(1) God block
Bitcoin (English name Bitcoin, referred to as BTC) has been destined to be a magical and controversial product since its birth. The three simple words “Bitcoin” include cryptography, economics, political science, currency, computer technology and other cutting-edge theories and technologies.
Since the beginning of 2013, with the crazy price increase, Bitcoin has frequently appeared on various technologies and mainstream media, attracting a lot of attention, and has become the most mysterious part of the popular “Internet finance” field. Many people are still wondering whether Bitcoin is a great Internet financial experiment that subverts the existing financial system, or is it a Ponzi scheme dominated by geeks?
The concept of Bitcoin was first published by a research report “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (Bitcoin: a Point-to-point electronic cash system). Subsequently, he developed the earliest bitcoin issuance, trading and account management system.
With the first block created by Satoshi Nakamoto on January 3, 2009, called the “God Block”, the first 50 bitcoins were announced. At that time, who could have thought that in just a few years, Bitcoin would be accepted and liked by so many people, from the geek circle to the public in such a rapid manner, and will be manifested in such a fierce price increase What is your unique charm?
Since the birth of the Internet, the concept of “Crypto currency” has been a hot topic, but it faces the major challenge of how to solve counterfeiting and repeated payments. Digital currency is just pure information. How to prevent people from copying and pasting it easily and then paying as much as they want is a crucial issue.
Before the advent of Bitcoin, the more common solution was to establish a central settlement system to record all transactions in real time, and at the same time ensure that people’s used electronic money can no longer be reused. This approach requires a reputable third-party organization to manage the entire system. The banking system in daily life adopts such a central settlement system.
Bitcoin uses open distributed ledger (also called Blockchain) method to avoid double payment, completely abandoning the structure that requires third-party management. All historical transactions of Bitcoin are recorded in the ledger through blocks. This ledger is not stored in a central server, but is open to the entire network and stored on each computer connected to the Bitcoin network.
When a complete transaction order is issued, the information quickly spreads throughout the Bitcoin network. The network node starts to calculate whether the transaction is valid (that is, whether the account balance is sufficient to pay), and attempts to generate a block containing the transaction information. When a total of 6 blocks contain the transaction information, it is considered “verified” and officially confirms the successful transaction.
(2) Bitcoin supply mechanism
The new bitcoin is made by running software. From the appearance, this kind of money supply mechanism is similar to the supply mechanism of gold and silver and other precious metal currencies, so it is often referred to as “mining”. ) “, And the person who mines it is called” Miner “; some people think that this creation process is very similar to playing gold coins in the game, and the image is called” playing bitcoin “.
The essence of mining is to compete for the right to keep accounts. In the Bitcoin world, every 10 minutes, a data block is recorded on the public ledger of the entire network. This data block contains all transactions that have been verified globally in these 10 minutes. The opportunity to confirm this data block is needed to grab. Every time a new block is grabbed, the winner is allowed to add an amount to his account as a reward. If a miner does not seize the billing rights within 10 minutes (in principle, only one miner can grab them at a time), he is just tossing and re-entering the next round of contention for billing rights.
The way to compete for the right to keep accounts is that everyone plays a cryptographic game called hash, and the specific algorithm is: SHA-256 (a typical secure hash algorithm).
Due to the randomness of the hash calculation results, there is no way to optimize the algorithm, and it can only be calculated from zero to the top (that is, the “exhaustion method”). At this time, whoever has the greater computing power will have a better chance of finding this number first. Therefore, the possibility of “discovering” a new data block is based on a comparison of his computing power and the total computing power of the entire network.
In the Bitcoin network, the production rate of new coins is predetermined. The generation time of each transaction block is kept at about 10 minutes. The initial reward for successfully grabbing a block is 50 bitcoins. Every time the size of the blockchain reaches an integer multiple of 210,000 (it will be reached every four years), the reward for successfully grabbing the block will be halved: first from 50 bitcoins to 25, then from 25 to 12.5. By analogy, the entire system will generate 21 million bitcoins by about 2140, reaching the previously set total cap. After that, bitcoin will not increase, and the income of bitcoin miners will be paid by the transfer fee.
(3) Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
Until now, Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity is still confusing, no one knows. Some are just endless speculations. Although there is a Japanese name, it is difficult to verify whether he is a Japanese or whether he is an organization. People only know that he should be at least the top excellent algorithm engineer and programmer.
Satoshi Nakamoto rarely reveals his information. The online profile shows that he lives in Japan, but his email address is from a free service site in Germany, and no information can be found on Google.
The topics he talked about online before were limited to source code technical discussions. On December 5, 2010, after Bitcoin users started asking WikiLeaks to accept a donation from Bitcoin, he posted on the Bitcoin forum that “This project needs to grow gradually so that the software can continue to strengthen in the process. I call WikiLeaks does not accept Bitcoin. It is still a small testing community in its infancy. At this stage, if it is not handled properly, it will only ruin Bitcoin. “
At 6:22 GMT on December 12, 2010, just 7 days after he posted a post arguing about WikiLeaks’ issue of Bitcoin donation, Satoshi Nakamoto posted the last post in the forum, which talked about the latest version of the software. Critical details, after that, he disappeared from the forum, his email reply became unstable, and finally ended completely. Since then, Satoshi Nakamoto has kept in touch with only a few people, and Gavin Andresen, who later became the leader of the Bitcoin core development team, is one of them. On April 26, 2011, Anderson told other members of the Bitcoin development team: “Satoshi Nakamoto proposed this morning that we should try to avoid the topic of” mysterious founder “when talking publicly about Bitcoin.” , Satoshi Nakamoto did not even reply to Anderson ’s emails.
The mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto has completely disappeared this time, and Bitcoin enthusiasts feel sad and puzzled by his departure. But Bitcoin continues to develop with strong vitality.
To commemorate him, someone developed a small gaming game that uses Bitcoin as a betting chip, named “SatoshiDice” (SatoshiDice), this game allows players to choose different probability of winning bets, completely random, unable Cheating is a small game that Bitcoin enthusiasts are keen on. In July 2013, this small game was received by an anonymous mysterious buyer at the price of 126,315 bitcoins (then worth $ 11.5 million) and became the first large-scale acquisition in the bitcoin industry.
The speculation and reverie of Satoshi Nakamoto is one of the topics that Bitcoin enthusiasts are very interested in. It increases the mystery of Bitcoin and provides a lot of material for conspiracy theorists.
It now appears that the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, may remain a mystery