Posts tagged #Bitcoin
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The prisoners meet the generals
Getting strangers who do not trust each other to agree on a single truth, with no arbiter and over an unreliable channel: that is the Byzantine generals problem, the heart of distributed consensus. Classical solutions hold only among known, counted participants; Bitcoin solves it on an open network with proof-of-work, which makes lying expensive and turns the generals into a defused prisoner's dilemma. Out of it also comes a time chain: a chain with a direction, which fixes the order of events. The value lies there, in the problem solved.
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A fingerprint and a clock no one controls
A fingerprint says whether a text has changed, a clock no one can move lets one establish when this text existed, a stable signature says who it comes from: three already-known tools, put together, that do not abolish trust but shift it from whoever publishes to what anyone can check. A concrete use case, not a showcase of buzzwords.