Sublime

In an onstage conversation between Nas and Horowitz, Horowitz called Bitcoin “the internet of money,” with the potential to help billions of people.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention is also a practical and novel solution to a problem in distributed computing, known as the “Byzantine Generals’ Problem.” Briefly, the problem consists of trying to get multiple participants without a leader to agree on a course of action by exchanging information over an unreliable and potentially compromised network.

The unidentified founder of bitcoin dealt with this fairness problem by resorting to the free-market principles of competition. That is one of the purposes of the relentless hashing competition, a process that, to the uninitiated, can seem pointless. It’s a bit of a trick. Miners perform a task with the sole goal of winning a race to earn bitcoin,

In the first post since 2009—and the first communication from Satoshi in any form since 2011—the user Satoshi Nakamoto wrote five words: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.”

Nakamoto combined several prior inventions such as digital signatures and Hashcash to create a completely decentralized electronic cash system that does not rely on a central authority for currency issuance or settlement and validation of transactions. A key innovation was to use a distributed computation system (called a “proof-of-work” algorithm)