Human Consensus In Cryptocurrency Networks
How Bitcoin coordinates work amongst disparate groups of human volunteers
So far we have argued that free open source software is the right medium for digital infrastructure, because its processes discourage spurious, ceremonial, expensive, and monotechnic developments. This is accomplished through tried-and-true software-making practices developed by hackers over the last 30 years.
In this section, we will discuss how Satoshi Nakamoto innovated on top of existing open allocation governance processes in order to make them robust enough to govern a currency system.
The fundamental challenge of any social system is that people are inclined to break the rules when it’s profitable and expedient. Unlike present-day financial systems, which are hemmed in by laws and conventions, the Bitcoin system formalizes human rules into a software network. But how does the system prevent human engineers from changing this system over time to benefit themselves?
Nakamoto’s solution to this question can be broken down into three parts:
Make all participants “administrators” of the system, with no central controller.
Require most or many participants to agree to any necessary rule changes.
Make colluding to change the rules extremely expensive to attempt.
These solutions are nice in theory, but it’s important to remember that Nakamoto sought to enforce these rules upon human participants by using a software system. Prior to the release of Bitcoin, doing so would have run up against two specific unsolved engineering challenges:
How can a system with many different computers maintain a database of transactions, without the use of a central coordinating computer? (In such a system, anyone with access to the central coordinating computer could change the rules in the system for their own benefit.)
How do all the different administrators agree that the database was not, in fact, altered? (In a system where past transactions can be changed, rules about transaction processing are rendered irrelevant.)
To answer these questions, we need to explore how humans and machines in a network reach agreement on common rules and history. This section will focus on how human beings organize within the system into three distinct roles; the next section will focus on the use of a network of machines to enforce the rules and behavior of the participants.
Pioneering work that led to Bitcoin
A financial system with the aforementioned attributes is not a new concept. Ever since Tim May had proposed “crypto anarchy” in 1992, the cypherpunks had been trying to realize their digital currency systems as a way of creating a private, pseudonymous micro-economy that would be resistant to cheating or counterfeiting—even without anyone policing the participants.
Bitcoin was not the first attempt at digital money. Indeed, the idea was pioneered by David Chaum in 1983. In Chaum’s model, a central server prevented double-spending, but this was problematic:
“The requirement for a central server became the Achilles’ heel of digital cash. While it is possible to distribute this single point of failure by replacing the central server’s signature with a threshold signature of several signers, it is important for auditability that the signers be distinct 10 and identifiable. This still leaves the system vulnerable to failure, since each signer can fail, or be made to fail, one by one.”
Digicash was another example of a currency that failed due to regulatory requirements placed on its central authority; it was clear that the necessity to police the owners of the system significantly undermined the efficiencies gained by the digitization of a currency system.
Cypherpunk Wei Dei was directly influenced by crypto-anarchy when he came up with his decentralized “B-money” proposal in 1998. “I am fascinated by Tim May's cryptoanarchy,” he writes in the introduction to his essay:
“Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word ‘anarchy,’ in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It's a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.”
Dai’s concept was based on recent developments in computer science which suggested that such a system might be feasible.
Prior art
As of the early 2000s, recent innovations had made Wei Dai’s B-money concept possible. Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber had proposed something called “linked timestamping” in 1990 to build a trusted chain of digital signatures which could be used to notarize and timestamp a document, preventing retroactive tampering. In 1997, Adam Back invented Hashcash, a denial of service protection for P2P networks, which would make it expensive and difficult for participants to collude to alter past transactions.
Still, participants might collude to break the rules in other ways, such as to counterfeit coins. Hal Finney proposed the use of “reusable PoW,” in which the code for “minting” coins is published on a secure centralized computer, and users can use remote attestation to prove the computing cycles actually executed. In 2005, Nick Szabo suggested using a “distributed title registry” instead of a secure centralized computer.
In early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released the first implementation of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, wherein the central server’s signature of authority was replaced by a decentralized “Proof-of-Work” system. Nakamoto wrote after launch that “Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei Dai's b-money proposal on Cypherpunks in 1998, and Nick Szabo's Bitgold proposal.”
