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1. Bitcoin can be explained if you take time and study it. It has no new or strange constructs in it. Hash functions and digital signatures were around for deca
by oleganza 13y ago
1. Bitcoin can be explained if you take time and study it. It has no new or strange constructs in it. Hash functions and digital signatures were around for decades. You may also like this glossary: https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY.md https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY...
2. Bitcoin has rules and those rules are strictly followed and very strictly specified in actual software.
- maxerickson 13y agoThe block size blockchain fork was resolved on an ad hoc basis. There was nothing in the software to deal with it. Miners lost rewards over it (or at least, wasted cycles).
- oleganza 13y agoSoftware has bugs. They need to be fixed and some people may lose money. This story only proves that incentives are correctly working in favour of everyone: miners voluntarily chose to lose rewards and stay compatible with the older network to not shake confidence in it. The point is not to have a perfect system (which is impossible), but to have proper motivations for everyone to play along instead of cheating and stealing.
- maxerickson 13y agoWell, now we are running away from "strictly followed" and "very strictly specified". I guess I would be happy if you always posted a disclaimer with such claims, something like "But of course all software has bugs and who knows how severely a given bug in the bitcoin software will impact the network".