Such a construct – an open network of unrelated nodes following code-based rules to agree on and locally record valid transactions without a central leader – results in Bitcoin’s key properties: Bitcoin is decentralized with no central point of control; trustless as nodes implement open-source software; censorship resistant with transaction history stored locally on thousands of unrelated machines; immutable as historical transactions cannot be changed; and permissionless as anyone can partake in the network. Additionally, Bitcoin utilizes new, internet and blockchain-based rails, rather than existing, antiquated financial rails, and its technology forms the building blocks for later blockchains that add programmability and arbitrary computation to the decentralized ledger. This makes the technology underlying Bitcoin the basis for novel use cases like identity, ownership, governance, computation and more, and enables the democratization of value exchange, removal of rent-extracting intermediaries, and establishment of new paradigms around ownership and governance.
Check Also
Stablecoins: Roman Coins or Spanish Doubloons for the Modern Era
By 1900, colonialism had seen the adoption of currencies, or at least local derivations, of …