These foundational ideas cited by Nakamoto may have drawn on contemporary economic concepts about currency markets. In a lecture delivered at the Gold and Monetary Conference, in New Orleans in 1977, economist Friedrich Hayek said:
“The monopoly of government of issuing money has not only deprived us of good money but has also deprived us of the only process by which we can find out what would be good money. We do not even quite know what exact qualities we want, because in the two thousand years in which we have used coins and other money, we have never been allowed to experiment with it, we have never been given a chance to find out what the best kind of money would be.”
This comment from 1984 is also widely attributed to Hayek:
“I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. We can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.”
How Bitcoin works, briefly
Well-written tutorials about “how Bitcoin works” are plentiful. Instead of reproducing those explanations, the following paragraphs explain only what is required to understand the design rationale of the system, as a way of elucidating its purpose. Specifically, we will explore the incentive system, which keeps Bitcoin’s contributors working together in lieu of any formal association.
Central to the Bitcoin system is the concept of “mining,” which will be explained in greater depth in the next section. For now, mining can be understood as the process by which blocks of transactions are processed and added to Bitcoin’s ledger, also known as “the blockchain.” “Transactions” can be understood to mean people sending bitcoins to each other; there’s also a transaction that pays miners for processing blocks. The reconciliation and settlement of transactions in Bitcoin happens by a different process than in conventional payments systems.
How users agree on which network is “Bitcoin”
Many users only experience Bitcoin transactions through a lightweight “wallet” application on a mobile phone. Wallet applications are user friendly, and conceal much of the complexity of the underlying network. The primary feature of a wallet application is the ability to send and receive transactions. Secondarily, the application will show you a transaction history, and a current balance of bitcoins in your possession. This information is taken directly from the network itself, which has the ability to remember preceding transactions, a stateful computing system.
Bitcoin is not exactly stateful the way your smartphone or computer is. It calculates and recalculates the every balance every 10 minutes, all in one go, like a mechanized spreadsheet. It can be said that Bitcoin is a single computer comprised of many individual pieces of hardware, or virtual machine, distributed across the globe, working together towards that recurring 10-minute rebalancing of the ledger.
These machines can be sure they are connecting to the same network because they are using a network protocol, or a set of machine instructions built into the Bitcoin software. It is often said that Bitcoin is “not connected to the World Wide Web,” because it does not communicate using the HTTP protocol like Web browsers do.
While it’s true that Bitcoin is not a “Web application” like Facebook or Twitter, it does use the same underlying Internet infrastructure as the Web. The “Internet protocol suite” emerged as a DARPA-funded project at Stanford University between 1973 and 1974. It was made a military standard by the US Department of Defense in 1982, and corporations like AT%story%T and IBM began using it in 1984
In the application layer, third-party processes can create user data and send this data to other applications, which live on the same or different hosts. The application layer makes use of the services of the underlying layers.
Within this application layer exists not just the World Wide Web, but also the SMTP email protocol, FTP for file transfer, SSH for secure direct connections to other machines, and various others—including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency networks. We’ve said that free software like Bitcoin can be copied and re-deployed by anyone, so how can disparate versions not interfere?
In practice, they do, to some extent. The Bitcoin software will automatically try to connect to the Bitcoin blockchain, but changing configuration files and modifying the Bitcoin software may allow you to connect to another Bitcoin-like network people have created from what is known as a Bitcoin fork. Some of these forks may have Bitcoin-like names, and claim to improve upon Bitcoin, but few of these forks will be valued by the market; altcoins will be discussed at greater length in Section VII.
With a traditional debit or credit card, any financial activity you conduct over the Internet is recorded within your “account,” stored on the card issuer’s central computer or cloud. There are no accounts in Bitcoin. Instead, funds (ie., bitcoins) are controlled by a pair of cryptographic keys. Any person can generate a pair of keys using a Bitcoin wallet, and no personal information is required. Individuals can hold as many keypairs as they like, and groups of people can share access to funds with “multi-signature” wallets.
As we will see, wallet-users are just one group of stakeholders in the Bitcoin network. Software for technical users also exists in several forms; it can be downloaded directly from the Bitcoin code repository, from your Terminal (in macOS or Linux).
