Did you read the first ever created whitepaper? | 白皮书始祖

Reading the first ever whitepaper for the first time after consuming much of garbage whitepapers, my shame, Mr Satoshi. I have a deeper understanding of the blockchain than my average peers prior to this reading, but reading this 9-page PDF gave me another chance of witnessing what a great whitepaper/thesis should be like.

Below are some highlighted notes which interested and wowed me after the consumption:

1) If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.

After reading much of other voting systems in all kind of blockchains, it is an interesting perspective to interpret the electricity-consuming proof-of-work activity as voting with CPU power. This is exactly what happens in the POW. Much like with the DPOS voting mechanism like EOS/Steem, who could gather more miners(gaining witness votes) and afford to spend more electricity(stake more Steem power), have more power in getting more coins.

2) To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.

I constantly have a problem in understanding how is the mining difficulty be determined. This sentence explained in a simpler way but I think digging deeper into the technical part would be more helpful in getting the clearer picture.

3) Nodes always consider the longest chain to be the correct one and will keep working on extending it.

In other words, the attacker is almost impossible to take over the longest and honest chain because, in order to do that, he will have to rework all the previous blocks while catching up with the latest increasing blocks. Man, it would be easier for betting on the Dogecoin to dethrone Bitcoin over the crypto ranking.

4) Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation-free.

While there is less than 20% of Bitcoin to be mined and the block reward expected to be halved in the coming early June 2020, I once wondered what would keep the miners incentivized to secure the network. Seems like they will be living fully on the transaction fee by then. With technology like the Lightning Network incoming to reduce the fee by a large extent, it sounds like a conflict of interest here in the short future.

5) Nodes are not going to accept an invalid transaction as payment, and honest nodes will never accept a block containing them. An attacker can only try to change one of his own transactions to take back the money he recently spent.

This is referred to the event of a successful attack on the honest chain, it doesn’t mean an attacker could generate new coin out of thin air nor taking coins from other’s wallet. Double-spending is all he can do. Of course, he can still proceed all the wrong-doings on this own chain but it is subjected to the majority miners whether to continue investing computing power to acknowledge it. Owning a chain which is owned by a single entity worthless.

说来惭愧，在币圈混迹了一年多直到今天才朝圣了白皮书始祖，不好意思了， Satoshi先生！尽管里头很多概念已经是耳熟能详，还有好些 concept 也让人读来由耳目一新的感觉：

1） Proof-of-work 其实就是用 CPU 来投票的一种运作方式，和 Steem 上买 SP 投见证人票上没什么本质上的不同。
2） 挖矿难度时取决于一个小时的出块速度，出块越快难度越高。
3） 节点永远会倾向认为最长的链就是诚实的链。
4） 当最后一个比特币被挖完（也就是 2020 年六月左右），矿工的将全面被交易费取代。
5） 当区块链攻击成功，攻击者能做的最多就是二次消费（double-spending），而不是凭空生币和偷别人钱包里的币。

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