4 ms·
Couldn't this be achieved in some sort of other way? One that does not require hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and electricity? Couldn't a r
by pontifier 13y ago
Couldn't this be achieved in some sort of other way? One that does not require hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and electricity? Couldn't a regular PKI message digest on the transaction list work?
I suppose there's something I'm not getting about this.
- dragontamer 13y agoBitcoin is a voting-based protocol. The "vote" with 51% of the computational power of the system wins. By performing very very hard math problems with every PKI digest (ie, the "proof of work"), with a "difficulty level" such that it'd take the entire BTC network approximately 10 minutes to find a solution... then it becomes extremely extremely difficult for someone to enter the BTC system and screw up the public ledger. You see, BTC is a distributed database, cryptographically signed by the BTC miners every 10 minutes. The difficulty of _performing_ the signature is automatically adjusted to take a ridiculous amount of time.