>>13820059 (\pb)
"What is bitcoin?"
So nobody gave a good explanation, I'll explain for anons.
To understand bitcoin you first need to understand what money is. Money is trust, an ephemeral concept, made manifest. You give me a widget, I give you $1, you trust that the $1 can then get you a widget of similar value.
The question then is, how is this trust enforced? Because if there's no way to enforce the trust, the money has no value. USD is backed by guns and oil, we trust the USD will have the value people say it will because it can buy oil, and if you stop believing in the trust the US will make you keep believing.
Bitcoin is exactly the same thing, except the trust is based on MATH instead of force or resources. 1+1 will always = 2, seems like a solid basis of trust. Sufficient at least for a currency!
The real magic of bitcoin is that the system is designed to be resilient and trustable even if everyone in the entire world is trying to defraud it at the same time. As long as >50% of the bitcoin network isn't colluding, the results are reliable. You can trust the results because math.
(I may get a few details wrong here, but this is more or less correct)
So now where it gets REALLY interesting is how it actually works. BTC works by rewarding the first computer to figure out the "correct" prime number for a block (a block is a group of transactions). When a block is created, it is assigned a random number of length L for verification. The "correct" prime number N is the number for which N * hash(block) has its last L digits the same as the verification number.
So for example, we create a block and the "answer" is 1234 and the hash of the current block is 105810, the "correct" answer is some number N such that N * 1234 = <some number of digits, maybe 0, goes here>105810
The verification bits at the end are actually every increasing. So while the first block might've only been "match 20 digits" I'm pretty sure we're in the "match thousands of digits" now (lol).
I said this would get interesting, getting there - Bitcoin is effectively computing every single prime number * prime number ever. Ever ever ever. If you wanted to make the worlds biggest password cracking supercluster BTC is how you'd do it. It literally creates a financial incentive for people to dedicate resources to generating prime numbers and factors, and if you were tapped into the network I'm sure you could be pulling useful stuff out (prime number math isn't hard, it just takes CPU time. Lots and lots of CPU time)
So as someone said earlier, if BTC is an OP, it's definitely an NSA OP (which is consistent, the first Crypto papers were published in the 90s by the NSA) where they're creating, for free, a financial incentive for people to crack passwords for them.