This is an opinion piece by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-minded Bitcoin podcast host.
The Bitcoin White Paper is one of the most important documents written in this century for anyone reading this. Every Halloween, somewhere deep down in our hearts, “when this happens” invades our consciousness. It was one of those random, innocuous moments at the time. presented the framework of
it was safe Dropped to the crypto mailing list at 18:10 UTC Using the paper abstract and this little blurb:
I have been working on a new electronic cash system that is completely peer-to-peer without the need for a trusted third party.
This paper is available at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Main properties:
Peer-to-peer networking prevents double spending.
There are no mints or other credible bodies.
Participants can be anonymous.
The new coin will be made from Hashcash style proof of work.
New coin generation proof of work will strengthen the network to prevent double spending.
Only a relatively small number of people saw or engaged with this post, but it was where the first domino fell and all the cascades that followed began. It’s an important piece and should be remembered and valued as such. This is not a specification of the Bitcoin protocol. That’s not the definition of Bitcoin. This white paper did not actually create the Bitcoin network.that code and the client Satoshi Nakamoto It was released about two months later.
What the Bitcoin white paper left behind
This white paper is only a conceptual overview. All it really does is examine the fact that a solution to the double-spending problem has been found in a very oversimplified way. A detailed analysis of the overall protocol and network structure has not been done, nor is there a comprehensive definition of the protocol itself. It’s basically just the academic equivalent of “hey, I got this idea, check it out”. Many of the protocols themselves are not mentioned at all in this paper.
for example, Section 2 of the paper states:
“We define an electronic coin as a sequence of digital signatures. Each owner digitally signs the hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the to the owner of the.The recipient signature can be verified to verify the chain of ownership.”
There was a ridiculously complex scripting system used to lock and unlock coins during the course of the transaction. As Nakamoto mentioned, it allows the construction of scripts, or “predicates” (equations that evaluate to true or false). hereit could require all sorts of arbitrary conditions to be met in order to spend the coin. as done beforecreating a coin that requires no digital signature at all to use.
The way the white paper describes what a “coin” is in its second section is the multisig, escrow, hash lock, and all the possible functions that can be (and were) built using those primitives. It’s a huge oversimplification that ignores everything. The point of the white paper was not to explicitly define the details of the protocol, it was just trying to understand the basic concept that coins can be controlled securely without relying on a central authority. The use of signatures, and all other arbitrary conditions that can be scripted, are all publicly verifiable by anyone scanning the chain.
The fourth section on Proof of Work doesn’t mention any real details regarding difficulty goals. There is no defined hard period and no average number of blocks. In the incentives section, which describes block reward subsidies and the ability to shift from new coins issued to purely transaction fees, the total supply is not discussed, and the rate that dictates a slowdown in new issuance. No time schedule. All these things. Not fully defined in the whitepaper.because That’s not the definition of BitcoinThis is just a very high level conceptual introduction to the important things that make the system actually viable.
Talked about but not implemented
Some of what was explicitly mentioned in the white paper was not implemented in the actual system. In discussing Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) in section 8 of the paper, Nakamoto notes that malicious miners can overwhelm the rest of the network and trick SPV clients into accepting invalid transactions. If possible, I explained the possibility of creating an invalid payment. The reason this is possible is that all they are using to verify anything is the block header and the Merkle he tree, which contains its individual transactions, and nothing else is visible to the rest of the block. It’s for Nakamoto suggested that nodes on the network could send an “alert” to his SPV client whenever an invalid block was encountered. This allows clients to download and verify it. This wasn’t built because you can’t validate a block before validating a block. I literally couldn’t.
Now, zero-knowledge proofs may open the door to such things in the future, but the vague idea presented here to solve the main problem of the white paper has not yet been implemented. Hmm. Mr. Nakamoto guessed as follows. possibility It was a work on zero-knowledge proofs in Bitcoin, but at the time the technology was much less developed and clearly outperformed Nakamoto in terms of depth of understanding.
Thoughts on Today’s Bitcoin Whitepaper
Looking at all these examples, we can see that the Bitcoin protocol, launched in January 2009, had a very important and crucial aspect that was never mentioned in the paper. We can also see that none of the very important security protections proposed in this paper have actually been implemented in any Bitcoin software to date.
The whitepaper is a very important document historically and in terms of conveying the most fundamental concepts underpinning the design of Bitcoin as an abstract system, but the reality of the protocol and network As for the specific technical details of , it is essentially irrelevant.
This was the failure of many Bitcoiners who left the system in favor of broken protocols such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. Satoshivision — they treated the white paper like a protocol specification. it’s not. It never was.
This is a guest post from Shinobi. Opinions expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
