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<title>Blown to Bitcoins - Comfortably Numbered</title>
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<a href="/"><span class="left-word">Comfortably</span> <span class="right-word">Numbered</span></a>
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<article id="postcontent" class="centered">
<section>
<h1>Blown to Bitcoins</h1>
<center><em><p>Bitcoin for Liberal Arts majors.</p>
</em></center>
<h4>Monday, December 30, 2013 · 7 min read</h4>
<p>Bitcoin is a hard-core nerd thing. It was built by nerds, and was used by
nerds—until recently. <em>Normal</em> people have finally caught on to
this powerful new alternate currency (it became rather popular in black markets
when they realized purchases were untracable). And now a café a few
blocks from my home accepts bitcoins.
<p>So how do bitcoins work? How can something as fragile as money run
completely in the cloud? And why should the public trust us nerds, anyway?
Well, here's a short Bitcoin 101: Bitcoin for Liberal Arts Majors.
<p>The article is in three parts: how bitcoin transactions work, why it is
secure, and how bitcoins come to be in the first place.
<h3>The Whiteboard</h3>
<p>Let's assume that we have already, somehow, <q>created</q> some amount of
bitcoins, and distributed them among some people. We'll formally establish how
bitcoins come into being later. We can model the Bitcoin system as a large
whiteboard that anyone can see or write on (but not erase). Suppose Alice wants
to send Bob some bitcoins. She just writes an IOU on the whiteboard:
<blockquote style="font-family:cursive;">I, Alice, agree to send Bob a sum of 2
bitcoins.</blockquote>
<p>Since IOU is kind of childish, we nerds call it a <em>transaction</em>. Now
if Bob claims to have 2 bitcoins to pay Charlie, Charlie (or anyone else,
really) can take a look at the whiteboard and trace all of Bob's transactions.
<p>That's really it—Bitcoin is a large public whiteboard listing
transactions. Nobody keeps track of accounts or balances, because those can be
recalculated if needed. In reality, it's a bit more complicated. People all
over the world run a <em>Bitcoin Daemon</em>, which is connected to other
Bitcoin Daemons over the internet. Each transaction is sent to a daemon, which
then forwards it to others. The end result is that the whiteboard isn't
centralized, it's distributed across a network. It's more like Alice writes a
postcard to the nearest daemon, and the daemon forwards photocopies to its
neighbors.
<p>Compare this to a traditional paper currency system, where you have central
banks. Each transaction goes through a bank: the bank deducts money from the
sender's account and adds money to the recipient's account, possibly deducting
some as a fee. That puts the bank above other people. They can freeze accounts,
track people, or delay transactions for as long as they want. Bitcoin bypasses
this bank and makes transactions directly between people:
<em>peer-to-peer</em>.
<h3>The dotted line.</h3>
<p>If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that since anyone can
write to the board, anyone can put up a transaction from Alice to himself.
Nobody knows who wrote that message. So Bob can easily write fake transactions
and get all of Alice's bitcoins. Which is a problem.
<p>The solution is called <strong>public key cryptography</strong>, a
remarkably snazzy trick. It relies on using certain clever mathematical
properties of really big numbers to encrypt data. This math is called
<strong>RSA</strong>, which are the initials of all three inventors (Rivest,
Shamir, and Adleman). We accept RSA as being the most secure option available,
but that's only because it hasn't been hacked yet. Conspiracy theorists do talk
about how the people at the NSA already have broken it.
<p>To get started, Alice picks a huge number (in practice, this is several
hundred digits worth of huge). She does some math with that number to get two
new numbers: her <em>public key</em> and <em>private key</em>. As expected, she
guards her private key with her life, but she is free to give out her public
key. Both of these look a lot like a cat started dancing on your keyboard: long
sequences of random-looking numbers and letters.
