The Bitcoin White Paper: 12. Conclusion…
“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi Nakamoto
October 31, 2008″
We’ve reached the end of The Bitcoin White Paper. Satoshi wraps up his world changing proposal.
“12. Conclusion
We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power. “
This is where the phrase “trust but verify” has been changed to “don’t trust, verify”. Bitcoin is trustless. Bitcoin isn’t corrupted by human nature. It is code, math, and energy in digital form.
“The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.”
Bitcoin’s simplicity is its strength. There is no complicated code or potential backdoors that an attacker can use to steal others bitcoin. Each node gets a vote on the future of Bitcoin. To earn more bitcoin, honest proof-of-work is needed through CPU calculations that rely on energy usage.
Thanks to the Nakamoto Institute for making the whitepaper available freely via an Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. More info on that here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Source: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/