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Cryptography is Not Enough - Gigi @ Baltic Honeybadger 2022
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cryptography is not enough a longish speech on paradoxes and antennamace before i start with the speech let's get one thing out of the way code is speech and speech is code and if speech isn't free as in freedom then we'll run headlong into censorship and tyranny privacy is not secrecy cypherpunk's write code and running the numbers is not a crime numbers i'm going to talk about three numbers today because this is going to be a presentation in three acts black on white white and black and in the third act we're gonna add a little bit of color the three numbers are 12 21 and 10. number 12 act one let's begin bitcoin as we all know bitcoin is code it's computer code but in my opinion more importantly it's a moral code and this moral code is deeply embedded in bitcoin and in the creation thereof and the moral code in essence says you shall not inflate you shall not confiscate you shall not counterfeit in short you shall not steal that's what bitcoin is saying basically i will say something to you now that might sound outrageous at first namely bitcoin is knowledge and i mean this literally so bitcoin is literally knowledge and as another guy who is long dead said at one point in time knowledge is power of course we all know knowledge is power was said by francis baking and if we can equate that knowledge is power and francis baking and bitcoin is knowledge then we can easily deduce that bitcoin is baking bitcoin is banking i mean that literally and you might think has this guy lost his mind no that's not the case because bitcoin literally is baking because 24 times the word baking is a valid bip 39 seed phrase which is a valid bitcoin wallet so you can verify this yourself download something like blue wallet enterprising 24 times and you will have a valid bitcoin wallet so baking times 24 that's bitcoin and this works with many different words flag gas grade slice solution summer day tray trap zebra and there are others in total there are 241 of these special words that work if you just repeat them often enough some words you have to repeat 12 times some others will have to repeat 24. so 12 words 12 words in your head 12 magic words this is what bitcoin is and this is what bitcoin can be funnily enough 12 times word also works and is also a valid bitcoin wallet so this literally is bitcoin and anyone can use this you should not use this these are terribly insecure wallets but nevertheless this is how bitcoin works bitcoin is just 12 magic words so how how in the hell does this work how can this ever be secure why is this the way that bitcoin works so bitcoin finds strength in numbers strength in large numbers and your 12 magic words they have to be 12 random words for them to be secure if they are truly random then they then they are as secure as anything can be all cryptography is rooted in randomness or in a concept that we call entropy if they are random then your wallet is secure if they are not random then they are terribly insecure that's why you should never use the banking wallet or the word wallet or what have you so 12 valid words this is what bitcoin is it can't be any old random words they are very special words and there are jacksons involved so they have to be 12 valid words and if they are valid then you have a valid bitcoin wallet funnily enough 12 and valid and word are one of these valid 12 words so if you enter 12 12 times or valid 12 times or word 12 times this will work too so this is what bitcoin is essentially from a user-facing perspective again if you want to try this out download blue wallet or something similar anything that can recover a wallet from a p39c phrase and enter 12 12 times or valid 12 times or worth 12 times or baking 24 times or what have you all right this is what bitcoin is which brings us to act two act two black and white number 21. so bitcoin is paradoxical and unintuitive you might have heard of the story of the sage in india that went to a king and wanted to play a game of chess against the king and the king loved jess so he graciously accepted the offer but the king he wanted to repay the sage in case he won so he told his age what do you want is a payment on the off chance that you win against me in chess and to sage he was a very humble character he just wanted one grain of rice that the king was to place on one square of the chessboard and just double the grain of rice for every square on the chessboard so it's one on the first one two on the next one four on the next one eight on the next one and so on and the king obviously accepted and of course as luck would have it the sage one and thus the king began to put rice on the chess board and if you ever dealt with exponentials or large numbers you might know this story and you might know that this is a lot of rice that the king has to put on the chessboard so it's a very unintuitively large number it turns out that these are 18 quintillion grains of rice so that is indeed a very very large number if you calculate how much rice this actually is it's 210 billion tons of rice so this is enough rice to cover all of india one meter deep in rice so it's a literal metric for ton of rice it