<p>Alice can now <em>sign</em> a message (piece of text) by applying some
mathematical transformations that depend on knowing her private key. Since
Alice keeps her private key a secret, only she can create a signed message. A
signed message can then be <em>verified</em> by applying a different set of
transformations which depend on the public key. If the message was signed with
the correct, matching private key, then the verifying transformations will give
a meaningful result.
<p>Let's say Alice wants to send Bob a bitcoin. Now all she has to do is create
a public statement which says:
<blockquote style="font-family:cursive;">I, [Alice's public key] agree to send
[Bob's public key] a sum of 2 bitcoins.</blockquote>
<p>She now signs this message and puts it up on the whiteboard. Charlie can
verify that the transaction is legitimately from Alice by checking it with
Alice's public key.
<p>Notice how this makes Alice and Bob anonymous. Neither Alice nor Bob are
mentioned, just their public keys. This is why Bitcoin doesn't need an account
or email address or registration. If she wanted to, Alice could make a new
public key for each transaction. In fact, Bitcoin encourages that.
<h3>Where do bitcoins come from?</h3>
<p>The short answer is that people get paid to run Bitcoin Daemons, because
daemons take up a lot of power. One of the more profitable daemons duns in
Reykjanesbaer, Iceland where the Arctic prevents the computers from physically
<em>melting</em> because of the huge computations (they also have cheap
geothermal power there).
<p>The long answer is a lot cooler. To really understand how it all works, you
need to know what a cryptographic hash function is.
<h3>Hashes—There, but not back again</h3>
<p>Paint is fun. You mix yellow and blue, and just like that you have green.
Kindergarten stuff. But what if you were presented with a brand new color, and
asked to name its constituents? You can't, without a lot of experimentation. So
mixing paint is a one-way road: it's easy to go from constituents to mixture,
but not the other way around.
<p>In Computer Science, we have something very similar, called
<strong>cryptographic hash functions</strong>. That's just a fancy word for
some operation that takes a number, and spits out another number, but it is
mathematically impossible to go the other way. This may be hard to believe, but
one example is taking the sum of the digits of a number: it's easy to find the
sum, but impossible to tell the original number given the sum of its digits.
Some common hash functions are <code>md5</code>, <code>SHA</code>, and
<code>RIPEM-D</code>.
<p>We already have standards in place to convert text to a large number and a
large number back to text using hexadecimal notation. So you can find a hash of
any piece of text, or any data (even an image or a video!).
<p>Hashes have two cool properties: they are unstable (so a small change in the
input produces a wildly different hash) and they are fixed-length (so any input
will generate a hash of the same size). Here are some hashes (pay attention to
the difference between the second and third!):
<table style="border-spacing: 20px;">
<tr><th style="text-align:left;">Input</th><th style="text-align:left;">SHA-256</th></tr>
<tr><td>banana</td><td style="font-family:monospace;">5a81483d96b0bc15ad19af7f5a662e14-b275729fbc05579b18513e7f550016b1</td></tr>
<tr><td>Hello, World!</td><td style="font-family:monospace;">d6d0e133111615497a62e9f84e061a49-d106e90d90b7bc975790a84c8588fe80</td></tr>
<tr><td>Hello, World </td><td style="font-family:monospace;">8663bab6d124806b9727f89bb4ab9db4-cbcc3862f6bbf22024dfa7212aa4ab7d</td></tr>
</table>
<h3>Blocks</h3>
<p>Anyway, back to Bitcoin. The giant stack of transactions is broken up into a
large number of sections called <strong>blocks</strong> that are chained
together. A block contains the following important information:
<ul>
<li>The version of the software being used
<li>A reference to the previous block
<li>All the transactions, in order
<li>The time
<li>The <strong>target</strong> at that time (this is a number that Bitcoin provides)
<li>A <strong>nonce</strong> (this is a number that has a very specific property)
</ul>
<p>A completed block has a <em>header</em>, which is a hash of all of these
elements smushed together in order. A bitcoin daemon's job is to try to
complete the current block by finding a <em>nonce</em> so that the header
obtained from the completed hash is less than the <em>target</em> (remember,
hashes are just numbers). This process is called <strong>mining
bitcoins</strong>.
