The Book of Satoshi

TL;DR

Satoshi makes a reference to the ability of governments to shut down any centralized system. Pure peer-to-peer network systems like the Bitcoin and the Nostr, have been demonstrated to be more resilient.

Satoshi Nakamoto Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:30:360800 [Lengthy exposition of vulnerability of a system to use-of-force monopolies ellided.] You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.

Several questions and answers were covered in this post. Hal Finney, the first recipient of a bitcoin transaction, posed the questions. In the first part, Satoshi explains how miners retain transactions until they form them into a block.

In the second, he explains how double spending cannot occur on the Bitcoin Blockchain and how only one blockchain will prevail given that two miners solve their blocks simultaneously.

To the third question, he describes what an attacker would have to do to “rewrite history”, i.e., reconstruct and change the blockchain. To add or remove transactions in prior past blocks would require rewriting them faster than all miners on the network still working on the existing blockchain.