is a lot of rice back to the 12 magic words what you can do with the 12 magic words is you can open up a box in cyberspace keep in mind that all metaphors about bitcoin break down at one point in time so if you want to understand bitcoin deeply you actually have to look at the code understand the code and so on so all these metaphors are imperfect nonetheless i believe that they are useful so you can think of the 12 words as opening up a paradoxical box in cyberspace and of course you can put bitcoin in this box and these 12 magic words of course we talk about these things as a private key and you can think of the box as being locked and the key is what unlocks the box and then you can move bitcoin around and so on but also keep in mind that bitcoin bitcoin only exists inside these boxes there is no such thing as you know like opening the box and taking bitcoin out all you can do is move it to a different box so let's say you put a million sets into this box which is also why we say not your keys not your coin because your keys are equivalent to this value that's the neat thing about bitcoin is source value in bits and bytes directly it's not a password to anything that is separate the value itself is stored in the information itself so if you have 12 words in your head you literally have bitcoin in your head it's not a password or anything like that it is the value itself that is stored in your head and so that's why the keys are equivalent to the coins so let's say this key these 12 magic words control a million sets and let's say just for the sake of argument you put the million cents into this magic box so if the key is random and if you manage to keep it private then everything is good but if you do something stupid and let's say you put the 12 magic words onto a public presentation then it's very unclear who owns these kind of bitcoins like it's million sets five minutes ago it was my million sets who owns them now it's a very difficult concept to pin down in bitcoin the concept of ownership so if we look at this magical box there's a million sets in there and now we can say with 100 guarantee that this box is now empty and the million sets are 100 percent gone i can say this with confidence because i tweeted this out not too long ago and you know some of the people on twitter they're probably way quicker than you watching this presentation after the fact so i know for a fact that these are 100 gone so 12 magic words again how can they ever be secure we spoke about randomness and we spoke about these non-random wallets like baking and word and so on and so forth and how you should never ever use them so the security again comes from a strength in that is embedded in large numbers we have 2048 of these special words and if you take 12 word seat phrase this is 2048 to the power of 12 which approximately is 128 bit security which is this very large number if you ride it out and if you remember the story about the grains of rice on the chessboard that's a way large number that 18 quintillion so the quintillion are you know somewhat in the middle so we have many orders of magnitude larger than the chessboard story and just to remind you 18 quintillion was enough to cover all of india one meter deep in rice and to guess a private key you would have to like one specific one you would have to pick out one specific grain of rice out of this out of all of india that is covered very deep in rice with bitcoin it's even more involved so you can think of it as the whole visible universe covered in grains of rice and you would still have to pick out one grain of rice to break open a wallet so to speak all right so if the 12 words are random then you're more than reasonably secure and if you manage to keep your keys private then again you're secure and you have nothing to worry about so you have to check both these boxes we spoke about one paradox already i want to rattle off um some of the paradoxes that come to mind when we speak about bitcoin so again keep in mind all metaphors are imperfect these are various things that people have said over the years what bitcoin is and how it works and what the implications are don't take any of these too seriously but still i think it's interesting to think about these things all right the paradigm the paradox of possession we saw this already very clearly that you can't really possess bitcoin so bitcoin is secret knowledge but you can definitely be possessed by bitcoin as is evidenced by a lot of people that seem to be literally possessed by bitcoin so bitcoin is everywhere bitcoin is nowhere bitcoin can't be copied yet every part of bitcoin can be copied bitcoin is always changing yet it is unchangeable so no single line of code in bitcoin is the same as it was when it was first created by satoshi nakamoto but it's still unchanging in essence i would like to say that bitcoin soul has an unchanging character bitcoin is digital yet this is cars digital scarcity used to be an oxymoron but now we have something that is digital and that is cars bitcoin is dead as the mainstream media pundits will always tell you yet bitcoin is alive bitcoin is a bubble yet bitcoin is the pin bitcoin is simple yet bitcoin is complicated bitcoin is elegant yet bitcoin is complex bitcoin is ugly yet bitcoin is beautiful bitcoin is