Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this about Bitcoin. It's not hard to understand at all, but everyone attempts to dive into the technical details right from the start and this loses most people.

The core conceit that people gloss over is the fact there is no such thing as a "wallet" that "stores" bitcoins. The only thing that exists is a public record of numbers saying they're giving bitcoins to other numbers.

When you create a "wallet", you're choosing a private number that nobody knows and nobody has already picked. You use this private number to create another number, the public number, the "wallet address".

Since this number doesn't exist anywhere in the public record, we say you have "zero bitcoins."

Then, you get someone to claim "I am giving x bitcoins to your number". If you can get this claim (a transaction) into the public record (the blockchain), we all decide to agree "This happened." And now we say you have x bitcoins. Why? Because now you're allowed to make a transaction saying you're giving those bitcoins to another number!

It's all made up. This is what currency is, it only exists because of collective trust.

Excellent comment. You should do a "Bitcoin demystified" blog post or something.

Replace that public record with a physical ledger, replace digital signatures with handwritten signatures, and replace proof of work with a requirement to write a haiku of sufficient wittiness and relevance to the lines on the page including the prior page's haiku, and you have a version of Bitcoin that doesn't even need computers.

You need something like a telephone party line, too, but that part can be skipped over; it still works if people sit close enough that they form a peer-to-peer earshot network.

Is the telephone party line protected free speech?

Up to you. Depends on which technical aspect(s) you're trying to explain.

What's really hard is to get your head around is the random number- what are the chances someone will have the same number as me? For anyone that asks, the answer is basically 0, because maths

For a trustless currency there's a lot of trust going on there!

The private key is usually a 256-bit number, which means your private key is going to be anywhere between 1 and 2^256 - 1.

2^256 - 1 is around 1.15e+77, which is ridiculously huge (to put it technically :P)

It’s not really hard to explain: the probability of two people generating the same random 256 bit number is roughly equal to buying four tickets to the national lottery four weeks in a row, and winning the jackpot on all four of them.

No one has ever won the jackpot even two times in a row, so do we really need to worry about someone doing it four times in a row?

(Two people generating the same 256 bit number is a collision, which means the probability is 1/sqrt(2^256))

Excellent distillation of its core concept and its free speech nature. Just as much as decss for example.

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