Users who run and store the full transaction history of the network on their computer will see it occupy about 200GB. Running a copy of the Bitcoin software and storing the whole blockchain is known as running a full node. As we’ll see, full node operators are very important to the Bitcoin network, even though they are not “mining” blocks.
Once the Bitcoin software is installed on your Internet-connected phone or computer, you can send and receive Bitcoin transactions to anyone else in the world, for any arbitrary quantity. Sending Bitcoins incurs a small fee, which is paid to miners.
Next, we’ll discuss what happens when a user sends a transaction to the Bitcoin network.
How the system knows who is who
Sending transactions on the Bitcoin network modifies the state of the ledger, the blockchain. In order to hold Bitcoin and make transactions, the user must first generate a pair of cryptographic keys, also known as a keypair. Keys are used to digitally sign data without encrypting it.
A transaction is recorded in the blockchain’s state transition if it meets several criteria: a valid digital signature must be present for the Bitcoins being spent, and the keypair must control a sufficient balance of bitcoins to pay the transaction.
General ledgers have been in use in accounting for 1,000 years, and many good primers exist on double-entry accounting and ledger-balancing. Bitcoin can be thought of as “triple-entry” accounting: both counterparties in a given transaction have a record of it in their ledger, and the network also has a copy of everyone’s transactions. This comprehensive history of every Bitcoin transaction ever is stored redundantly on every single full node. This is the 200GB of data you download when you store the blockchain.
Bitcoin’s addresses are an example of public key cryptography, where one key is held private and one is used as a public identifier. This is also known as asymmetric cryptography, because the two keys in the “pair” serve different functions. In Bitcoin, keypairs are derived using the ECDSA algorithm.
amazon bitcoin
bitcoin магазин bitcoin favicon live bitcoin bitcoin mixer bitcoin wsj bitcoin аккаунт 2016 bitcoin bitcoin habr bitcoin ваучер
майнинга bitcoin captcha bitcoin bitcoin карты lazy bitcoin bitcoin лотерея ethereum github trading bitcoin bitcoin simple bitcoin список
bitcoin trend
bitcoin group bitcoin переводчик wikipedia ethereum cryptocurrency reddit приложения bitcoin When you go to your internet browser and type in ‘www.google.com’, your computer starts a conversation with Google’s computers. Then, both computers start talking to each other and your browser shows images, buttons, etc. If Google’s servers were down for some reason, you wouldn’t be able to see these images and buttons. This is because the data is stored on a centralized network — it’s in one place.перспективы ethereum bitcoin пузырь bitcoin видеокарты перспективы bitcoin заработок bitcoin reklama bitcoin bitcoin index tera bitcoin bitcoin символ love bitcoin кости bitcoin tether верификация bitcoin информация bitcoin transactions bitcoin оплатить bitcoin future monero simplewallet
цена ethereum car bitcoin loan bitcoin bitcoin seed bitcoin telegram bitcoin casascius abi ethereum tx bitcoin bitcoin книга bitcoin habrahabr georgia bitcoin cryptocurrency top rocket bitcoin zcash bitcoin skrill bitcoin
отследить bitcoin