worse it's better it's a great article by guern written a couple of years ago bitcoin is worthless yet bitcoin is too expensive bitcoin is finite yet bitcoin is endless bitcoin is private yet bitcoin is transparent bitcoin is energy intensive yet bitcoin is insanely efficient at what it does bitcoin is slow yet bitcoin is fast as lightning bitcoin can't be confiscated yet bitcoin can be lost bitcoin is taxed but bitcoin is money bitcoin is time and bitcoin is energy bitcoin is savings and bitcoin is streaming money bitcoin is conservative yet bitcoin is progressive bitcoin is political and bitcoin is apolitical bitcoin is lawless and bitcoin is still all when it comes to transactions everything that happens internally in bitcoin bitcoin definitely is the law bitcoin is math and bitcoin is physics bitcoin is religion and bitcoin is atheism bitcoin requires randomness yet bitcoin creates order bitcoin price is important your bitcoin price is terribly unimportant at the same time bitcoin pays people yet bitcoin can't go bankrupt bitcoin is intangible yet bitcoin is incorruptable bitcoin has rules but no rulers bitcoin is love and bitcoin is you money bitcoin is a chain yet bitcoin and slavery head tip to ben gunn who brought this to my attention on twitter this is the one that i really like the most um after studying bitcoin for many many years it seems that this is very much very much true so bitcoin is 12 words in your head and bitcoin is 21 million bitcoin is knowledge and knowledge is power so where does bitcoin derive its power from bitcoin derives its power from the asymmetry of knowledge knowledge asymmetry information is symmetry all of cryptography is rooted in information as symmetry and bitcoin as we will see in bitcoin cryptography is not enough so you need different kinds of asymmetries for bitcoin to work so one of these asymmetries is this is true for multiple things but one of these asymmetries is that things need to be hard to produce and easy to verify this is both true in money and in cryptography money needs to be hard to produce and easy to verify for good money to emerge this is this is always true like if you can't verify the money then it's terrible money is it's easy if it's easy to produce then again it's terrible money for cryptography as well the solution to a crypto cryptographic puzzle has to be hard to produce and it has to be easy to verify as well so bitcoin again checks both of these boxes it is very hard to produce and is very easy to verify and to understand this more deeply we will have to look at two of the building blocks of bitcoin which are signatures and blocks so to interact with bitcoin to use bitcoin in a meaningful way you need to have a valid signature and someone needs to find a valid block these are the two very essential things that make bitcoin tick valid signatures and valid blocks so if you want to do anything with bitcoin you need to be able to produce a valid signature and someone needs to be able to produce a valid block so signatures are private blocks are public signatures are created locally blocks are created globally signatures deal with secret information blocks deal with public information signatures relate to the 12 words and blocks relate to the 21 million so i know this was a very general overview of those two things of course it's nuanced and i'm glossing over many many details but still the important thing is that the 12 words in your head and the 21 million there are two sides of the same coin so they're like the two pieces of yin and yang that you need to put together for bitcoin to emerge one of them is not enough you need both you need the private information which are your 12 words and you need the completely public and publicly verifiable information and the publicly verifiable history of the blockchain of the thing where the 21 million emerge out from to make bitcoin work and to use bitcoin in a meaningful way so let's put the two together and as we all know bitcoin is not black and white so we need to add some color to it as we all know bitcoin is orange which brings us to act three act three bitcoin is the orange tree to understand this tree we'll have to look at the root problem that bitcoin solves and there is no better person to ask what the root problem is that bitcoin solves then its creator satoshi nakamoto so satoshi famously said that the root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work so trust is the root problem and the problem with trust is the trust can be abused so he famously also said somewhere else that in bitcoin we do not have to rely on trust we can use crypto proof those were his words instead of relying on trust so i i would like to show you that this is not enough the crypto proof alone is not enough and to understand this we have to look at how the trust problem was solved historically so how was the trust problem solved historically very easy we always had some people that were dressed very nicely with a very nice smile on their face and they would say well just trust us we will take care of everything and you can just put all your trust in us and we will solve the problems for you and this is how the world works so we always had authorities that we had to trust and now supposedly we can replace this with cryptography but what happens