Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…How do you do that? Well, the solution that Satoshi proposes is a "peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.” Why is chronological order important? Go back to the I'm emailing you $100 and I'm copying somebody else on that transaction example. Whoever gets the $100 first, then it's spent. The next transaction is void. If I were trying to give somebody a paper $100 bill, the first person who gets it, they've got it. Yeah. Of course, the way that this actually works—we talked about public-key encryption—is when I'm sending it to you, I sign it with my private key. I take that bitcoin, which is a hash that has all the other signatures that came before it in there. I know that's not technically exactly right, but that's the reasonable way to think about it. I sign it with my private key, I send it. Anybody else out there, if they wanted to sign something from my wallet that I owned, they couldn't. They only have my public key, I'm the only one who can sign it and send it to someone else. Now, of course, that someone else can verify that I sent it to them because they have my public key. They can quickly do some work and check the work and say, yeah, that did come from you. But they don't need to know my private key in order to do that check. If this system were to exist, all these transactions—thousands of them, millions of them, billions of them—would be going out into the network. How do you keep track of which ones are the valid, correct, unique, scarce ones? The way that Satoshi proposes you do this is you have a distributed system of the ledger. Everybody can see the entire chain of transactions of every transaction that has ever happened within the system.…

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