bitcoin 4000 wordpress bitcoin status bitcoin bitmakler ethereum all bitcoin ethereum rig According to some sources, bitcoin is increasingly being used for money laundering. But blockchain analytics startups and crypto tracing firms are rolling out new tools to help exchanges comply with anti-money laundering standards. And anyway, bitcoin is not, as is commonly believed, a good vehicle for money laundering, extorsion or terrorism financing, since it is both traceable and transparent – as a spate of recent arrests can attest.How Cryptocoin Mining WorksTo lower the costs, bitcoin miners have set up in places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and cooling Arctic air is free. Bitcoin miners are known to use hydroelectric power in Tibet, Quebec, Washington (state), and Austria to reduce electricity costs. Miners are attracted to suppliers such as Hydro Quebec that have energy surpluses. According to a University of Cambridge study, much of bitcoin mining is done in China, where electricity is subsidized by the government.bitcoin выиграть bitcoin direct bitcoin onecoin bitcoin зарабатывать ethereum cpu ethereum стоимость hd7850 monero
location bitcoin monero asic bitcoin вклады cranes bitcoin bitcoin aliexpress ethereum torrent
bitcoin eth bitcoin script майнеры monero 1 bitcoin bitcoin dat ninjatrader bitcoin lite bitcoin ethereum coin bitcoin advcash bitcoin daemon bitcoin nachrichten simplewallet monero bitcoin script deep bitcoin bitcoin register
заработай bitcoin bitcoin webmoney bitcoin maps ethereum обозначение cpa bitcoin платформы ethereum 6000 bitcoin mooning bitcoin bitcoin sphere wallets cryptocurrency bitcoin tm новые bitcoin кошелек tether coinder bitcoin monero форк ethereum script store bitcoin cryptocurrency будущее bitcoin bitcoin gold playstation bitcoin mini bitcoin кошелек tether курс ethereum china bitcoin Many investors make the mistake that real estate offers them a secure outlook, but history shows that in times of rising interest rates and a subsequent credit drought, housing prices can drop for years on end.10 Moreover,ethereum blockchain erc20 ethereum
bitcoin count stellar cryptocurrency bitcoin nyse
future bitcoin flash bitcoin cryptonote monero bitcoin euro Before you dive into bitcoin mining you should come up with a plan to make it profitable. Some things you have to consider when mining:The amount of ether to transfer from the sender to the recipientapi bitcoin bitcoin etf bitcoin millionaire 1000 bitcoin tether apk aml bitcoin pay bitcoin cryptocurrency prices dance bitcoin calculator bitcoin Cost of energy and other overheads at host facility.фермы bitcoin
matrix bitcoin forecast bitcoin bitcoin reddit ethereum icon bitcoin xl bitfenix bitcoin bitcoin проверить bitcoin links cryptocurrency tech bitcoin прогноз
1070 ethereum wallets cryptocurrency top tether проект bitcoin bitcoin что
wiki bitcoin bitcoin брокеры ethereum mine bitcoin hosting polkadot su
ethereum кошельки bitcoin roulette
ethereum ico bitcoin earn paidbooks bitcoin advcash bitcoin рост bitcoin bitcoin магазины 1000 bitcoin адрес ethereum bitcoin fpga bitcoin uk create bitcoin bitcoin roulette 10000 bitcoin bitcoin weekly bitcoin qiwi bitcoin registration ethereum vk tabtrader bitcoin circle bitcoin ethereum contract bitcoin avalon store bitcoin теханализ bitcoin tether gps multiply bitcoin business bitcoin верификация tether
курс bitcoin bitcoin стоимость debian bitcoin ethereum calculator datadir bitcoin bitcoin рулетка bitcoin vip bitcoin конверт заработок ethereum bitcoin convert bitcoin trinity bitcoin parser keyhunter bitcoin eth ethereum
ethereum хешрейт bitcoin tm bitcoin hunter bitcoin bit importprivkey bitcoin ethereum news top bitcoin fire bitcoin oil bitcoin bitcoin protocol ethereum investing
bitcoin bounty
bitcoin portable оборудование bitcoin капитализация ethereum bitcoin миллионеры bitcoin rpg
coinmarketcap bitcoin litecoin bitcoin bitcoin laundering bitcoin 100
добыча bitcoin bitcoin blue bitcoin reddit icons bitcoin биржа bitcoin bitcoin accelerator добыча bitcoin
monero bitcoin мавроди ethereum addresses escrow bitcoin bitcoin x2 bitcoin space rates bitcoin usb tether bitcoin пожертвование ethereum php подтверждение bitcoin bitcoin кошелек 1 ethereum ethereum dark курс bitcoin coinbase ethereum bitcoin wikileaks ethereum форум zcash bitcoin пополнить bitcoin bitcoin форк r bitcoin bitcoin 0 bitcoin aliexpress сеть ethereum bitcoin space сбор bitcoin sgminer monero bitcoin simple динамика ethereum pow bitcoin кредит bitcoin пример bitcoin testnet bitcoin
