needed to operate entirely independent of them. In fact, it had to operate in a completely decentralized way—unreliant on any core set of organizations or institutions and able to survive and thrive no matter

if not most, benefit from being exposed to different perspectives—to people and teams, in other words, with multiple dissimilar backgrounds, educations, problem-solving approaches, intellectual and technical tool kits, genders, and so on. This is absolutely the definition of the crowd, and

Specialized computers called “nodes” periodically collect all the transactions and verify that they’re legitimate by checking that the Bitcoins involved weren’t previously spent elsewhere. The set of good transactions over a period of time is called a “block.”

rules and principles—like frequently using the “golden ratio” of about 1.618 to 1 when arranging the elements of a painting or other visual

Robert Wright predicted one of its most important consequences. In his essay “Voice of America,” which appeared in the September 13, 1993, issue of the magazine the New Republic, Wright reported on his forays into Usenet, a set of online discussion groups

pure engineering, aided by statistical modeling based on gigantic amounts of raw data. . . . I not only didn’t

the same time that they’re doing this work on transactions, the nodes are also involved in a competition with each other, consisting of trying to find a short numeric summary, called a “hash,” of the current block.

Instead, they fall back whenever possible on the processes of iteration and experimentation to find unbiased evidence on the quality of a new idea. Managers,

since the contract relies on BookScan data for that. Or that the publisher will actually raise our royalty rate if we meet the hardcover sales target, since that increase is part of the immutable code.