if we do this does this really work so we have a face of cryptography unfortunately but there we go that is the face of cryptography it seems it is definitely the face of crypto and so the situation doesn't really change if you know the people are a bit younger and a bit more technologically involved and so if the trust does comes from the crypto bros nothing really change changes the the crypto bros just become the new politicians and that's what we want to move away from don't we like we always had politicians tell us just trust us this is the current state of things so the state would always say trust us and we will figure it out and you the plebs have no say anyway and bitcoin bitcoin is not about trusting the state bitcoin is about the separation of money and state and for the separation of money and state cryptography is not enough if cryptography would be enough we would have had something like bitcoin we would have had cryptographic money for a long time already so we had keys and ledgers and those kind of things for a very very long time this is a cryptographic device that is very very old this is a ledger that is thousands of years old and we can't magically put them together and have something like bitcoin because cryptography alone does not provide integrity cryptography alone does not provide legitimacy and to understand like i choose these words very carefully and to understand why this is the case we have to at least you know like do a little bit of political philosophy and speak to that guy and this guy is thomas hopps and he famously said that authority not truth creates legitimacy and he said this about state power and as we all know bitcoin changes changes you in a massive way so now we have our own kind of political philosophers and thomas hobbes turns into eric cason and what eric cason says about bitcoin power is the truth not authority creates legitimacy and that is exactly correct that is exactly right the authority in bitcoin comes from truth itself it does not come from any external source it's a closed loop system that builds up its own truth that anyone can verify you don't have to trust anyone and again cryptography is not enough for that you need something else you need something else so i highly recommend to read eric casin he is on a mission to reclaim the word crypto and you can read his writings on cryptosoverity.org and we're gonna talk about crypto and cryptography next so when i say crypto here in this context time most of the time i mean cryptography and again i i would like to show you that cryptography is not enough because cryptography requires secrecy cryptography requires secrecy always which means automatically cryptography does not provide legitimacy because cryptography is not necessarily tied to reality cryptography also doesn't automatically provide any type of scarcity if this would be the case we would have we would have had scars digital things for a very long time we would have had it before bitcoin but we don't like we didn't we need we needed something else so crypto most definitely provides like crypto does not provide the scarcity period we have over 9 000 coins listed on coin market cap and so it's very very clear that crypto does not equal scarcity if you hear crypto just think rockpools that's way more accurate don't think scarcity don't think you know quick riches or anything like that just think rockpools you will have an easier life which brings us to the next section of act three which is the great rug here's the problem with rockpools it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble it's what you know for sure that just ain't so mark twain famously said this about rakpos and satoshi also had something to say that he basically said where there is trust in others there's a rock i'm obviously paraphrasing but i can highly recommend you read the books of satoshi all his writings it's a compilation of all his writings online in chronological order and he was talking about trust a lot and how trusted third parties are security holes again a great piece by sabo that everyone should read and of course the great drug bitcoin fixes this because bitcoin is not crypto bitcoin is not a rock pool bitcoin in fact is anti-ruckball technology bitcoin provides legitimacy and it provides legitimacy by combining reality and cryptography it combines also physics and math which a lot of people don't get and it combines cryptography with another kind of proof it's not only cryptographic proof there is another kind of proof involved it combines keys with work and most importantly keys and work are not the same thing they're truly not the same thing they're they're very different just like reality and theory is different and one one way to think about reality is that reality is that which survives and my friend ellen farrington he wrote a great piece only the strong survive again everyone should read it and so we have to talk about strength for a little bit this beautiful image i call it adam's back for obvious reasons because adam beck is the inventor of proof of work and the beautiful thing about proof-of-work is that it is self-evident proof-of-work is completely self-evident you don't need any external source of truth for proof-of-work to make sense so proof-of-work is self-evident and