Notes

Bitcoin

Reasoning for making bitcoin

  1. Anonymous
  2. Decentralized money system
  3. No trust in the government money system

How does this work in a no trust environment?

Use asymmetric encryption scheme like public/private key pairs.

Double spend problem

Double spend (make a transaction and then unrecord it and then spend that money again)

How do you solve this?

Similar to the consensus problem where everyone must agree on transactions. We can’t use consensus algos like Paxos or RAFT because its not a closed membership situation(no global view of number of servers.)

Solution

Consensus on the basis of compute(ask a proposer to solve a very hard to compute problems). That computation must have some properties-

  1. Hard to compute
  2. Easy to verify
  3. Should be unique(based on the contents of the transaction) The math problem is - HASHING

How do you make this hard to compute?

Make it so that some “n” leading bits should be 0. Time complexity - 2^n

How do you make sure that these hashes aren’t precomputed?

Include the hash of the previous block as well so that it needs to be real time.

How do you decide the size of n?

  • Store the timestamp in the blocks
  • Look at the last 1000 blocks generated and calculate the difference, average it and see if time taken for a new block generation is low or high, increase the value for n or decrease it.