Bitcoin Is Not A Belief
Bitcoin Is Not A Belief
Saying I don't believe in bitcoin is like saying, “I don't believe in the Internet.” Google does not care if you believe in the Internet. The Internet works if you believe in it or not.
Saying "I believe my bank has the money my bank says it has," is a belief. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. We don't actually know, but it's belief. The money is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the nation. That's nothing more than a belief.
Bitcoin is not a belief. Bitcoin is a series of calculations. You roll a pair of dice 100 times and write down the numbers. You calculate your seed on a calculator. In elliptic key cryptography, the math makes an elliptic curve. If you draw a line on one of those points on the curve, you will cross another point on the curve. These two points represent the public/private key pair. Without the secret number, you have no way of altering the data associated with the public key.
If you have the correct secret key and are willing to pay a fee, you can spend your bitcoin. This spend is validated by all the miners around the world competing to include a batch of transactions into the bitcoin time chain. This is more math, fitting the highest bidding transactions into a puzzle that turns all data all the words into binary, the language of the machines. Then, it ads a number to it and performs trillions of calculations a second until someone finds a number with a certain amount of leading hex zeros and wins a block subsidy(for now) plus all the fees.
Part of this calculation is included in the next calculation and the process is repeated. After about 6 of these calculations it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to reverse it. This is not a belief. This is a fact. This is not a belief in nerds full faith and credit. This is math, no more of a belief than 2 + 2 = 4.
If you do it right, Nobody else knows how much bitcoin you have. It cannot be taken by Even if they do, they don't know where you keep the keys. So a company like Unchained Capital can't spend your bitcoin without another one or two of your keys no matter what, not even if the world's largest army came knocking on the door. Even if they tortured or killed you, this would not give them this knowledge. Maybe you get tortured and give them a o key to some.of your bitcoin, but they can't get all of it. Maybe you set a time lock that only allows you to.spend every 4 years. You set the rules, nobody can break the rules.
Ghengis Khan and his army may have killed 40 million people, but they could not change the rules of mathematics and say 2+2=5. Neither can any government. Sure the government of China banned bitcoin mining, but it did not stop bitcoin. Banning bitcoin is banning math. They cannot ban the number 4.. The 2+2=5 quote comes from the book, 198...sorry the last number is banned by the government. I'm not allowed to say it. Please pass the bugs.
It sounds ridiculous, right? Almost as ridiculous as $34,000,000,000,000 national debt. Banning bitcoin is like banning the number 4. It's an idea, not a belief. It is math, calculated and verified on thousands of calculators all across the world. Distributed computer networking is just a fancy word for nerds running computers to crunch numbers and publishing the results of the numbers on a computer network. Bitcoin is not a belief, it's a bunch of calculators. You keep one calculator off the Internet, and put the irreversible and un-guessable result of that calculation on the Internet. You give the computers the ability to "check your answer" without ever seeing your answer. Because if that answer points to a specific point on an secp256k1 curve, you must have the correct secret that allows you to spend your bitcoin.
That is not a belief system. At the end of the day, it's just counting…Well, accounting--A peer to peer electronic accounting system with rules set in stone like:
No more than 21 million bitcoin.
Each bitcoin after the genesis block is released on a schedule.
There are as many private key possibilities as atoms in the universe.
Bitcoin in an unspent transaction output can only be spend by (one-out-of the number of atoms in the universe private key) or certain number of these keys when multisig is used.
Valid transactions pay a fee to be calculated into the chain of blocks thousands of computes around the wold verify. This is not a belief, nor a religion. Bitcoin is not a belief in providence. Sathoshi is not watching over us from the clouds.. Bitcoin is people verifying the integrity of the bitcoin time chain using computers. I have two such computers in my closet and I converted an old S9 miner into a space heater. I don't “believe” in my space heater, the computers in my closet, or the calculator I lost in a tragic boating accident. I know these things exist. I know other people who say they also run these computers. At least they tell me they do. I must admit, I have not verified they run them myself, but I have reason to believe they run them just like me. Do you have any reason to believe what is in your wallet?
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