proof of work always deals in transformation so proof of work is always about transformation it doesn't matter if it's the pyramids that transformed stones into large pyramids it doesn't matter if it's the ripped guy in the gym proof of work always deals in transformation and if all we have is data then all we have is computation so we only have data information and the transformation of this information which is computation and of course to do compute we require electricity and to generate electricity we require energy and energy of course is costly we cannot print more energy and this is where the integrity of proof of work comes from so proof of work provides integrity without authority without crypto keys and without relying on secrecy so the difficulty adjusted proof of work in bitcoin truly is the solution to many many many problems and the more people understand this and the quicker they understand this the easier it is to figure out why bitcoin works and why other solutions failed and why moving away from the difficulty adjusted proof of work is a terrible idea you reintroduce all the problems that bitcoin actually solves and one of these problems is the problem of time so you all remember the story of the sage visiting the king in india to play a game of chess which had a very unintuitive outcome i want to tell you a bitcoin riddle you all probably know a little bit about bitcoin otherwise you wouldn't watch this and you probably know that bitcoin has a block time of 10 minutes so every 10 minutes a new block comes in and this is my favorite bitcoin riddle kind of for one of my favorites because it will tell you how much someone knows about bitcoin how deep they how deeply they looked into it already so let's assume again every 10 minutes a new block comes in that's the way things are in bitcoin and let's assume that the last block came in nine minutes ago when will the next block come in most people will say something like in a minute or maybe a little bit longer you know two minutes something like that and the correct answer very counterintuitively is always 10 minutes so if you said something else than 10 minutes then you basically you made the gambler's fallacy so the principle behind this is very similar to you standing at the roulette table and red came you know red came in for like 15 times in a row and now i ask you what are the chances that red comes again or what are the chances the black comes and if you say anything else than 50 50 then well you're committing the gambler's fallacy so 10 minutes this is the magic number this is the duration that it is about and every 10 minutes reality asserts itself in bitcoin every 10 minutes truth emerges every 10 minutes past becomes stone and every 10 minutes information is reified so it's about this duration of 10 minutes this is the constant in bitcoin this is more or less the only constant in bitcoin almost because everything else emerges out of that and you could say that bitcoin measures duration via computation like this is not terribly inaccurate and further bitcoin bitcoin not only measures duration via competition it also settles 10 minutes of history every 10 minutes so it is about these 10 minutes of history but it's not only about the past it's also about the future and we that's that's such an important concept to understand that bitcoin bitcoin it is fixed in time it's not it's not really tied to energy or like mining bitcoin doesn't require energy in the sense that the more energy you put in the more bitcoin our mind and everyone is just greedy and uh you know like we want to produce more bitcoin that's why we that's why we use more energy for it no energy relates to security and energy relates to the distribution of the 21 million it does not create more bitcoin and the reason why we know this is that we have bitcoin supply curve so bitcoin has a predetermined supply it has an emission schedule so the supply is emitted over time and that's why we know in the year approximately 2140 all 21 million bitcoin will be mined and this is obviously linked to duration because with every valid block new bitcoin are emitted and this is how satoshi solved the problem of bringing new coins into circulation which is an insanely difficult problem to solve without any authority so it is like a natural process a natural growing thing that emits that emits new coins to all those who who choose to secure it and this is this is why the genesis of bitcoin is so important and it's so beautiful and it's the only way to do any fair distribution everything else falls back to authority that's what i mean when i say bitcoin is time i mean these 10 minutes and the past at the future and how the past is settled and how the future is predetermined so the difficulty trusted proof of work is what creates an unfortunate history nick sabo talked about unfortunate costliness i think in bitcoin we should talk about unfortunate history because the ledger is just that letter is a history of transactions who owes what to whom and it has to be unforgeable for it to be good money otherwise it will always be manipulated and bitcoin creates this unfortunate history the difficulty adjusted proof of work solves the root problem a lot of people when they start talking about the root problem they mean the double spending