The conspiracy theory economics of Bitcoin
The gold standard – an economy with a finite money supply – was accepted mainstream monetary policy up to the…
Bitcoin Scripts
Each transaction output doesn’t just specify a public key. It actually specifies a script. What is a script, and why…
Bitcoin transactions
Let’s start with transactions, Bitcoin’s fundamental building block. We’re going to use a simplified model of a ledger for the…
Bitcoin : Incentives and proof of work
Let’s pause for a moment. Everything that we’ve described so far is just an abstract algorithm for achieving distributed consensus…
Consensus without identity using a block chain
Bitcoin’s consensus algorithm. Recall that Bitcoin nodes do not have persistent, long‐term identities. This is another difference from traditional distributed…
Bitcoin : Distributed consensus
In a generic manner, centralization and decentralization. Let’s now examine decentralization in Bitcoin at a more technical level. A key…
Bitcoin : Centralization vs. Decentralization
Decentralization is an important concept that is not unique to Bitcoin. The notion of competing paradigms of centralization versus decentralization…
Traditional financial arrangements
Back in time before there were governments, before there was currency, one system that worked for acquiring goods was barter.…
The Long Road to Bitcoin
The path to Bitcoin is littered with the corpses of failed attempts. I’ve compiled a list of about a hundred…
The Future of Bitcoin and the Blockchain
BITCOIN IS NOT SO MUCH a single software program as it is software written using a model called the blockchain…
