Provides a detailed description of the transaction format, replacing an
example hexdump taken from the wiki.
I'm putting this in the transaction section as the format is necessary
for the creation of txids, which are used as merkle leaves (so are
covered by consensus rules). However, this is also the format used by
several P2P network messages to transmit transactions, so I'll be
linking back to it from there as I document those messages.
As reported by @gsalgado (thanks!), the docs incorrectly state that all
sigs are compared against all pubkeys. This commit provides a corrected
description, additional details, and references in other parts of the
text where we mention multisig. (Fixes#622)
* Revise P2P Networking section to provide a more detailed description
of initial peer discovery and DNS seeds.
* Tweak autocrossref.rb to allow term blacklisting. Use this new feature
to prevent cross referencing "address" in "IP address" to the
definition of Bitcoin P2PKH/P2SH addresses. This avoids a bunch of
manual "norefs".
* Sorted the _includes/references.md file as it became unclear where
links should be added.
* Fixed accidentally lowercased "merkle" at start of sentence.
Based on a suggestion made by @petertodd to the -devel mailing list and
the discussion in that thread by him and other participants.
* We've been using the term "consensus", but this commit introduces a
formal definition for it and "consensus rules" as part of the block
chain introduction.
* Describe that consensus rules may change and may happen when they
do: hard or soft forks.
* Describe how full nodes can detect hard or soft forks, then describe
how SPV clients can detect hard and soft forks using the more limited
information available to them.
* Add a short subsection about the different byte orders used with
hashes in Bitcoin Core and other software.
* Re-word some text in other sections to mention the byte order
differences
This commit created based on comments from @SergioDemianLerner (thanks!)