problem but we framed it as trust and integrity so the difficulty adjusted proof of work provides trust and integrity most importantly without relying on secrecy without relying on authority so the difficulty adjusted proof of work solves all the problems of manny's past and i mean that literally it solves the problems of gold it solves the problems of fiat obviously it solves the problems of all the digital monies that we tried to create in the past so bitcoin has a very rich history of like you know it depends on how long you want to go back but bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere like people ever since the internet emerged people tried to do money on the internet that they always failed and people say they failed because of the double spending problem and so on and so forth but there's a lot of things wrapped up in the double spending problem so we already talked about trustless issuance we didn't really talk too much about decentralized time stamping but if you want to read about that please read bitcoin is time we also didn't talk too much about crypt analytics stability that's one problem that nick sabo tried to solve for the longest time the problem is that you cannot define a cryptographic puzzle or any computational problem where you can be sure that any computer will solve it below a certain threshold of time so let's say pick any supercomputer and it will take this super computer at least five minutes to solve this problem you cannot do it you just can't that was a that was a big problem of digital monies because you you you cannot know the breakthroughs in computing you cannot know if someone comes up with a new architecture or a better way faster computer there's like 10 trillion times faster and suddenly you can solve this problem in like a millisecond and so this crypt analytics stability the problem of cryptanalytic stability was a really hard problem the difficulty adjusted proof of work solves it digital scarcity again it used to be an oxymoron now thanks to bitcoin we have it and data integrity that's what i want to talk about next and of course the computer scientists listening to this they will have big question marks in their mind because they all know that we were able to do data integrity before bitcoin like we we had had multiple ways of doing data integrity but i'm here to tell you no that's actually not correct because for data integrity to work you always needed to have keys so how do you do any type of data integrity without secret information without relying on private keys what if all you have what if all you want to have is just public information what if authorities are not allowed what if key holders are not allowed what if we must not have a quorum of people that sign off on the on the integrity of the information all the other things all the other systems that want to remove proof of work from the equation automatically fall back to a quorum of people to key holders that sign off on information it's very much a fiat move where where we have authorities to say this is the reality this is the gold in the vaults just trust us we are we sign off on this all the gold is there just trust us and you're dealing with paper notes so removing proof of work it's an absolutely horrible idea that reintroduces all the problems that bitcoin solved so how can you do data integrity how can you do data integrity without any private keys how can you do it it's a really hard problem to understand how data integrity works we will have to take a closer look at this orange again and we'll split it up again so we're back into yin and yang and we're going to talk about integrity and validation we're going to talk about the 12 words again and the 21 million and about private keys and public ledgers very briefly if you have keys and you want to prove the integrity of the keys it's very easy because you can do key pairs and asymmetric cryptography then we have private keys and public keys and with one or the other you can check the integrity of the other and just you know this is well known this is nothing new this is all fine and nice and that's very very easy if we have keys data integrity and validation is very easy what if we don't have keys what if we don't have any private part at all what if all we have is public data what if we what if we must not have any keys this is so important like how to do this without any keys at all how to do it well the answer should be obvious but it wasn't obvious for the longest time it was only obvious to satoshi and the answer of course is proof of work adam back and so on and so forth because the nice thing about proof-of-work again is that you only have to look you only have to look proof of work is self-evident everything you need for verification is publicly available nothing is hidden no private keys are needed there is no authority there is no secret secrecy there's just truth there's truth embedded in the data itself and that's why it's so beautiful you just can look at it and without any use of any private keys you can verify that everything is correct in the data itself and you can go back to genesis and see that no one was able no one was able to modify this data in any shape way shape or form and you do not need to trust anyone you don't need to trust any quorums