Comments by "SAL" (@SAL-fs1mr) on "3Blue1Brown" channel.

The rest of the network just builds on the block they see first. If I'm a miner, then I'll choose to build on the block that came a millisecond before the other, because whichever comes first is likely to be what the majority of the network also saw first. Once some subsequent blocks are mined, then the block that wasn't built on is disregarded, or orphaned.
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Let's take Bitcoin for example (since it is the original blockchain). The Bitcoin blockchain natively has only one type of token (called bitcoins) that get released as rewards for mining. People trade these bitcoins everyday and a price per bitcoin gets established. I can spend dollars to buy bitcoin, give that bitcoin to a friend, and they can sell it to get dollars - pretty much the same as how a physical gold coin would work. So from one perspective, the money enters the system by buying the coin. But from another perspective, the bitcoins (or gold coins) ARE the money itself. I hope my explanation was helpful, but let me know if you have questions.
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@vasvisharma6850 I think he used "Bob gets 100 LD" just to mean "bob received a transaction of 100 LD" (maybe for selling something for 100LD). Now with miners - the computationally intensive mining process makes the blockchain secure, and for doing this, miners are rewarded with newly generated coins by the protocol (or "set of rules") of the blockchain they are mining on. So it isn't anyone's money until the miners generate it (Like mining for gold, it wasn't anyone's money until it got mined by a gold miner). In other words, bitcoin miners showing to the network the work they did (proof of work) earns them the ability to make a blockchain ledger entry that basically reads: "newly generated bitcoins will get paid to the miner's address". Bitcoin's rules are such that mining earns 50 new bitcoins every 10 minute block for the first 4 years, then 25 per block the next 4 years, then 12.5 for the next four years (this is where we are now), then in the year 2020, it will decrease to 6.25 new coins, etc etc.... and if you add up all the coins, you'll end up with a maximum of 21 million bitcoins (we are currently at 17.7 million bitcoins that have been mined). This is considered one of the biggest breakthroughs of bitcoin: decentralized digital scarcity (this was never achieved prior to bitcoin) - gold is an example of decentralized physical scarcity. This is why people consider bitcoin to be "digital gold".
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@vasvisharma6850 You are welcome! Let me know if there are any other bitcoin related questions you may have!
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No. The creator of bitcoin has no special power over the code or network. Bitcoin is completely open source.
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@helenal3956 it is still a trust minimized system. You don't have to run any changed software (no one can make you do so), and if you are dedicated, you can go read and verify the code yourself.
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@helenal3956 yes, with softfork upgrades it is possible to do just that. The latest example of this is an upgrade called Segwit. Even if I didn't upgrade, I could send bitcoin to your Segwit address, and then you could use your Segwit address to send my old type address. Bitcoin is the main crypto focused on upgrading in this manner. Other cryptocurrencies use hardfork upgrades that require tremendous trust in whoever pushes for the changes that are incompatible with the previous consensus rules.
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@helenal3956 learn as much as you can before you consider buying. www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html
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@shikeridoo speed and fees are not a problem with bitcoin when it comes B2B transactions (because bitcoin is cheaper and faster than the legacy system where settlement time takes days at best). The key point is that bitcoin is extensible, it doesn't have to be just lightning network that is "the solution". For example, right now exchanges can do fast and cheap transactions on bitcoin liquid sidechain. So whatever innovation you can imagine can be utilized using bitcoin.
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Loans might continue to be the one area where banks continue to have a use. bitcoin can now be used as a medium of exchange (no need for central bank Fiat currencies) and electronic payments no longer have to be settled through banks (because the bitcoin blockchain can now serve this purpose).
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indeed.
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Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future - a good paper to read if you are interested in trying to change your mind.
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@twiexcursori as civilization advances, we will use more energy, no getting around that (Kardashev scale and what not). So we have to be smart about it and promote tech innovation that will incentivize the development of cheap and green renewables.
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Yup!
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Miners don't create new ledgers, they only add new "pages" to THE Bitcoin ledger (blockchain). There can't be duplicate pages, so each new block/page that is mined has to be built on top of the most recent one. Therefore, "taking an old one" will accomplish absolutely nothing.
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yes, if two or more new blocks are found by different miners at near the same time and then are broadcast, the rest of the miners simply choose the one the receive first and start building a new block on it. basically, even though to valid blocks are found simultaneously, only one of them will get included in the blockchain, the other one will get abandoned or "orphaned". Therefore this doesn't really ever become an issue because all the miners will end up converging on only one blockchain. Look up "orphaned blocks" to learn more.
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Larry Pina no, stay away from third party mining services.
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It depends what is meant by fraudulent. If by fraudulent they are giving themselves too much bitcoin, that still wouldn't be possible. The nodes of the network double check everything in every block produced by any miner.
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@chhayaplays7171 bitcoins are always associated with bitcoin addresses, and this is publicly known on the bitcoin blockchain. So we always know the source address and destination address to ensure there is no over spending of funds. Identities are not readily seen in the blockchain, but can be determined when bitcoins are exchanged for regular currency at exchanges.
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When it comes to Bitcoin, block production is adjusted to 1 block every 10 minutes, and each block can only be a few megabytes large - this will ensure that the bitcoin blockchain can be maintained on regular home computers with regular home internet connections (trustless usage). However, for other blockchains that grow too big too quickly, such as Ethereum perhaps, it will be difficult to maintain the full blockchain on a regular computer, so then you might have to rely on trusting a big data center.
