I've been going through Base58's bitcoin dev course and I am enjoying it quite a bit. For me, I think its the combination of the various technologies. The deeper I get into it the more respect I have for Satoshi and the developers that have built bitcoin. It may be old news to those of you that work on bitcoin projects every day but I'm pretty excited about how it all works still.
179 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 13 Mar
The fact that there isn't code for doing the "consensus", the consensus just emerges when many nodes start communicating.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 13 Mar
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384 sats \ 5 replies \ @nullama 13 Mar
It's a bit of a miracle that all the numbers used in the system work in such a perfect way.
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10: The Bitcoin system is designed so that, on average, a new block is mined every 10 minutes.
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50: The initial block reward at genesis(2009) was set to 50 bitcoins. This is the reward a miner gets for solving a new block. Every roughly 4 years this number is halved.
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2016: The mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks to keep blocks 10 minutes apart on average. If the miners are too fast, the difficulty increases, and if they're too slow, it becomes lower. This number comes from choosing roughly 2 weeks as the amount of time between difficulty adjustments. 2016 = (60 * 24 * 7 * 2 / 10).
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210,000: The mining reward is halved after this many blocks have been mined. It's roughly 4 years assuming constant 10 minutes blocks (60 * 24 * 365 * 4 / 10 = 210,240)
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21,000,000: This is the maximum amount of bitcoins ever to exist(Note that for some technical reasons there will be a few less sats than that though).
It was an educated guess by Satoshi Nakamoto
You can read a bit more about this here
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83 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 13 Mar
What really blew my mind was that picking 50 for the original block subsidy causes the subsidy amount to correspond to the proportion of bitcoins created in that epoch and also to the proportion of bitcoins left to be created:
First epoch: 50 BTC -> 50% created in epoch, 50% left after
Second epoch: 25 BTC -> 25% created in epoch, 25% left after
Third epoch: 12.5 BTC -> 12.5% created in epoch, 12.5% left after
Current epoch: 6.25 BTC -> 6.25% created in epoch, 6.25% left after
Next epoch: ...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 14 Mar
Nice.
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53 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 13 Mar
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 13 Mar
I like that.
Not sure if it was intentional, but it works great.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinFreedomSiim 13 Mar
10 min Block reward nr is the % of number of Bitcoins still to be mined from total.
In around April 20, 2024, with 840k blocks mined, 96.875% BTC will be mined as block reward goes from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC per block and so on.
It means around 2028, less than 2% of BTC is left to be mined and 2032 less than 1%.
And daily new BTC issuance goes from 900 a day now, 450 in April, 225 in 2028, and about 112.5 in 2032 thar means less than 3500 BTC per month!!!
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258 sats \ 0 replies \ @harrr 13 Mar
Proof of work with difficulty adjustment.
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79 sats \ 0 replies \ @OneOneSeven 13 Mar
That you can keep it in your head, and destroy it at will.
True power to the people.
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83 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 13 Mar
The way it organizes people on a global scale.
Previously, it has taken empires with lots of weapons and violence. Or it simply hasn't happened.
But Bitcoin achieves global consensus every ten minutes. Pretty much real time. And it's an open system. Is there anything comparable?
I guess the internet achieves something similar: at any given point, there is a roughly global state, but it feels much more tenuous and permissioned.
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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 13 Mar
Yeah, there's nothing like it. It really blows my mind that more technically minded people are fascinated with it. I think greed clouds people's minds as well as envy of those that got in "early".
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145 sats \ 2 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 13 Mar
Great question!
For me, it's the "be your own bank" aspect. This sounds like a simple phrase, like a kid clutching a piggy bank with both hands. It's not that. At all. It is far deeper.
I am running a full Bitcoin core node and I stream every single on chain transaction in real time getting validated on my computer and then I share block confirmations with...Let's see:
64 other Bitcoin nodes and we all agree that our accounting checks out. And those 64 connect with all the others to form an impenetrable ring of certainty. This takes the concept of double ledger accounting to the quantum level.
Also, incredibly, I have the entire history from the genesis block to block 834458 that I just validated that I can view and analyze in its entirety. I can create wallets at will and fund them. I truly am a bank. My bank. And your bank. We collectively form the bank, and my contribution is absolutely every bit as crucial as any one else's, along with the miners, to strengthen the network. It is truly empowering.
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16 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullama 13 Mar
A much better and trustworthy bank than any other common bank.
Every single transaction since genesis can be validated. Try doing that with traditional banks.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 13 Mar
It may be the first immutable digital object to last a century. It is historic.
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33 sats \ 0 replies \ @Catcher 13 Mar
The most fascinating thing for me is that all bitcoin exists as an open book and yet it's impossible to randomly create 24 words that will be a Saylor's 24 words.
It's like living in a village with 10^77 houses with no locks on the doors. It's impossible to steal anything because you will never ever find a house where somebody lives. I'm not sure it's a technical level thing though.
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33 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 13 Mar
Merkle trees, or hash trees. Encodes the timechain in a secure and efficient way, enabling quick data verification and facilitating the transfer of large amounts of data between computers.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 13 Mar
For me it's the agility that Bitcoin possesses. It doesn't matter how hard it's hit, it roars back. I ain't talking about bear to bull market. I am rather talking about its robust security. There were attempts back then and I'm sure there's someone/something that's trying to break it apart, but that's not gonna be resulting in success
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105 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 13 Mar
A bitcoin transaction and its various parts and their encodings is pretty interesting. To the untrained eye it looks like noise.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 13 Mar
I agree, they're fascinating
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lightworks 13 Mar
That it will go literally vertical sometime in the future ;-)
At least in some fiat currencies!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nicosey 13 Mar
MercuryLayer!
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cleaningup12 13 Mar
Bitcoin is based on time and numbers...
So... we don't know the future in the physical world and we can't go back to the past.
But with Bitcoin satoshi invented a time machine whereby if we start at 100....I know the future, I know exactly what's gonna happen in the future...it's 101,102....
Cooked my noodle 🍜
And after satoshi reinvented time, he slowed it down and sped it up!!
When the miners are confirming the blocks, if there's a rush on bitcoin, more people are buying and selling, and the block clock starts to speed up
And if it continues to speed up, it will become too fast and the block won't be confirmed properly, and the wheels fall off and bitcoin breaks
So satoshi invented the difficulty adjustment, to slow down the miners when they are busy by making it more difficult
And when times are slow, makes it easier and speeds it up.
Mind-blowing 🚀🚀
And Bitcoin is information, not a physical object....
So if I want to trade a physical object with you versus information...
Read this quote and tell me this isn't the most profound thing you've heard this year...
'If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then each of us will have two ideas'
Mind-blowing
I love it 😀
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 14 Mar
There might be an edge case in which the time stops for too long.
For example, imagine a period of massive increase in difficulty given exponential growth of miners followed by a massive destruction of technology, i.e. global war, natural disaster, etc.
There is a change in difficulty, but you need to get 2016 blocks first. If you only have primitive miners, say Pentium1-level compute power, then time will be expanded into pretty much infinity
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 13 Mar
NgU Technology
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