any key holders any external sources the truth is self evident in the data itself that's what nvk meant when he said the map is not the territory like in bitcoin in bitcoin the map is the territory in bitcoin the map is the territory there is no differentiation you just look at the map you look at the data and there is no external thing the truth is self-evident in the data itself in bitcoin truly the map is the territory so this was the big brain invention of satoshi nakamoto because satoshi was the first person that was able to think decentralized completely about issuance about security about time itself the timing problem is such a such a difficult problem to solve as well like i encourage anyone who is interested in other systems to always look at the timing problem we don't have a fixed time in our universe and this is why it's such a difficult problem just because of relativistic effects alone together orderly sequence of events in decentralized computing it's it's it's a borderline impossible problem and only the difficulty adjusted proof of work solves it completely so satoshi knew this satoshi knew that he had a breakthrough because he said he said i think this is the first time we're trying a decentralized non-trust-based system so he realized that with crypto proof and the reification of information which is a phrase i really like which i stole from adam gibson we can create digital scarcity we can create sound money in cyberspace and he also knew that crypto proof was not enough he knew that cryptography was not enough he mentioned in one of his posts that we we can't just we we have computational proof of the past computational proof of the sequence of events that's what he said and it's this computational proof computational proof is different from cryptographic proof because in computational proof in the difficulty or just a proof of work there are no private keys involved it's just pure computation pure raw energy if you will this is absolutely required to have publicly available information that is consistent in itself that anyone can validate so bitcoin is knowledge it is literally true that bitcoin is knowledge anyone anyone can have the knowledge of the integrity of the system it's a completely open system it's completely transparent you can yourself convince yourself of the 21 million you can check bitcoin's monetary policy you can check the integrity of the system but the opposite is also true that knowledge is bitcoin as we saw bitcoin it's just 12 words in your head that's why i believe that trying to you know outlaw bitcoin in any in in any way is equivalent to thought crime because all that bitcoin mining does for example is trying to find random numbers all that holding bitcoin entails is having 12 words in your head so if your government tells you that you're not allowed to hold bitcoin that's what they are saying you cannot think of baking 24 times you cannot think of word 12 times you can't have 12 random words in your head that's what anyone is saying when they forbid you to use bitcoin it's of course not enforceable but that's a different kind of that's a different kind of speech knowledge in bitcoin bitcoin is private knowledge 12 words in your head bitcoin is public information public and transparent information which leads to the 21 million it's private keys and public letters and the s at the end of lectures is important because we have many many ledgers all over the world and you need to have your own valid copy that you in the best case validate yourself and if you want to use bitcoin in any meaningful way you have to put those two together and if you put them together then the orange emerges and just as a very quick example let's say alice wants to send bob some sets so alice needs a private key and she needs a copy of the public ledger and in private she uses her private key to sign a message which is a transaction and let's say this message says i alice wants to send 21 sets to bob and she signs it with her private key so if everything checks out and if the signature is valid then the transaction gets broadcast and if the transaction is valid the bitcoin network will accept it and the transaction will land in the manpool which is what connects the private world of private keys with the public world of public ledgers it connects the 12th and the 21 it is the link between the past and the present and if everything checks out and if the signature is valid and if a valid block is found after approximately 10 minutes then the transaction is confirmed which is what bitcoin is saying all the time every 10 minutes but it it is saying more than that with every transaction that is confirmed with every valid block that is coming in it also self confirms its own integrity always all the time the beautiful thing about the difficulty just the proof of work in bitcoin is that it's accumulative over time it's like layers of amber that solidify the past and with this solidified past bitcoin also says moral code confirmed and as we heard in the very beginning the moral code of bitcoin is you shall not inflate you shall not confiscate you shall not counter fate in short you shall not steal and that's what bitcoin is saying every 10 minutes without relying on trust
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