Month: January 2020

Continuing the book analogy in the previous post, Bitcoin and blockchain can be seen as a throng of authors attempting to write the next page of a book. Each author having a copy of the book, it takes coordination and agreement amongst them to determine the canonical version. In Bitcoin, the ultimate rule is that the longest blockchain is the official one. That would be analogous to saying that the book with the most number of pages is the official edition.

To understand Bitcoin and the blockchain, you can think of them as a book that records all the exchanges of Bitcoins from one person to another. The pages are the links in the blockchain that contain all the transactions. Anyone can read these pages from beginning to end because it is accessible to the public and a copy of the book can be made by anyone at any time. This allows the book to be scrutinized for accuracy, and with many copies lying around, it is not under the control of a single author. This also means the book can also have pages added to it by anyone. However, writing a page to the book is difficult because it has to follow strict rules and it requires a lot of time to follow these rules. This is necessary to prevent bad actors from polluting the book with junk. On the other hand, checking that a page follows the rules is easy to do and takes far less time than trying to write it. Making it difficult to add pages, by requiring effort in time, would force malicious people to dedicate a lot of energy to commit a fraud that could be easily detected and thus not succeed. A bad author attempting to add a junk page with fraudulent transactions would be detected by the other authors who would reject the page by not accepting the page into their copy of the book. As long as the majority of authors agree and accept a page, it will be incorporated as the next page of the book. Consequently, if the majority reject a page, it will never make it into all the copies of the book.