Peter Todd has gone underground after an HBO documentary named him as the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, whose real identity has long remained a mystery.
Bitcoin was the very first solution to how do you prevent a digital item from being copied and used repeatedly aka double spending.
Nothing digital was truly safe from this until bitcoin as you always had to trust someone who could double spend or steal it if they wanted to, or the database/system being hacked and things altered.
Things became truly immutable once committed to the chain.
The whole system needed an incentive to keep everyone aligned to reject double spends, and the coin itself was the reward. (Edit and there’s a limited number of coins, making them scarce)
Miners get rewarded for ensuring transactions are legitimate. It costs money to gain the reward so it’s better for them to just keep the reward instead of risking losing it
Edit: it also created the first time we could prove something digital existed at a point in time. Everything before this involved trusting someone data wasn’t altered to ‘prove’ it. Since blocks are immutable, their timestamp proves something existed then. E.g. a hash of a picture. It’s irrefutable the picture existed on that day.
Bitcoin was the very first solution to how do you prevent a digital item from being copied and used repeatedly aka double spending.
Nothing digital was truly safe from this until bitcoin as you always had to trust someone who could double spend or steal it if they wanted to, or the database/system being hacked and things altered.
Things became truly immutable once committed to the chain.
The whole system needed an incentive to keep everyone aligned to reject double spends, and the coin itself was the reward. (Edit and there’s a limited number of coins, making them scarce)
Miners get rewarded for ensuring transactions are legitimate. It costs money to gain the reward so it’s better for them to just keep the reward instead of risking losing it
Edit: it also created the first time we could prove something digital existed at a point in time. Everything before this involved trusting someone data wasn’t altered to ‘prove’ it. Since blocks are immutable, their timestamp proves something existed then. E.g. a hash of a picture. It’s irrefutable the picture existed on that day.