<p>Since hashes are so unstable, it is pretty much impossible to work backwards
from the target to get a nonce. Instead, you have to guess a nonce, and see if
it works. Furthermore, a lot of transactions happen every second, so the same
nonce will return different hashes over time. So you can't really eliminate a
nonce either. It's just guessing again and again. More powerful computers
clearly have an advantage, which is why people use supercomputers to mine
bitcoins.
<p>You can find the current target at <a
href="http://blockchain.info/q/getdifficulty">BlockChain.info's API</a>. You
may find <a href="http://blockchain.info/q/probability">the current probability
of a nonce working</a> more interesting. At the time of writing, it is
approximately the probability of rolling a die 24 times and getting a 6 every
single time. The daemons automatically control the target so that on average,
each block is solved in 10 minutes. As computers get more powerful and more
people start competing in the bitcoin mining industry, we will be guessing many
more hashes per second and so the target will slowly decrease, reducing the
number of valid nonces.
<p>When you find a nonce, you get the power to tack on a new transaction that
doesn't have a sender, only a recipient. This new transaction adds bitcoins
into the system by rewarding the recipient with bitcoins. When bitcoin was
first launched, you got 50 bitcoins for solving a block. This number goes down
so that it halves every four years—as of today, it is exactly 25
bitcoins, which would today trade in the market at over $18,000 (you can find
the current trading value of bitcoin <a href="http://preev.com">here</a>). This
means that eventually, the bitcoin economy will stabilize at around 21,000,000
bitcoins in circulation and the new bitcoins added into the system will be
insignificant. The plan is to introduce a transaction fee to keep it going
beyond that point.
<h3>Recap!</h3>
<p>You've come a long way. From being an oblivious newbie, you now know the
internals of a rising cryptocurrency. You learned how bitcoin is a peer-to-peer
system with no central authority, which stores transactions rather than
accounts and balances. You learned how we use public key cryptography to verify
transactions by digitally signing each message with a private key, and checking
the message with the corresponding public key. Finally, you learned how bitcoin
mining works, by using the instability of cryptographic hash functions to
create a sort of computational lottery. Congratulations!
<p>Now you can explore the insides of bitcoin some more by viewing real live
data. Check out <a href="http://blockchain.info">blockchain.info</a>. This site
provides real-time information on each block. For example, we can <a
href="http://blockchain.info/block-index/123456">investigate block #123456</a>:
it looks like the nonce was <code>3794651987</code>, which produced a hash of
<span style="font-family:monospace;">0000 0000 0000 21a8 34fd 780d bd25 e43a
b565 b4e5 7a1f 7df0 435a c88e f982 a737</span>. See all those leading zeros?
That shows that the hash is a (relatively) small number (for example, 00029 is
clearly less than 42001). Scrolling down, the top transaction says "Newly
Generated Coins", and produced 50 bitcoins which went to public key
<code>1H54JGkh9TE5myxdamSNvm7zeFHnRWrVes</code>, who solved it.
<h3>Further reading</h3>
<p>I hope I got you excited about Bitcoin. The best thing to do now is to dive
right in. <a href="http://bitcoin.org/en/download">Download the "official"
Bitcoin Wallet</a> and start using it! Or <a
href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients">find another one</a> you may like.
<p>Finally, here are some links for you to keep on learning. See you soon!
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo">Bitcoin's promotional YouTube video</a>
<li><a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Introduction">Bitcoin's own Wiki has a great introduction.</a>
<li><a href="http://qz.com/154877/by-reading-this-page-you-are-mining-bitcoins/#/">Another great introduction from qz.com</a>
<li><a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin">If you're into code, view their Github repository where the real Bitcoin software lives</a>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin">Wikipedia: Intimidating introduction</a>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography">Wikipedia: Public-key cryptography</a>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash">Wikipedia: Cryptographic hash functions</a>
</ul>
</section>
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