The way Satoshi Nakamoto came up with was how to independently agree on the history of events without central coordination.

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Editor’s note: Since the birth of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, it is destined to be a process of mixed reputation. Just like the proverb: half of human nature is divine and half of animal nature. This sentence perfectly embodies the characteristics of Bitcoin. Its decentralized design mechanism generally arouses people’s infinite reverie and hope; but in the process of implementation, it is mixed with too much human greed about wealth and desire. The “Animal Spirit” of Keynes was vividly embodied. “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares at you. In this article, the author cites classics and deeply analyzes the nature of Bitcoin. He believes that timekeeping devices have changed civilization more than once. As the American social philosopher Lewis Mumford said As pointed out in 1934: “The key machine in the modern industrial age is a clock, not a steam engine.” Today, it is another timekeeping device that is changing our civilization: clocks, not computers, are the real key to the modern information age. Machine, and this clock is Bitcoin. The original title Bitcoin Is Time, author dergigi.

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Probability time

Time always forks towards countless futures.

—— Jorge Luis Borges “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1958)

Finding a valid nonce (an arbitrary or non-repeated random value that is used only once) for a Bitcoin block is a guessing game. It’s a lot like tossing a dice, or tossing a coin, or spinning a roulette. Essentially,You are trying to find a large random number beyond astronomy. There is no progress in finding a solution. You either win the jackpot or you don’t.

Whenever you toss a coin, the chance of it being heads or tails is 50%, even if you toss it 20 times before, it will be heads every time. In the same way, every time you wait for a Bitcoin block to come in, the chance of being discovered this second is ~0.16%. It does not matter when the previous block was found. The approximate waiting time for the next block is always the same: ~10 minutes.

It can be seen that every single tick of this clock is unpredictable. Compared to our human clock, this clock seems to be spontaneous and imprecise. As Gregory Trubetskoy pointed out, this is irrelevant, “It’s not important that this clock is inaccurate. What’s important is that it’s the same clock for everyone, and the state of the chain can be unambiguously related to this The ticking of the clock is linked together.” Bitcoin’s clock may be probabilistic, but it is not illusory.

Time is an illusion.

This is especially true during lunch time.

—— Douglas Adams (1979)

However, in Bitcoin, the present can definitely be an illusion. Since there is no central authority in the network, strange situations can occur. Although unlikely, it is possible to find a valid block at the same time (again, apologies to all physicists), which will cause the clock to move forward in two different places at the same time. However, since two different blocks are likely to be different in content, they will contain two different histories, both equally valid.

This is the so-called chain split, which is a natural process of the Satoshi Nakamoto consensus. Just as a flock of birds split into two briefly and then merged again, due to the probabilistic nature of speculation, the nodes on the Bitcoin network will eventually tend to share history after a period of time.

The Satoshi Nakamoto Consensus simply puts it that the correct history is found on the heaviest chain, that is, the chain with the most proof-of-work embedded. Therefore, if we have two histories A and B, some miners try to build on the basis of history A, and others try to build on the basis of history B. As long as one of the miners finds the next valid block, the other Group miners will be programmed to accept that they are on the wrong side of history and switch to the heaviest chain, which by definition represents the chain that actually happened. In Bitcoin, history is truly written by the winner.

The payee needs to prove that when every transaction occurs, most nodes agree that this is the first transaction received. […] When there are multiple double spend versions of the same transaction, only one will become valid. The recipient of the payment must wait an hour or so before believingIt is effective. At that time, the network will resolve any possible double-spending competitions.

—— Satoshi Nakamoto (2009)

In this simple sentence, there is the secret of the distributed coordination problem. This is how Satoshi Nakamoto solved the “synchronized payment” problem encountered by our fictitious business partners. He solved the problem once and for all.

Due to the probabilistic nature of the Bitcoin clock, the current (we call it the tip of the chain) is always uncertain. The past (the block buried under the tip of the chain) is always certain.

“The more thorough the understanding required, the more you must go back.

——Gordon Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, p. 58. (1951)”

Therefore, the Bitcoin clock may rewind from time to time, and for some peers, it will tick once or twice. If your chain tip (now) happens to lose to the competitive chain tip, your clock will rewind and then jump forward, covering the last few ticks that you think have become history. If your clock is probabilistic, so must your understanding of the past.

“Tick Tick Tick–What time is it now?

Tick Tick Tick… End with C619.

Are you sure there is no problem? Could we be late?

The absolute value is not important: there are eight points before nine.

The clock is not precise, it sometimes reverses.

Accurate time means the center, and this is the root of this curse!

However, this clock has been walking ticking, ticking.

Cheating is not profitable, only the tick tick and the next block.

—— An interesting little nursery rhyme about Bitcoin and time (2020)

Conclusion

Time is still a big mystery in physics, and it questions the definition of physics.

—— Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe, pp. 117-118 (2017)

Tracking things in the information field means tracking a series of events, which in turn requires tracking time. chaseTracking time requires agreeing on a “now”-a moment of time that eternally links the determined past with the uncertain future. In Bitcoin, this “now” is the corner of the heaviest proof-of-work chain.

For the structure of time, two components are essential: causality and unpredictable events. Causality is a necessary condition for defining the past, while unpredictable events are necessary for constructing the future. If the sequence of events is predictable, then the previous events can be skipped. If the steps in the sequence are not connected, then changing the past will be trivial. Due to its internal sense of time, it is very difficult to deceive Bitcoin. People will have to rewrite the past or predict the future. Bitcoin’s time chain can prevent these two situations from happening.

From the perspective of time, it should be clear that “blockchain”-a data structure that connects multiple events causally, is not a major innovation. It is not even a new idea, as can be seen by studying the literature related to past timestamps.

A new idea, which Satoshi Nakamoto came up with, is how to independently agree on the history of events without central coordination. He found a way to implement a distributed time stamping scheme. This scheme (a) does not require a time stamp company or server, (b) does not require newspapers or any other physical medium as proof, (c) even in CPU clock time Running in a faster and faster environment can keep the timestamp basically unchanged.

Timekeeping requires causality, unpredictability, and coordination. In Bitcoin, causality is provided by a one-way function: the cryptographic hash function and digital signature as the core of the protocol. Unpredictability is provided by the proof-of-work problem and interaction with other peers: you cannot know in advance what others are doing, nor can you know in advance what the solution to the proof-of-work problem is. Coordination is achieved through difficulty adjustment, which is a magic weapon to connect Bitcoin and our time. Without this bridge between the physical domain and the information domain, it would be impossible to rely on data to agree on time.

Bitcoin is time in many ways. Its unit is storage time, because it is currency, and its network is time, because it is a decentralized clock. The relentless beating of this clock is the reason for all the magical properties of Bitcoin. Without it, Bitcoin’s intricate dance moves would collapse. But with it, everyone on the planet has access to something truly magical: the magical Internet currency.

Translator: Di Kewei

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