have you tried google?
• What does the peer-to-peer network protocol look like?
• How do I make a transaction / mine a block?
I know how to do this using end-user wallet applications, but the open protocols are so very well documented that I'm sure you can find this information easily.
The pages that show up in search results[0][1] don't really have this information. It gives me a high-level overview, tells me that it uses TCP and which port it uses, and gives the structure of the TCP packets (with some examples), but there's a whole load of stuff that's just never defined. To actually understand what's going on, I then have to read the source code.
And… making a transaction?[3] Mining a block?[2] No chance. I know it's “double SHA256” and that's about it. (I can look at the source code to find out, sure… but an open standard? Open secret, more like. The flaming whitepaper[4] is more useful than these docs.)
This is Bitcoin, the best-known, most-popular, (presumably) best-documented DeFi system on the 'net. Ethereum has… a blog post, an onlinelibrary.wiley.com book and an academic article. I don't even want to know what other stuff has. Most DeFi garbage barely has a whitepaper.
[0]: https://developer.bitcoin.org/devguide/p2p_network.html
[1]: https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/p2p_networking.html
[2]: https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/block_chain.html#ser...
[3]: https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/transactions.html
[4]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf (which has apparently been taken down…?) https://web.archive.org/web/20140320135003if_/https://bitcoi...
If you want to read some “DeFi docs”, there are PLENTY - you can start here: https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.10/
> that a specific open-source project you chose
It was but an example; I assert the rest are also like that. I chose Bitcoin because it is the biggest, but I could just as easily have chosen Ethereum (as I have already said).
> doesn't have good enough documentation for a specific feature you want, which is not the main aim of the project.
If not making transactions, blocks, and mining, what is the main aim of Bitcoin?
> Additionally, all the answers to your question are contained in my first comment.
You provided a link to the documentation for Solidity, one of many high-level languages over the Ethereum VM. While it provides a little documentation of Ethereum bytecode, and a high-level overview of how Ethereum is used to handle smart contracts, this isn't Ethereum documentation. The answers are not to be found there.
(And I don't expect you to help; I'm aware that the answers aren't easy to find. That's my whole point!)
Yes, some aspects you need to look at the code, others you will find documented
i would recommend https://learnmeabitcoin.com/ which has very in-depth resources but it seems to be down at the moment
I know how all the small parts work. It's not new technology. I just don't know how Bitcoin does it! To mine a block, you:
• collect a load of transactions (somehow)
• validate them (the obvious stuff, plus the special transaction type requirements, plus unspecified “consensus“ magic I can't find anywhere)
• put them in a block (somehow) along with the hash of the most recent block
• keep changing a certain bit of the block until SHA256(f(SHA256(block))) is low enough (with some f: digest → bitstring)
But I can't fill in the gaps.
validate them: your best resource for this is code. your client needs to keep old consensus code around and use it to verify block under the older rules (your client will do a full sync at some point)
rules for formatting a transactions and blocks (and a byte by byte explanation) can be found on https://learnmeabitcoin.com/ as mentioned (probably will be up soon)
keep changing a certain bit of the block until SHA256(f(SHA256(block))) is low enough (with some f: digest → bitstring): yes. you set the block nonce to mine. finding a block means that the hash256() operation (sha256(sha256(block))) returns an hash with at least D (either left or right most, can't recall right now) bits set to 0, where D is the current difficult, which is adjusted by the network to make the 10min/block average time
> finding a block means that the hash256() operation (sha256(sha256(block))) returns an hash with at least D (either left or right most, can't recall right now) bits set to 0, where D is the current difficult, which is adjusted by the network to make the 10min/block average time
This is a lies-to-children explanation. Bitcoin actually uses less-than a certain value (source: [0]). The tricky part is that a SHA-256 digest is a 256-bit number, and the SHA-256 function's input is a sequence of bits; the SHA-256 specification explicitly declines to specify a canonical representation of that 256-bit number, so it can't be used as the input to SHA-256 without explaining how it's being used. I can't find anywhere what this intermediate function (the one I called f) actually is. There are only half a dozen obvious possibilities (bits from most→least, or least→most, and the four normal ways of doing ASCII hex digests) so it's not that hard to guess, given an example… but still. It's the principle of the matter; it's all under-documented.
(Thanks for the rest of the info by the way. You've given me leads I wouldn't otherwise have been able to easily find.)
Maybe it's just deceptive
At least smart contracts usually don't have that much code, so it's not too much effort to reverse-engineer. But that's not source code.