Tags / 8 quotes from 3 sources
#Bitcoin
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals Problem
If the Byzantine Generals problem sounds familiar to you, it might be because Bitcoin relies on a solution to exactly this problem to verify the authenticity of transactions and bitcoins. A mysterious programmer (or group of programmers) called Satoshi Nakamoto released the…
The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto
of excitement and controversy. According to Wired magazine, people have been trying to unmask the true identity of Bitcoin’s author(s) ever since. Silicon Valley titan Marc Andreessen recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times explaining that the key innovation in Bitcoin is…
Can Bitcoin's origins be trusted?
Since the initial formulation of the Byzantine Generals problem in 1982, it has been the subject of intense academic study and several Byzantine-tolerant algorithms and architectures have been developed. The most famous real-world solution to the problem is Nakamoto’s Bitcoin…
Bitcoin: What You Need To Know | Technology | Theguardian.com
Bitcoin, a currency no company controls
Bitcoins are an anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency.In contrast to older forms of electronic money, no company controls Bitcoin, nor ever could: all the rules about how it works are embedded into the very operation of trade, including the rate of inflation…
Man Buys $27 Of Bitcoin, Forgets About Them, Finds They're Now Worth $886k | Technology | Theguardian.com
Bitcoin without banks
In traditional banking the banks keep a record of how much money you have. They deal with all the security to make sure people can't claim they have more money than they do. Bitcoin is designed to do away with this centralisation. Each customer keeps track of their own balance…
Bitcoin's value comes from scarcity
One one level it's basic economics; if there is a demand for something and it is scarce it's price goes up, the scarcer it gets the more it's value increases. With bitcoin the scarcity is created by any user downloading software that will give the computer a unique problem to…
Mining bitcoin gets exponentially harder
To start it took 1000 calculations to reward a bitcoin, something easily achieved by one computer that was doing 100 calculations per second. However there were a few other computers/miners all mining the SAME bitcoin. After 999 calculations were made the computer that (by…
A believer's pitch for Bitcoin
Well, some people say you can still get in before the real boom. Many are predicting the bitcoin to go from 200 to 360 in the next few months and eventually end up at 100,000+ You see there is only 21 million bitcoins that can ever exist. The more people use the greater the…