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The survivors who made it to the lifeboats were not "investing" in the failure of the Titanic. There are too many signs that established "stable" currencies are in big trouble.
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The rule to follow in such a rare situation is to just mine on the block you saw first - because chances are that the one you saw first is the one most everyone else on the network saw first as well. This does lead to blocks getting orphaned from time to time, which is why people wait until their transactions are several blocks deep to consider them finalized.
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These messages can't be replicated since they are referring to the same unspent transaction output.
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Bankers 🤣
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it has real value based on the desire of people worldwide wanting to accept it and hold it.
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The same could be said of mining real gold...
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Meh, we'll wait and see. As a counterpoint, we already have examples of decentralized/open internet protocols that haven't become outdated.
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The computational work is needed to solve the "double spend problem", otherwise, you can have different nodes on the network showing conflicting transactions.
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@beaconofwierd1883 In your setup, who is "everyone" ? Because if you need 100% of nodes to agree, then a very tiny % of malicious actors can prevent consensus from ever being reached. So most likely you need a certain majority % to agree, not everyone - but then you are still open to a Sybil attack where one/few malicious actors run very many nodes (cheap to do since you are getting rid of the burden of computational mining). So to get around that problem you can designate "trusted nodes", but then it wouldn't really be peer-to-peer (it would be more master-slave network).
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@Zack_Taylor Yes, the ledger does grow over time and more bandwidth is needed for the initial download of the blockchain (when first starting up a node). It is obvious that uncontrolled growth of the ledger would be problematic, hence, the Bitcoin protocol rules stipulate that blocks can only be so large (current absolute max size per block is just under 4MB). So while initial blockchain download (over 200GB currently) for new nodes just getting synced might take a while (up to a week), keeping up with downloading (and verifying) a 1-4MB block every ten minutes is very doable on most home computers/internet connections. So it might then seem that the bottle neck for scaling is the ~2500 transactions per 10 minute interval, however, it is important to realize that bitcoin developers are now busy building out a 2nd layer protocol network ontop of the bitcoin blockchain call the Bitcoin Lightning Network, where true scale can be achieved (over >100,000 transactions per *second* is now possible).
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When mining, the miner who creates a particular block (and included whichever valid transactions they wanted) has to broadcast that block to the entire network (so everyone will be on the same block).
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10 minutes to send any amount of value to absolutely anywhere in the world without any restrictions (which is fast). Additionally, now that we have the bitcoin lightning network, we can these features along with instant transactions.
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Craig is such a fraud lol!
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What makes you think AI can crack any code? maybe you are thinking about quantum computing? but even then, it is well known that there are several types of encryption methods that are immune to quantum computing hacking.
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You are confusing the market for bitcoin and the actual bitcoin system. There was such a thing as the "internet bubble" some years ago, but that doesn't explain how the internet works. Also, people don't use graphics card to mine bitcoin (you need an ASIC machine).
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@marietta5316 it's worth it.
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Bitcoin is free from government and banks.
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The incentive is to not try to falsify transactions. Even if you do have more than 50% of mining power, the most profitable path is to mine normally.
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Your first question is like asking "why would people use e-mail over regular mail?". There are advantages to having a digital money not controlled by middlemen - and the advantages go well beyond buying groceries.
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@brucetrappleton6984 there are ways of using bitcoin to buy just about anything. But buying things isn't where bitcoin shines. Money should be able to be a store of value over the long term - so for example, people in Venezuela can escape their currency hyperinflation buy holding bitcoin. Also, there situations where traditional payment methods don't work well. For example, visa, MasterCard, and PayPal prevented people from sending money to WikiLeaks when sending them money is not illegal. Bitcoin has no middlemen that can stop transactions going to WikiLeaks. There are situations where global transactions are very difficult to do. For example, my Iranian friend from work uses bitcoin to send money to his family in Iran because other routes are closed down due to government sanctions. Bitcoin enables just about any individual to be able to store, send, and receive value in ways that keeps the individual in complete control.
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.... Are you a communist or something??
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Just download it again from the network.
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No, there wouldn't necessarily be a conflict. Too smooth out the frequency of getting rewards, many people might pool together.
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Do you mean price? Price at any given moment is determined by the aggregate of all the global buying and selling of bitcoin - in other words, it is defined by the free market.
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This was a concern in the very early days of bitcoin when there wasn't much mining going on, but since regular computers (and even supercomputers) can't mine efficiently at all, a botnet wouldn't be able to do anything.
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Miners don't have to include all transactions in any particular block. If one miner doesn't include it in their block, it simply stays pending (unconfirmed) until a miner does include it in a block. As a real world example, I sent a transaction yesterday to my brother. It took over 2 hours to be confirmed/mined into a block, but it was completely fine. This was because I decided to put a low fee on it, so miners weren't rushing to include it in their blocks, but it eventually did get included. If I needed to be very sure about it getting confirmed in the block, I would have put a higher fee with the transaction.
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if I mined bitcoin and then sold it to your for cash, you now have the bitcoin and I have the cash. Focus on bitcoin, because yes, most altcoins have ceo's and teams that simply gave themselves the altcoins and then dump the coins for profit.
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If miners decide they no longer wanted money, then then the difficulty to mine bitcoin goes will actually go down, and then it will be easier for new people who want to make money to start mining. I think it is safe to assume that there will always be people who want to earn money.
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@hephaistion3 yes most likely bitcoin would die without new miners. But don't bet any money on that happening, because I can assure you, I personally will start mining - if I were to mine without any mining competition, I'll be crazy rich!!!
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