Bitcoin
Notes on Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto.
The paper describes a new type of peer-to-peer electronic cash that allows payments to be sent without a financial institution. Bitcoin utilises Digital Signatures and solves Double-Spending Problem by utilising hash-based Proof-of-Work.
The longest chain - the ledger - of blocks serves as proof of the sequence of events, and also proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.
As long as the majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they will generate the longest chain and outpace attackers (Nakamoto, 2008).
Predecessors
Earlier work on proof-of-work and electronic cash includes:
- Hashcash by Adam Back, cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper (Nakamoto, 2008).
- B-Money by Wei Dai, also cited in the whitepaper (Nakamoto, 2008).
- Bit gold by Nick Szabo, a proposal combining proof-of-work, timestamps and distributed ownership records (Szabo, 2005).
- RPOW by Hal Finney, a working 2004 system that exchanged Hashcash for transferable tokens, using a server with secure hardware (HalFinney).
Related
References
Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. 2008. ↩ 1 2 3
Nick Szabo. Bit gold. 2005. ↩
Hal Finney. RPOW - Reusable Proofs of Work. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/finney/rpow/index.html. ↩