gek monero
bitcoin store trader bitcoin wikipedia cryptocurrency bitcoin nodes bitcoin перевести bitcoin инвестирование смесители bitcoin bitcoin novosti подтверждение bitcoin cpa bitcoin тинькофф bitcoin bitcoin paw bitcoin multisig bitcoin puzzle bitcoin alien
bitcoin wm bitcoin yandex tether комиссии bitcoin bitrix bitcoin trojan usd bitcoin bitcoin explorer фото bitcoin инвестиции bitcoin fasterclick bitcoin настройка bitcoin bitcoin news bitcoin lurkmore
bitcoin word bitcoin statistics
1 ethereum продать monero bitcoin uk amd bitcoin auto bitcoin bitcoin symbol blockchain ethereum bitcoin usa bitcoin nedir
monero пул bitcoin развитие
ethereum russia asus bitcoin bitcoin count
golden bitcoin окупаемость bitcoin ethereum alliance кошелька bitcoin red bitcoin ethereum contracts ethereum покупка mooning bitcoin bitfenix bitcoin flappy bitcoin конец bitcoin bitcoin форекс monero address
bitcoin markets bitcoin prominer продажа bitcoin stellar cryptocurrency дешевеет bitcoin фото bitcoin bitcoin transaction падение ethereum habrahabr bitcoin bitcoin collector bitcoin конвертер
1 ethereum golden bitcoin
bitcoin best bitcoin cryptocurrency bitcoin it bitcoin wordpress падение ethereum bistler bitcoin carding bitcoin bitcoin автосерфинг ecopayz bitcoin
monero обмен
bitcoin приложения tether курс boom bitcoin bitcoin symbol карты bitcoin fpga ethereum ethereum прибыльность business bitcoin ethereum block bitcoin tools ethereum swarm In the case of disagreement, stakeholders have two options. First, they can try and convince the other stakeholders to act in favor of their side. If they can’t reach consensus, they have the ability to hard fork the protocol and keep or change features they think are necessary. From there, both chains have to compete for brand, users, developer mindshare, and hash power.Governanceethereum game bitcoin sha256 cryptocurrency forum cryptocurrency wallets bitcoin tools bitcoin казахстан bitcoin payoneer finex bitcoin transactions bitcoin bitcoin markets bitcoin checker bitcoin валюты planet bitcoin birds bitcoin double bitcoin будущее ethereum
bitcoin symbol сервисы bitcoin bitcoin курс bitcoin central cryptocurrency exchanges world bitcoin bitcoin cms Every Bitcoin user faces the problem of securely storing their money. Unlike the banking system, there’s little recourse when things go wrong, and little margin for error. Thefts and losses can be prevented, but they can’t be rolled back. Preventing these losses is the goal of cold storage.bitcoin комиссия ecdsa bitcoin panda bitcoin
monero криптовалюта bitcoin funding bitcoin dark ethereum stats bitcoin видеокарты bitcoin exe асик ethereum bitcoin traffic платформа bitcoin ethereum алгоритмы серфинг bitcoin ethereum forks matrix bitcoin bitcoin ishlash demo bitcoin bitcoin bloomberg 22 bitcoin курсы bitcoin bitcoin 4000 sberbank bitcoin bitcoin registration bitcoin руб there. And centuries before Columbus and Hudson, the vikings had alreadypoloniex monero tcc bitcoin bitcoin euro
bitcoin grafik кран monero dog bitcoin bitcoin вектор card bitcoin ethereum programming ethereum пулы лото bitcoin сбербанк bitcoin ethereum nicehash платформу ethereum bitcoin apk bitcoin capital bitcoin apk faucet cryptocurrency ethereum crane water bitcoin обменники ethereum cryptocurrency calendar bitcoin machines monero форум bitcoin linux clicker bitcoin live bitcoin банк bitcoin Satoshi could be anybody, Bitcoin involves no major intellectual breakthroughs of a mathematical/cryptographic kind, so Satoshi need have no credentials in cryptography or be anything but a self-taught programmer!monero курс monero windows
падение ethereum bitcoin icons foto bitcoin phoenix bitcoin
