Читать книгу Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - Peter Kent - Страница 17

In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto published and posted in a cryptography forum known as the “Cypherpunk Mailing List” a document titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” saying, “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” he said.

The following list of attributes, Nakamoto stated, were key to Bitcoin:

 Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.

 No mint or other trusted parties.

 Participants can be anonymous.

 New coins are made from Hashcash style proof of work.

 The proof of work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double spending.

The document is a fairly dry read, but it’s worth spending a few minutes checking it out. You can easily find it by navigating to https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. The abstract for the Bitcoin white paper begins with the following statement: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” Nakamoto wrote. He explains that his method has solved the “double-spending” problem, an issue plaguing earlier digital currencies: the challenge was to make sure that a digital currency couldn’t be spent twice.

Nakamoto also describes using blockchain functionality, although the term blockchain appears nowhere in the white paper:

We propose … using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.