terminology – What are Bitcoin shoppers, servers, nodes and friends

Consumer

A consumer usually is a sort of participant or function in a distributed software construction referred to as client-server. Shoppers talk with servers and never with different shoppers.

^Supply

Server

Servers primarily talk with shoppers and never with different servers. When servers talk with different servers they could use a unique protocol (e.g. SMTP as a substitute of IMAP/POP) or in any other case act as a consumer as a substitute of as a server in that relationship.

Node or Peer

A node is a peer in a peer-to-peer community. The concept right here is that each one friends have the identical function and tasks. Their roles will not be differentiated.

^Supply

Bitcoin

The Bitcoin community was designed as a peer-to-peer community. Not as a client-server community.

Bitcoin core

Strictly talking, calling a program resembling bitcoin-qt a consumer is misusing client-server terminology for peer-to-peer distributed-application construction.

bitcoind is a server (for the RPC API) however word that bitcoin-qt is not a consumer for bitcoind at current.

bitcoind and bitcoin-qt are each nodes or friends with respect to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin community protocol. Each are servers (not shoppers) with respect to the network-accessible client-server RPC API. bitcoin-cli is a consumer for that.

See associated query about constituent packages of Bitcoin Core