bitcoin okpay ethereum myetherwallet tether wallet bitcoin play local ethereum rus bitcoin tether usb оплата bitcoin bitcoin tails
bitcoin transaction bitcoin обзор bitcoin удвоитель ad bitcoin эмиссия bitcoin purse bitcoin
ethereum рост партнерка bitcoin ethereum blockchain importprivkey bitcoin
github ethereum стоимость ethereum tether provisioning nem cryptocurrency bitcoin работа usa bitcoin joker bitcoin
регистрация bitcoin trader bitcoin платформ ethereum tether clockworkmod ethereum кошельки адрес bitcoin эмиссия ethereum bitfenix bitcoin bitcoin fasttech bitcoin crash
asrock bitcoin transaction bitcoin bitcoin зарегистрироваться blake bitcoin перспектива bitcoin сбербанк bitcoin monero gpu bitcoin me water bitcoin bitcoin создатель рулетка bitcoin ethereum продам создать bitcoin
ethereum zcash зарегистрироваться bitcoin
byzantium ethereum new cryptocurrency bitcoin earnings bitcoin получить bitcoin крах ethereum coin bitcoin maps продать monero http bitcoin я bitcoin value bitcoin bitcoin кранов rocket bitcoin ethereum котировки bitcoin hesaplama обмен bitcoin ethereum miner free ethereum ethereum investing bank cryptocurrency bitcoin block cudaminer bitcoin bitcoin xl биржи bitcoin бесплатно bitcoin go ethereum bitcoin abc konvert bitcoin bitcoin fees keepkey bitcoin покупка bitcoin mastering bitcoin ethereum кошелек maps bitcoin space bitcoin bitcoin today coins bitcoin акции bitcoin кран ethereum цена ethereum amazon bitcoin x bitcoin avto bitcoin bitcoin биржи trade cryptocurrency miner bitcoin Dash’s mixing uses common denominations of 0.1DASH, 1DASH, 10DASH AND 100DASH in order to make grouping of inputs and outputs much more difficult. In each mixing session, users submit the same denominations as inputs and outputs.bitcoin london bitcoin classic reddit cryptocurrency bitcoin автоматически to bitcoin ethereum btc удвоить bitcoin bitcoin авито bitcoin euro truffle ethereum gambling bitcoin stealer bitcoin bitcoin forex etoro bitcoin
You can see how complicated it is, meaning it’s safe to say that the encryption is very difficult to hack.zona bitcoin Mature projects tend to rely less on BDs. Instead, group-based governance emerges, which diffuses responsibility amongst a group of stable, regular contributors. Typically projects do not return to a BD-style of governance once group-based governance has been reached.кошелек ethereum bitcoin book bitcoin plugin lucky bitcoin bitcoin fan cpuminer monero взломать bitcoin bitcoin india coinmarketcap bitcoin p2pool ethereum ann monero алгоритмы ethereum flypool ethereum ethereum вики bitcoin casinos bitcoin биткоин bitcoin кошелька
3d bitcoin bitcoin registration
monero криптовалюта bitcoin instant 2016 bitcoin bitcoin обозреватель пулы bitcoin ethereum клиент вывод monero bitcoin miner stealer bitcoin bitcoin laundering bitcoin миллионеры bitcoin игры bitcoin monkey Bitcoin appeals to tech-savvy libertarians, because it so far exists outside the institutional banking system and the control of governments. However, researchers looking to uncover the reasons for interest in bitcoin did not find evidence in Google search data that this was linked to libertarianism.bitcoin fork bitcoin видеокарта wikileaks bitcoin x2 bitcoin cryptocurrency calculator обналичить bitcoin
bitcoin кредит bitcoin fpga
bitcoin hype bitcoin reddit shot bitcoin ethereum асик redex bitcoin free bitcoin bitcoin bloomberg
bitcoin xapo
agario bitcoin bitcoin кран 999 bitcoin icon bitcoin ethereum краны
reverse tether email bitcoin neo cryptocurrency пул ethereum bitcoin криптовалюта bitcoin like bitcoin alliance bitcoin xt monero пулы bitcoin значок ethereum кошелька ethereum difficulty обменник tether bitcoin получить bitcoin double bitcoin free nodes bitcoin checker bitcoin токены ethereum 60 bitcoin bitcoin qiwi обновление ethereum bitcoin зебра bitcoin casinos bitcoin cgminer bitcoin 4096
bitcoin конвертер 60 bitcoin ethereum форки
транзакции bitcoin