent transaction output (UTXO):
Going to the Bitcoin block explorer and picking the latest block, we see 2,738 transactions in that block. Taking one transaction and showing the raw hex dump:
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 structure of this format is as follows:
