Misconceptions about Bitcoin
I created a new course Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Technologies for this semester and I am listing some of the misconceptions I explained during my lectures:
- Crypto in cryptocurrencies does NOT mean encryption
- Digital wallets do NOT store your cryptocurrencies. They simply store your private/public keys
- Since wallets do NOT store your coins, a transaction does NOT send or receive coins. A transactions simply changes the ownership of coins and writes this info to the blockchain
- Hashing is NOT encryption
- Digital Signatures are NOT encryption
- Using CPUs, GPUs, or FPGAs are NOT profitable for Bitcoin mining (ASICs rule that world)
- Elliptic Curve point addition is NOT multiplication
- Bitcoin's elliptic curve secp256k1 is NOT a NIST Curve
- Bitcoin does NOT use RSA encryption
- Bitcoin does NOT use RSA signatures
- Ethereum is NOT Proof-of-Stake, it is Proof-of-Work like Bitcoin
- There can be at most 21 million Bitcoin but Ethereum has NO such limit
- You CAN have smart contracts using Bitcoin but you are limited in such transactions because Bitcoin scripting language is NOT Turing-complete (which was a deliberate choice)
- NFT images or videos are almost NEVER stored in the blockchain (so they can get lost in the future and they can be changed if they are stored on a webpage)
- Most NFTs are simply represented with their description and URI in the blockchain due to ERC-721 standard. So if your NFT changes in the future, there is NO way of checking authenticity since the hash of the NFT almost NEVER written to the blockchain (this one is not related to Bitcoin)
If you are interested, you can watch my ongoing lecture videos from this Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUoixF7agmIvdqWvBrZNk1H9vxDZgjbUE
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