Bitcoin, and I almost would say the faith of humanity, comes from a bunch of mathematicians that solved some very important puzzles. Two of these problems stood out. The Byzantine general’s problem and the double-spending problem.

Now picture this

In Byzantine times, a city was under siege by 4 armies from 4 different directions. How can the generals of the 4 armies coordinate that the attack takes place at the same time? When they sent a courier from army 1 to army 2, he could be killed or corrupted because army 2 might have a different agenda. Then how would he even get to army 3 and 4 and make it back safe to army 1 again? The messenger can also be captured by warriors from the city and an imposter can carry further a false time of the attack.

I hear you thinking about how this possibly can have anything to do with Bitcoin? Hold on for a second.

Translated to computer science, this Byzantine Generals problem when solved, would bring the solution for the main issue of state synchronization in distributed systems. Don’t worry, I am not going technical here.

The underlying mechanism is trust.

When the generals and the couriers could all trust each other 100%, there would be no issue here. But they can’t. So a trustless system needed to be invented, meaning that the different parties don’t need to know or trust each other, but they still reach a consensus at the same time.

Now imagine the 4 armies are servers that execute programmable assignments. When all 4 of them would receive simultaneously the assignment to attack at a specific time, and they would agree that this assignment is valid, the problem would be solved.

The Blockchain can be seen as thousands of small Byzantine armies that are connected, they all receive the same information at the same time, and they all validate a certain action at the same time.

When the message would be changed by one of the servers, all others would see this. When the change would be correct according to the mathematical rules that all servers know than all servers would amend their strategy. They would not attack at dawn, but at sunrise for example.

In a distributed system of consensus like the Blockchain, the attack is replaced by validating transactions in the case of digital currencies.

Thank you for sticking this far. Tech can be fun too!

Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://medium.com/spirit-of-crypto/the-amazing-history-of-the-internet-of-money-bitcoin-62a727cc1001?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency