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In this video I go over a very extensive overview of all things Blockchain, from its initial public appearance through the creation of Bitcoin cryptocurrency to the endless applications. I also cover some of the mathematics that make all of this possible, which is in advancements in Cryptography, or the study of securing communications in the midst of third parties. The first implementation of a decentralized peer-to-peer distributed ledger that solves what it is known as the Byzantine Generals’ Problem as well as the infamous digital Double Spending problem was in 2009 by an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, and in the form of a digital currency called Bitcoin. The implementation of Bitcoin, a year after its 2008 whitepaper illustrating the concept, utilized the first decentralized Blockchain algorithm. In just under 10 years, the value of Bitcoin has skyrocketed to $7000+ USD per coin as of the making of this video. But the underlying technology, a distrusted Blockchain has some truly game-changing capabilities.

Blockchain technology is made possible by the mathematics of Cryptography, namely the development of the Public-key or Asymmetric key encryption concept. This is a seemingly simple concept but its implications are monumental. Through the use of mathematical “one-way functions” that are easy to solve in one direction and extremely difficult to solve in the other, it is possible to share encrypted messages even if the third party gained full access to all the communications channels! Extending this to the blockchain, blocks of data with cryptographical secured by a timestamp can be chained together to form one very long secure chain. This long chain, when implemented through a Peer-to-Peer network ensures that it is always being supported by the majority of “honest” computers or nodes that are working to maintain the algorithm of the blockchain. To overcome this “majority”, i.e. to modify previous blocks in any way, an adversary would require to go through a cryptographically “Proof-of-Work” algorithm solving the difficult one-way-function, but not for just that block but ALL BLOCKS AFTER it until it reaches and surpasses the main blockchain, but with more measures put in place to counter a fast rate of block creation. This is the solution to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem which basically is a concept where a majority consensus must always be undertaken because any split use of resources can be disastrous. This chain of blocks, known as the blockchain, serves as the single agreed upon history of by all computers and thus people using the blockchain; all this without a central authority!

Other concepts I cover in this very long video is in Cryptocurrency Wallets, hard vs soft forks, the Bitcoin whitepaper, my favorite blockchain technology Steemit, and some of the things to know before creating your own cryptocurrency or heavily investing in a relatively unknown company. But as with all of my recent videos, I need to include a full disclosure into my views on Blockchain and all technology for that matter, and which is that I view most advancements in technology as a result of the powers-that-shouldn’t-be trickling down tech to us in a gradual manner. It is done this way so that there isn’t too much of a disruption to the current establishment and to better steer the world into more centralization. To learn more about my reasoning here, make sure to follow my ongoing video series on 9/11 and free energy: https://mes.fm/911truth-playlist and https://mes.fm/freeenergy-playlist. Blockchain technology, although has the ability to decrease centralization of control, it ironically can do just the opposite if its access is restricted by the governmental corporate monopolies such as the CIA, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

But whether Blockchain is a trickle-down technology or a truly great innovation by Satoshi Nakamoto, it nonetheless is a very special technology which if we smarten up, and avoid the consumerism propaganda pushed at us at all levels of society, we may in fact be able to use it to ensure a truly self-sufficient lifestyle free of government tyranny…

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• Blockchain playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLai3U8-WIK0Fgp_lR0a0rscxWYrHARtkN

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Blockchain Overview

Topics to Cover

1. Important Note
2. Blockchain
3. Double Spending
4. Proof-Of-Work
5. Distributed Ledger
6. Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
7. Cryptography
8. Polyalphabetic Cipher
9. Symmetric vs. Public-Key (Asymmetric) Cryptography
10. Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
11. Cryptographic Hash Function
12. Byzantine Generals' Problem
13. Bitcoin
14. Wallets
15. Satoshi Nakamoto
16. Bitcoin/Blockchain Whitepaper
17. Data / Bits (Binary Digits)
18. Trusted/Cryptographic Timestamping
19. Creating Your Own Cryptocurrency
20. Summary
21. Full Disclosure: Trickle Down Technology #NWO

Important Note

In this video I go over a mainstream overview of Blockchain Technology, including some of the terms and definitions associated with it as well as looking at the requirements needed to create your own cryptocurrency.

That being said I take a lot of this "mainstream" information from Wikipedia.

For those that haven't seen my earlier videos, I have an extremely low opinion of Wikipedia and view it as nothing more than an Orwellian information control system that only provides "official" mainstream narratives for anything and everything.

Thus if you have any information that contradicts any of the mainstream definitions or concepts covered in this video, please let me know as it will provide for some future video material!

Blockchain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/8DeoZ

Blockchain

A blockchain[1][2][3] – originally block chain[4][5] – is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.[1][6] Each block typically contains a hash pointer as a link to a previous block,[6] a timestamp and transaction data.[7] By design, blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the data. A blockchain can serve as "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way."[8][not in citation given (See discussion.)] For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which needs a collusion of the network majority.

Blockchains are secure by design and are an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Decentralized consensus has therefore been achieved with a blockchain.[9] This makes blockchains potentially suitable for the recording of events, medical records,[10][11] and other records management activities, such as identity management,[12][13][14]transaction processing, documenting provenance, or food traceability.[15]

The first distributed blockchain was conceptualised by an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008 and implemented the following year as a core component of the digital currency – bitcoin – where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions.[1][not in citation given (See discussion.)] The invention of the blockchain for bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double spending problem without the use of a trusted authority or central server. The bitcoin design has been the inspiration for other applications.[1][3]

Blockchain formation. The main chain (black) consists of the longest series of blocks from the genesis block (green) to the current block. Orphan blocks (purple) exist outside of the main chain.

History

The first work on a cryptographically secured chain of blocks was described in 1991 by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta.[16]In 1992, Bayer, Haber and Stornetta incorporated Merkle trees to the blockchain as an efficiency improvement to be able to collect several documents into one block.[17][6]

The first distributed blockchain was then conceptualised by an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented the following year as a core component of the digital currency bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for all transactions.[1] Through the use of a peer-to-peer network and a distributed timestamping server, a blockchain database is managed autonomously. The use of the blockchain for bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double spending problem without requiring a trusted administrator.[4] The bitcoin design has been the inspiration for other applications.[1][3]

The words block and chain were used separately in Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper in October 2008,[18] and when the term moved into wider use it was originally block chain,[4][5] before becoming a single word, blockchain, by 2016. In August 2014, the bitcoin blockchain file size reached 20 gigabytes.[19] In January 2015, the size had grown to almost 30 gigabytes, and from January 2016 to January 2017, the bitcoin blockchain grew from 50 gigabytes to 100 gigabytes in size.[20]

By 2014, "Blockchain 2.0" was a term referring to new applications of the distributed blockchain database.[21]

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Blockchain 2.0 technologies go beyond transactions and enable "exchange of value without powerful intermediaries acting as arbiters of money and information". They are expected to enable excluded people to enter the global economy, enable the protection of privacy and people to "monetize their own information", and provide the capability to ensure creators are compensated for their intellectual property. Second-generation blockchain technology makes it possible to store an individual's "persistent digital ID and persona" and are providing an avenue to help solve the problem of social inequality by "[potentially changing] the way wealth is distributed".[22]:14–15

MES Note: If you have seen my other videos, note that I am always skeptical of any hidden motives, and in this case of storing a person's identity, it can serve as the ultimate tracking device as well… #NWO

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Bitcoin transactions (January 2009 – September 2017)

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Blockchain data

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Notable non-cryptocurrency designs include:

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• Steemit combines a blogging site/social networking website and a cryptocurrency

MES Note: #GetOnSteem

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• Ethereum is a Blockchain, with a Turing complete scripting language that enables the processing of smart-contracts on the Blockchain.

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National currencies

The following countries have adopted the technology for currency issue:
• e-Dinar, Tunisia's national currency, was the first state currency using blockchain technology.[109]
• eCFA is Senegal's blockchain-based national digital currency.[110]

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Nonprofit organizations

• Level One Project from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to use blockchain technology to help the two billion people worldwide who lack bank accounts.[116][117]
• Building Blocks project from The U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) aims to make WFP’s growing cash-based transfer operations faster, cheaper, and more secure. Building Blocks commenced field pilots in Pakistan in January 2017 that will continue throughout Spring.[118][119]

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/generalledger.asp

Retrieved: 18 May 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/AOUjs

General Ledger

What is a 'General Ledger'

A general ledger is a company's set of numbered accounts for its accounting records. The ledger provides a complete record of financial transactions over the life of the company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/tSb2i

Double-spending

Double-spending is an error in a digital cash scheme in which the same single digital token is spent more than once. This is possible because a digital token consists of a digital file that can be duplicated or falsified.[1]

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The prevention of double-spending has taken two general forms: centralized and decentralized.

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Decentralized

By 2007, a number of distributed systems for double-spending prevention had been proposed.[2][3]

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin implemented a solution in early 2009. It uses a scheme called proof-of-work, to avoid the need for a trusted third party to timestamp transactions. These timestamps are recorded in its public ledger called the blockchain. This avoids anyone double-spending the currency.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/poOVa

Proof-of-work system

A proof-of-work (POW) system (or protocol, or function) is an economic measure to deter denial of service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from the service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer. The concept may have been first presented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in a 1993 journal article.[1] The term "Proof of Work" or POW was first coined and formalized in a 1999 paper by Markus Jakobsson and Ari Juels.[2]An early example of the proof-of-work system used to give value to a currency is the Shell Money of the Solomon Islands.

A key feature of these schemes is their asymmetry: the work must be moderately hard (but feasible) on the requester side but easy to check for the service provider. This idea is also known as a CPU cost function, client puzzle, computational puzzle or CPU pricing function.

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One popular system—used in bitcoin mining and Hashcash—uses partial hash inversions to prove that work was done, as a good-will token to send an e-mail.

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Variants

There are two classes of proof-of-work protocols.

• Challenge-response protocols assume a direct interactive link between the requester (client) and the provider (server).

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• Solution-verification protocols do not assume such a link: as a result the problem must be self-imposed before a solution is sought by the requester, and the provider must check both the problem choice and the found solution.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ledger

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/2zZUb

Distributed ledger

A distributed ledger (also called shared ledger) is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions.[1] There is no central administrator or centralised data storage.[2]

A peer-to-peer network is required as well as consensus algorithms to ensure replication across nodes is undertaken.[2] One distributed ledger design is through implementation of a public or private blockchain system.[3][not in citation given] But not all distributed ledgers have to necessarily employ a chain of blocks to successfully provide secure and valid achievement of distributed consensus: a Blockchain is only one type of data structure considered to be a distributed ledger.[4]

In 2016, numerous banks trialed distributed ledgers for international payments.[5]

Applications

Incumbent banks are investing heavily in distributed ledgers as a cost-saving measure and a way to reduce operational risks.[2] The future use of distributed ledgers is expected to monetize the Internet of Things in a programmable economy.[6]

Everledger is used to track diamonds by recording numerous unique data points.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/ZwXJx

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.[1] Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client-server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided.

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While P2P systems had previously been used in many application domains,[3] the architecture was popularized by the file sharing system Napster, originally released in 1999.

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A peer-to-peer (P2P) network in which interconnected nodes ("peers") share resources amongst each other without the use of a centralized administrative system

A network based on the client-server model, where individual clients request services and resources from centralized servers

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Overlay network diagram for an unstructured P2P network, illustrating the ad hoc nature of the connections between nodes

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Overlay network diagram for a structured P2P network, using a distributed hash table (DHT) to identify and locate nodes/resources

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The BitTorrent protocol: In this animation, the colored bars beneath all of the 7 clients in the upper region above represent the file being shared, with each color representing an individual piece of the file. After the initial pieces transfer from the seed (large system at the bottom), the pieces are individually transferred from client to client. The original seeder only needs to send out one copy of the file for all the clients to receive a copy.

GIF Link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/iwD8W

Cryptography

Cryptography or cryptology (from Greek ???pt?? kryptós, "hidden, secret"; and ???fe?? graphein, "writing", or -????a -logia, "study", respectively[1]) is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries.[2] More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages;[3] various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation[4] are central to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, and communication science. Applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.

Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense. The originator of an encrypted message shared the decoding technique needed to recover the original information only with intended recipients, thereby precluding unwanted persons from doing the same. The cryptography literature often uses the name Alice ("A") for the sender, Bob ("B") for the intended recipient, and Eve ("eavesdropper") for the adversary.[5] Since the development of rotor cipher machines in World War I and the advent of computers in World War II, the methods used to carry out cryptology have become increasingly complex and its application more widespread.

German Lorenz cipher machine, used in World War II to encrypt very-high-level general staff messages

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Alphabet shift ciphers are believed to have been used by Julius Caesar over 2,000 years ago.[5] This is an example with k=3. In other words, the letters in the alphabet are shifted three in one direction to encrypt and three in the other direction to decrypt.

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Symmetric-key cryptography[edit]
Main article: Symmetric-key algorithm

Symmetric-key cryptography refers to encryption methods in which both the sender and receiver share the same key (or, less commonly, in which their keys are different, but related in an easily computable way). This was the only kind of encryption publicly known until June 1976.[23]

Symmetric-key cryptography, where a single key is used for encryption and decryption

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Public-key cryptography[edit]
Main article: Public-key cryptography

Symmetric-key cryptosystems use the same key for encryption and decryption of a message, though a message or group of messages may have a different key than others. A significant disadvantage of symmetric ciphers is the key management necessary to use them securely. Each distinct pair of communicating parties must, ideally, share a different key, and perhaps each ciphertext exchanged as well. The number of keys required increases as the square of the number of network members, which very quickly requires complex key management schemes to keep them all consistent and secret. The difficulty of securely establishing a secret key between two communicating parties, when a secure channel does not already exist between them, also presents a chicken-and-egg problem which is a considerable practical obstacle for cryptography users in the real world.

In a groundbreaking 1976 paper, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman proposed the notion of public-key (also, more generally, called asymmetric key) cryptography in which two different but mathematically related keys are used—a public key and a private key.[33] A public key system is so constructed that calculation of one key (the 'private key') is computationally infeasible from the other (the 'public key'), even though they are necessarily related. Instead, both keys are generated secretly, as an interrelated pair.[34] The historian David Kahn described public-key cryptography as "the most revolutionary new concept in the field since polyalphabetic substitution emerged in the Renaissance".[35]

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, authors of the first published paper on public-key cryptography

In public-key cryptosystems, the public key may be freely distributed, while its paired private key must remain secret. In a public-key encryption system, the public key is used for encryption, while the private or secret key is used for decryption. While Diffie and Hellman could not find such a system, they showed that public-key cryptography was indeed possible by presenting the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol, a solution that is now widely used in secure communications to allow two parties to secretly agree on a shared encryption key.[23]

Public-key cryptography, where different keys are used for encryption and decryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyalphabetic_cipher

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/c0B07

Polyalphabetic cipher

A polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. The Vigenère cipher is probably the best-known example of a polyalphabetic cipher, though it is a simplified special case. The Enigma machine is more complex but still fundamentally a polyalphabetic substitution cipher.

Example of Vigenère cipher:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/7Jsdq

Diffie–Hellman key exchange

Diffie–Hellman key exchange (D–H)[nb 1] is a method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over a public channel and was one of the first public-key protocols as originally conceptualized by Ralph Merkle and named after Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.[1][2] D–H is one of the earliest practical examples of public key exchange implemented within the field of cryptography.

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Illustration of the idea behind Diffie-Hellman key Exchange

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If a third party listened to the exchange, it would be computationally difficult for them to determine the secret colors. In fact, when using large numbers rather than colors, this action is computationally expensive for modern supercomputers to do in a reasonable amount of time. (In cryptology publications, the eavesdropper is usually named Eve.)

Cryptographic explanation

The simplest and the original implementation of the protocol uses the multiplicative group of integers modulo p, where p is prime, and g is a primitive root modulo p.

Here is a good illustration of the Diffie-Hellman protocol:

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/XkBzA

Note the amazing illustration of mixing two different colors to get another color that is very difficult to decipher the original color.

Now the two parties can switch their mixtures, add their own color to them, and mix again to obtain the exact same new mixture! #Genius

Thus this kind of protocol would just require finding a difficult mathematical "one-way function" that is easy in one direction, and hard in the other direction; comparable to the ease of mixing of colors vs. the difficulty in separating colors from a mixture.

A simple illustration of the "multiplicative group of integers modulo":

Note: This procedure is possible because of the following property of the mod function.

Eve can't find the hidden 10 from just the 6 and 12 results of previous modulu operations! #Genius

And when scaled up to extremely large Prime numbers, this becomes extremely difficult and time-consuming even with modern supercomputers.

Note: The inner workings and mathematics of the modulo concept is outside the scope of this video, but it serves as an illustration of how the same "paint mixture" protocol can be applied in a mathematical way. I may cover this in later videos so stay tuned!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/zpZDd

Hash function

A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to data of fixed size. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, digests, or simply hashes. One use is a data structure called a hash table, widely used in computer software for rapid data lookup. Hash functions accelerate table or database lookup by detecting duplicated records in a large file. An example is finding similar stretches in DNA sequences. They are also useful in cryptography. A cryptographic hash function allows one to easily verify that some input data maps to a given hash value, but if the input data is unknown, it is deliberately difficult to reconstruct it (or equivalent alternatives) by knowing the stored hash value.

A hash function that maps names to integers from 0 to 15. There is a collision between keys "John Smith" and "Sandra Dee".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/RxVEx

Cryptographic hash function

A cryptographic hash function is a special class of hash function that has certain properties which make it suitable for use in cryptography. It is a mathematical algorithm that maps data of arbitrary size to a bit string of a fixed size (a hash function) which is designed to also be a one-way function, that is, a function which is infeasible to invert. The only way to recreate the input data from an ideal cryptographic hash function's output is to attempt a brute-force search of possible inputs to see if they produce a match, or use a rainbow table of matched hashes. Bruce Schneier has called one-way hash functions "the workhorses of modern cryptography".[1] The input data is often called the message, and the output (the hash value or hash) is often called the message digest or simply the digest.

A cryptographic hash function (specifically SHA-1) at work. A small change in the input (in the word "over") drastically changes the output (digest). This is the so-called avalanche effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/6qcS9

Byzantine fault tolerance

In fault-tolerant computer systems, and in particular distributed computing systems, Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is the characteristic of a system that tolerates the class of failures known as the Byzantine Generals' Problem,[1] which is a generalized version of the Two Generals' Problem – for which there is an unsolvability proof.

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Byzantine Generals' Problem

Byzantine refers to the Byzantine Generals' Problem, an agreement problem (described by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease in their 1982 paper, "The Byzantine Generals Problem")[1] in which a group of generals, each commanding a portion of the Byzantine army, encircle a city. These generals wish to formulate a plan for attacking the city. In its simplest form, the generals must only decide whether to attack or retreat. Some generals may prefer to attack, while others prefer to retreat. The important thing is that every general agrees on a common decision, for a halfhearted attack by a few generals would become a rout and be worse than a coordinated attack or a coordinated retreat.

The problem is complicated by the presence of traitorous generals who may not only cast a vote for a suboptimal strategy, they may do so selectively. For instance, if nine generals are voting, four of whom support attacking while four others are in favor of retreat, the ninth general may send a vote of retreat to those generals in favor of retreat, and a vote of attack to the rest. Those who received a retreat vote from the ninth general will retreat, while the rest will attack (which may not go well for the attackers). The problem is complicated further by the generals being physically separated and having to send their votes via messengers who may fail to deliver votes or may forge false votes.

Byzantine fault tolerance can be achieved if the loyal (non-faulty) generals have a unanimous agreement on their strategy. Note that there can be a default vote value given to missing messages. For example, missing messages can be given the value < Null >. Further, if the agreement is that the < Null > votes are in the majority, a pre-assigned default strategy can be used (e.g., retreat).[citation needed]

The typical mapping of this story onto computer systems is that the computers are the generals and their digital communication system links are the messengers.

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In practice

One example of BFT in use is bitcoin, a peer-to-peer digital currency system. The bitcoin network works in parallel to generate a chain of Hashcash style proof-of-work. The proof-of-work chain is the key to overcome Byzantine failures and to reach a coherent global view of the system state.

Some aircraft systems, such as the Boeing 777 Aircraft Information Management System (via its ARINC 659 SAFEbus network),[31] [32] the Boeing 777 flight control system,[33] and the Boeing 787 flight control systems, use Byzantine fault tolerance.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/The-Byzantine- Generals-Problem.pdf

Retrieved: 9 October 2017
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170524230036/https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/The-Byzantine-Generals-Problem.pdf

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Page 385 (PDF Page 4)

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Page 389 (PDF Page 8)

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Page 392 (PDF Page 11)

MES Note: I present these schematics to give an illustration about the Byzantine Generals' Problem. For more information and some early solutions to the problem, please read through that paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/ARamw

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a worldwide cryptocurrency and digital payment system[8]:3 called the first decentralized digital currency, as the system works without a central repository or single administrator.[8]:1[9] It was invented by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto[10] and released as open-source software in 2009.[11] The system is peer-to-peer, and transactions take place between users directly, without an intermediary.[8]:4 These transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.

Bitcoins are created as a reward for mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies,[12] products, and services. As of February 2015, over 100,000 merchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment.[13] Bitcoin can also be held as an investment. According to research produced by Cambridge University in 2017, there are 2.9 to 5.8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.[14]

Terminology

The word bitcoin occurred in the white paper[15] that defined bitcoin published on 31 October 2008.[16] It is a compound of the words bit and coin.[17] The white paper frequently uses the shorter coin.[15]

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Units

The unit of account of the bitcoin system is bitcoin. As of 2014, tickers used to represent bitcoin are BTC[a] and XBT.[b] Its Unicode character is ?.[25]:2 Small amounts of bitcoin used as alternative units are millibitcoin (mBTC)[1] and satoshi. Named in homage to bitcoin's creator, a satoshi is the smallest amount within bitcoin representing 0.00000001 bitcoin, one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.[4] A millibitcoin equals to 0.001 bitcoin, one thousandth of a bitcoin.[26]

MES Note: The bitcoin Unicode doesn't render properly on my computer but an image of it is shown below:

Blockchain

The blockchain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions.[27] A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: the maintenance of the blockchain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software.[8]

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Number of bitcoin transactions per month (logarithmic scale)[30]

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Ownership[edit]

In the blockchain, bitcoins are registered to bitcoin addresses. To be able to spend the bitcoins, the owner must know the corresponding private key and digitally sign the transaction. The network verifies the signature using the public key.[3]:ch. 5

If the private key is lost, the bitcoin network will not recognize any other evidence of ownership;[8] the coins are then unusable, and effectively lost. For example, in 2013 one user claimed to have lost 7,500 bitcoins, worth $7.5 million at the time, when he accidentally discarded a hard drive containing his private key.[32] A backup of his key(s) might have prevented this.[33]

Simplified chain of ownership.[15] In reality, a transaction can have more than one input and more than one output.

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Wallets

A wallet stores the information necessary to transact bitcoins. While wallets are often described as a place to hold[41] or store bitcoins,[42] due to the nature of the system, bitcoins are inseparable from the blockchain transaction ledger. A better way to describe a wallet is something that "stores the digital credentials for your bitcoin holdings"[42] and allows one to access (and spend) them. Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography, in which two cryptographic keys, one public and one private, are generated.[43] At its most basic, a wallet is a collection of these keys.

There are several types of wallets. Software wallets connect to the network and allow spending bitcoins in addition to holding the credentials that prove ownership.[44] Software wallets can be split further in two categories: full clients and lightweight clients.

• Full clients verify transactions directly on a local copy of the blockchain (over 134 GB as of October 2017[45]), or a subset of the blockchain (around 2 GB[46]). Because of its size and complexity, the entire blockchain is not suitable for all computing devices.

MES Note: Operating on only a subset of the blockchain is known as Pruning.

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#wallet-pruning

Retrieved: 11 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/fnevD

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Wallet: Pruning

With 0.12 it is possible to use wallet functionality in pruned mode. This can reduce the disk usage from currently around 60 GB to around 2 GB.

However, rescans as well as the RPCs importwallet, importaddress, importprivkey are disabled.

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• Lightweight clients on the other hand consult a full client to send and receive transactions without requiring a local copy of the entire blockchain (see simplified payment verification – SPV). This makes lightweight clients much faster to set up and allows them to be used on low-power, low-bandwidth devices such as smartphones. When using a lightweight wallet however, the user must trust the server to a certain degree. When using a lightweight client, the server can not steal bitcoins, but it can report faulty values back to the user. With both types of software wallets, the users are responsible for keeping their private keys in a secure place.[47]

Besides software wallets, Internet services called online wallets offer similar functionality but may be easier to use. In this case, credentials to access funds are stored with the online wallet provider rather than on the user's hardware.[48][49] As a result, the user must have complete trust in the wallet provider. A malicious provider or a breach in server security may cause entrusted bitcoins to be stolen. An example of such security breach occurred with Mt. Gox in 2011.[50]

Physical wallets store the credentials necessary to spend bitcoins offline.[42] Examples combine a novelty coin with these credentials printed on metal.[51]Others are simply paper printouts. Another type of wallet called a hardware wallet keeps credentials offline while facilitating transactions.[52]

An actual bitcoin transaction including the fee from a webbased cryptocurrency exchange to a hardware wallet.

Electrum bitcoin wallet

Bitcoin paper wallet generated at bitaddress.org

Trezor hardware wallet

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Ponzi scheme concerns[edit]
See also: Economics of bitcoin § Ponzi scheme concerns

Various journalists,[60][139] economists,[140][141] and the central bank of Estonia[142] have voiced concerns that bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, stated in 2013 that "a real Ponzi scheme takes fraud; bitcoin, by contrast, seems more like a collective delusion."[143] In 2014 reports by both the World Bank[144]:7 and the Swiss Federal Council[145]:21 examined the concerns and came to the conclusion that bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. In 2017 billionaire Howard Marks referred to bitcoin as a pyramid scheme.[146]

On September 12, 2017 Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, called bitcoin a "fraud" and said he would fire anyone in his firm caught trading it. Zero Hedge claimed that the same day Dimon made his statement, JP Morgan also purchased a large amount of bitcoins for its clients.[147] On September 13th, 2017 Dimon followed up and compared bitcoin to a bubble, saying it was only useful for drug dealers and countries like North Korea.[148] On 22 September 2017, hedge fund Blockswater subsequently accused JP Morgan of market manipulation and filed a market abuse complaint with Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority.[149]

Legal status, tax and regulation
Main article: Legality of bitcoin by country or territory

Because of bitcoin's decentralized nature, restrictions or bans on it are impossible to enforce, although its use can be criminalized.[150]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/ujS9f

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The latest version contains a repertoire of 136,755 characters covering 139 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets. The Unicode Standard is maintained in conjunction with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical.

Logo of the Unicode Consortium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/VC6a6

Public-key cryptography

Public key cryptography, or asymmetrical cryptography, is any cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys which may be disseminated widely, and private keys which are known only to the owner. This accomplishes two functions: authentication, which is when the public key is used to verify that a holder of the paired private key sent the message, and encryption, whereby only the holder of the paired private key can decrypt the message encrypted with the public key.

In a public key encryption system, any person can encrypt a message using the public key of the receiver, but such a message can be decrypted only with the receiver's private key. For this to work it must be computationally easy for a user to generate a public and private key-pair to be used for encryption and decryption. The strength of a public key cryptography system relies on the degree of difficulty (computational impracticality) for a properly generated private key to be determined from its corresponding public key. Security then depends only on keeping the private key private, and the public key may be published without compromising security.[1]

An unpredictable (typically large and random) number is used to begin generation of an acceptable pair of keys suitable for use by an asymmetric key algorithm.

In an asymmetric key encryption scheme, anyone can encrypt messages using the public key, but only the holder of the paired private key can decrypt. Security depends on the secrecy of the private key.

In the Diffie–Hellman key exchange scheme, each party generates a public/private key pair and distributes the public key. After obtaining an authentic copy of each other's public keys, Alice and Bob can compute a shared secret offline. The shared secret can be used, for instance, as the key for a symmetric cipher.

MES Note: To better understand this, always keep in mind that a Public Key is mathematically related to its paired Private Key. Thus can mathematically send messages to any other Public Keys, and can only be unlocked using the associated Private Key. Again, this is under the assumption that it is mathematically difficult obtaining any Private Key from a Public Key or the mathematically sent message to a Public Key (or holder of the Public Key).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/MM4hn

Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown person or persons who designed bitcoin and created its original reference implementation.[1] As part of the implementation, they also devised the first blockchain database. In the process they were the first to solve the double-spending problem for digital currency. They were active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.

Nakamoto has claimed to be a man living in Japan, born on 5 April 1975.[2] However, speculation about the true identity of Nakamoto has mostly focused on a number of cryptography and computer science experts of non-Japanese descent, living in the United States and Europe.[3]

As of 24 May 2017, Nakamoto is believed to own up to roughly one million bitcoins,[4] with a value estimated at approximately $4 billion USD as of September 2017.

Development of bitcoin

In October 2008, Nakamoto published a paper[5][6] on The Cryptography Mailing list at metzdowd.com[7] describing the bitcoin digital currency. It was titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In January 2009, Nakamoto released the first bitcoin software that launched the network and the first units of the bitcoin cryptocurrency, called bitcoins.[8][9] Satoshi Nakamoto released the Version 0.1 of Bitcoin software on Sourceforge on 9 January 2009.

Nakamoto claimed that work on the writing of the code began in 2007.[10] The inventor of bitcoin knew that due to its nature the core design would have to be able to support a broad range of transaction types. The implemented solution enabled specialised codes and data fields from the start through the use of a predicative script.[11]

Nakamoto created a website with the domain name bitcoin.org and continued to collaborate with other developers on the bitcoin software until mid-2010. Around this time, he handed over control of the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen,[12] transferred several related domains to various prominent members of the bitcoin community, and stopped his involvement in the project. Until shortly before his absence and handover, Nakamoto made all modifications to the source code himself.

The inventor left a text message in the first mined block which reads 'The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'. The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3 January 2009. It is a strong indication that the first block was mined no earlier than this date.[13] The genesis block has a timestamp of 18:15:05 GMT on 3 January 2009. This block is unlike all other blocks in that it doesn't have a previous block to reference.[13] This required the use of custom code to mine it. Timestamps for subsequent blocks indicate that Nakamoto did not try to mine all the early blocks solely for himself.[13]

As the sole, predominant early miner the inventor was awarded bitcoin at genesis and for 10 days afterwards.[14] Except for test transactions these remain unspent since mid January 2009.[14] The public bitcoin transaction log shows that Nakamoto's known addresses contain roughly one million bitcoin. As of 18 August 2017, this is worth over $4,053,500,000.[15][16] Due to the hardfork in which Bitcoin Cash was made, creating one Bitcoin Cash for every bitcoin in circulation, he also owns roughly one million Bitcoin Cash, worth about $675,510,000.[17][16]

Characteristics and identity

Nakamoto did not disclose any personal information when discussing technical matters.[3] He provided some commentary on banking and fractional-reserve banking. On his P2P Foundation profile as of 2012, Nakamoto claimed to be a 37-year-old male who lived in Japan,[18] but some speculated he was unlikely to be Japanese due to his use of perfect English and his bitcoin software not being documented or labelled in Japanese.[3]

Occasional British English spelling and terminology (such as the phrase "bloody hard") in both source code comments and forum postings led to speculation that Nakamoto, or at least one individual in the consortium claiming to be him, was of Commonwealth origin.[5][3][19]

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Possible identities

There is still doubt about the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.[22]

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Some considered Nakamoto might be a team of people; Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who read the bitcoin code,[79] said that Nakamoto could either be a "team of people" or a "genius";[19] Laszlo Hanyecz, a former bitcoin core developer who had emailed Nakamoto, had the feeling the code was too well designed for one person.[3]

Very, VERY interesting "founding" of Bitcoin by an "anonymous" person or group… #NWO

https://bitcoin.org/en/

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/4Ng4q

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/whitepaper.asp

Retrieved: 15 May 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/pDNtJ

White Paper

What is a 'White Paper'

A white paper is an informational document issued by a company to promote or highlight the features of a solution, product or service.

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White papers are designed to be used as a marketing tool before a sale, and not as a user manual or other technical document developed to provide support to the user after making a purchase.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20171004042710/https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.

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Page 2

1. Transactions

We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the public key of the next owner and adding these to the end of the coin. A payee can verify the signatures to verify the chain of ownership.

The problem of course is the payee can't verify that one of the owners did not double-spend the coin. A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every transaction for double spending. After each transaction, the coin must be returned to the mint to issue a new coin, and only coins issued directly from the mint are trusted not to be double-spent. The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank.

We need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions. For our purposes, the earliest transaction is the one that counts, so we don't care about later attempts to double-spend. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions. In the mint based model, the mint was aware of all transactions and decided which arrived first. To accomplish this without a trusted party, transactions must be publicly announced [1], and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received. The payee needs proof that at the time of each transaction, the majority of nodes agreed it was the first received.

1. Timestamp Server

The solution we propose begins with a timestamp server. A timestamp server works by taking a hash of a block of items to be timestamped and widely publishing the hash, such as in a newspaper or Usenet post [2-5]. The timestamp proves that the data must have existed at the time, obviously, in order to get into the hash. Each timestamp includes the previous timestamp in its hash, forming a chain, with each additional timestamp reinforcing the ones before it.

Page 3

1. Proof-of-Work

To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis, we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash [6], rather than newspaper or Usenet posts. The proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.

For our timestamp network, we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits. Once the CPU effort has been expended to make it satisfy the proof-of-work, the block cannot be changed without redoing the work. As later blocks are chained after it, the work to change the block would include redoing all the blocks after it.

MES Note: A "nonce" in cryptography is just a random or semi-random number used only once. In this case it is used to increment a value to place into the hash function to obtain a new value, eventually obtaining a hash that begins with a number of zero bits (a unit of information).

The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. 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. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added.

MES Note: i.e. Solves the Byzantine Generals' Problem.

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.

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Page 4

1. Incentive

By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.

The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.

The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

MES Note: Unless the attacker's goal was to undermine the system… but even then, a local copy of the entire Blockchain could be presumably retrieved and used to replace the original blockchain.

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Page 6

1. Privacy

The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the "tape", is made public, but without telling who the parties were.

As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner.

MES Note: The rest of the Bitcoin whitepaper are outside the scope of this video, so make sure to read it and its accompanying references for more information. I may cover Bitcoin in further detail in later videos so stay tuned! (And let me know if I should.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/5LH3d

Bit

The bit (a portmanteau of binary digit)[1] is a basic unit of information used in computing and digital communications.[2] A binary digit can have only one of two values, and may be physically represented with a two-state device. These state values are most commonly represented as either a 0 or 1.

The two values of a binary digit can also be interpreted as logical values (true/false, yes/no), algebraic signs (+/-), activation states (on/off), or any other two-valued attribute. The correspondence between these values and the physical states of the underlying storage or device is a matter of convention, and different assignments may be used even within the same device or program. The length of a binary number may be referred to as its bit-length.

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Storage

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In modern semiconductor memory, such as dynamic random-access memory, the two values of a bit may be represented by two levels of electric charge stored in a capacitor. In certain types of programmable logic arrays and read-only memory, a bit may be represented by the presence or absence of a conducting path at a certain point of a circuit. In optical discs, a bit is encoded as the presence or absence of a microscopic pit on a reflective surface. In one-dimensional bar codes, bits are encoded as the thickness of alternating black and white lines.

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Multiple bits

Multiple bits may be expressed and represented in several ways. For convenience of representing commonly reoccurring groups of bits in information technology, several units of information have traditionally been used. The most common is the unit byte, coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, which historically was used to represent the group of bits used to encode a single character of text (until UTF-8 multibyte encoding took over) in a computer[10][11][12][13][14] and for this reason it was used as the basic addressable element in many computer architectures. The trend in hardware design converged on the most common implementation of using eight bits per byte, as it is widely used today. However, because of the ambiguity of relying on the underlying hardware design, the unit octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of eight bits.

Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "words". Like the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically between 8 and 80 bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the 21st century, retail personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64 bits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/oznIN

Cryptographic nonce

In cryptography, a nonce is an arbitrary number that may only be used once. It is similar in spirit to a nonce word, hence the name. It is often a random or pseudo-random number issued in an authentication protocol to ensure that old communications cannot be reused in replay attacks. They can also be useful as initialization vectors and in cryptographic hash functions.

Typical client-server communication during a nonce-based authentication process including both a server nonce and a client nonce.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3A+nonce+word&t=h_&ia=definition

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/075Fm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/XYGH2

Trusted timestamping

Trusted timestamping is the process of securely keeping track of the creation and modification time of a document. Security here means that no one - not even the owner of the document - should be able to change it once it has been recorded provided that the timestamper's integrity is never compromised.

The administrative aspect involves setting up a publicly available, trusted timestamp management infrastructure to collect, process and renew timestamps.

History

The idea of timestamping information is actually centuries old. For example, when Robert Hooke discovered Hooke's law in 1660, he did not want to publish it yet, but wanted to be able to claim priority. So he published the anagram ceiiinosssttuv and later published the translation ut tensio sic vis (Latin for "as is the extension, so is the force"). Similarly, Galileo first published his discovery of the phases of Venus in the anagram form.

Sir Isaac Newton, in responding to questions from Leibniz in a letter in 1677, concealed the details of his "fluxional technique" with an anagram:

The foundations of these operations is evident enough, in fact; but because I cannot proceed with the explanation of it now, I have preferred to conceal it thus: 6accdae13eff7i3l9n4o4qrr4s8t12ux. On this foundation I have also tried to simplify the theories which concern the squaring of curves, and I have arrived at certain general Theorems.

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Getting a timestamp from a trusted third party

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Checking correctness of a timestamp generated by a time stamping authority (TSA)

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Decentralized timestamping on the Blockchain

With the advent of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, it has become possible to securely timestamp information in a decentralized and tamper-proof manner. Digital data can be hashed and the hash can be incorporated into a transaction stored in the blockchain, which serves as a secure proof of the exact time at which that data existed[2]. The proof is due to a tremendous amount of computational effort performed after the hash was submitted to the blockchain. Tampering with the timestamp would also lead to breaking the integrity of the entire digital currency, and this would result in the digital currency devaluing to zero[3].

The decentralized timestamping approach using the Blockchain has also found applications in other areas, such as in dashboard cameras, to secure the integrity of video files at the time of their recording,[4] or to prove priority for creative content and ideas shared on social media platforms[5].

Creating Your Own Cryptocurrency??

Now the purpose of the above overview of cryptography and blockchain technology is to develop a broad understanding of the requirements and resources needed to develop a custom-made cryptocurrency, as well as to gauge the feasibility of new companies asking for investments.

1. Modify Source Code of Another Cryptocurrency:

The following is a good tutorial in understanding some of the procedures, albeit a technical background into programming is required, in modifying the open-source Litecoin files to create a working cryptocurrency titled "Learncoin" as well as an associated wallet.

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/VxPvD

Part 2:
Part 3: https://youtu.be/3Jp65Uq_U30
Part 4:
Part 5:
Part 6:

This type of modification of source-code is similar to a "Project Fork":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/F12A0

Fork (software development)

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community, a form of schism.[1]

Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission, without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software (e.g. Unix) also happen.

https://www.coindesk.com/short-guide-bitcoin-forks-explained/

Retrieved: 11 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/ENQ5s

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Hard fork

What is it? A hard fork is a software upgrade that introduces a new rule to the network that isn't compatible with the older software. You can think of a hard fork as an expansion of the rules. (A new rule that allows block size to be 2MB instead of 1MB would require a hard fork).

What happens? Nodes that continue running the old version of the software will see the new transactions as invalid. So, to switch over to the new chain and to continue to mine valid blocks, all of the nodes in the network need to upgrade to the new rules.

What can go wrong? The problem comes when some sort of political impasse arises, and a portion of the community decides to stick by the old rules no matter what. The hash rate, or network computing power, behind the old chain is irrelevant. What matters is that its data (and ruleset) is still perceived to have value, meaning miners still want to mine a chain and developers still want to support it.

The ethereum DAO hard fork was a perfect case study of how a community can split over rules. Now, we have two blockchains using a variant of the software – ethereum and ethereum classic, both of which boast a different ethos and a different currency.

Soft fork

What is it? A soft fork, by contrast, is any change that's backward compatible. Say, instead of 1MB blocks, a new rule might only allow 500K blocks.

What happens? Non-upgraded nodes will still see the new transactions as valid (500k is less than 1MB in this example). However, if non-upgraded nodes continue to mine blocks, the blocks they mine will be rejected by the upgraded nodes. This is why soft forks need a majority of hash power in the network.

What can go wrong? When a soft fork is supported by only a minority of hash power in the network, it could become the shortest chain and get orphaned by the network. Or, it can act like a hard fork, and one chain can splinter off.

Soft forks have been the most commonly used option to upgrade the bitcoin blockchain so far because it's argued they present a lower risk of splitting the network. Past examples of successful soft forks include software upgrades like BIP 66 (which dealt with signature validation) and P2SH (which altered bitcoin's address formatting).

2. Build a cryptocurrency on-top of other Blockchains, such as Ethereum.

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/FRNkh

This business, Proof, allows users to quickly create their own Cryptocurrency built upon the Ethereum Blockchain.

Basically, Proof serves as the user interface and automated cryptocurrency creation engine for users or businesses that don't want to do their own programming.

3. Create your own cryptocurrency from scratch.

The requirements, number of team members, and expertise required to create your own cryptocurrency from scratch is dependent on what exactly the purpose of your cryptocurrency/blockchain application you have in mind.

From what I have gathered so far, it is not overly difficult to creating a cryptocurrency, either from scratch or from modifying source-code of other coins, but the main difficulty is understanding market demands and ensuring an ecosystem is put in place for your particular currency to be adopted, purchased, used to purchase, and publicly traded.

Retrieved: 10 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/AqH3T

This is a good video to quickly get an overview of the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself and think about before embarking into creating your own cryptocurrency business or heavily investing into relatively unknown blockchain/cryptocurrency companies.

Summary

I made this video as a quick way for me to obtain an overview into the Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Cryptography industry in order to better understand some of the mainstream concepts and definitions.

To summarize these concepts, I have listed the main points covered in this video.

Blockchain, Cryptography

• A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked and secured using cryptography.
• Blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the data.
• Blockchains can be used as a distributed ledger on a peer-to-peer network.
• Blockchains have high Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
• The first distributed blockchain was thought up by an anonymous person or group known as Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented in 2009 as part of the digital currency / cryptocurrency bitcoin, to serve as the public ledger for all transactions.
• Applications of Blockchain technology are endless because they allow for the transfer of value without powerful middle-men or bureaucracies.
• New applications of Blockchain, outside the typical distributed ledger, are often referred to as Blockchain 2.0.
• Blockchain technology adoption and cryptocurrency trade volumes are growing exponentially.
• My favorite Blockchain technology is in the Social Media, Blogging, and crypto-value driven content curating platform Steemit (https://steemit.com/@mes) which runs on the Steem Blockchain! #GetOnSteem

Distributed Ledger, Peer-to-Peer, Proof-of-Work

• A distributed ledger is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions without a central administrator or storage.
• Peer-To-Peer (P2P) networking or computing is a distributed application architecture splitting tasks and workloads among peers/computers.
• Proof-of-Work protocols are basically mathematical puzzles that require high CPU computational power and time to solve, and used to ensure all parties are playing by the rules of the system.

Cryptography, Polyalphabetic cipher, Symmetric-Key, Asymmetric-Key / Public-Key

• Cryptography is the practice of secure communications that prevent access from third parties.
• Alphabet shift ciphers were antique forms of cryptography where an alphabet was shifted by a number of positions to encrypt, and shifted back to decrypt.
• A slightly more advanced antique cipher is known as the polyalphabetic cipher which involves multiple alphabet shifts, often by the relative numerical alphabet positions of individual letters in a key word.
• Modern cryptography methods include Symmetric-key cryptography and Asymmetric-key cryptography.
• Symmetric-Key Cryptography involves both parties to share a single secret key to encrypt and decrypt a message.
• Asymmetric-Key (or Public-Key) Cryptography involves creating two mathematically related keys, Private and Public, in which the Public Key is used to Encrypt and its corresponding Private Key is used to decrypt.
• For example: To send you a secret message, I can use YOUR Public Key to encrypt it thus only YOUR mathematically related Private Key can be able to decrypt it. #Genius
  • Note: You will know the message is from me because I use my Private Key in the creation and you can verify by using my Public Key.
• Both the creation of the Public-Private pair as well as the Public-Key Encryption process uses a mathematical One-Way function.
• The creation of the Public-Private pair generation one-way function is initialized by a suitable large random number generator.

One-Way Functions, Cryptographic Hash Function, Bits, Byzantine Generals' Problem

• A One-Way Function is a mathematical function that is easy to calculate in one direction, but very difficult in the reverse direction, i.e. can't feasibly obtain the Private Key from just knowing the person's Public Key.
• A one-way function is analogous to mixing different colors of paint together: It is easy to mix but very difficult to separate the paint once they are mixed.
• A Hash Function is any function that maps data of arbitrary size to data of a fixed size, called the hash value.
• The bit (binary digit) is a basic unit of information or data used in computing having two values 1 or 0, often physically represented by two levels of an electric charge in Random Access Memory (RAM) or the presence/absence of a conducting path at a certain point of a circuit.
• A byte or octet is a group of 8 bits.
• A Cryptographic Hash Function is essentially an one-way hash function.
• The Byzantine Generals' Problem is the problem of ensuring a majority consensus from different parties/generals/computers given some inherent individual characteristics of each party, including "traitors".
• Byzantine Fault Tolerance refers to a systems ability to solve varies types of the Byzantine Generals' Problem.

Bitcoin, Wallets, Software Wallets: Full Client, Lightweight Client; & Pruning Mode

• Bitcoin is the first and currently the largest decentralized cryptocurrency in the world.
• Bitcoin uses a peer-to-peer distributed network that uses a proof-of-work chain to overcome Byzantine failures and reach a coherent global blockchain.
• Bitcoin uses the Public-key cryptography protocol to ensure secure transactions and ownership of bitcoins.
• A bitcoin Wallet is something (physical, software, or online) that stores the digital credentials to gain access to bitcoins you own; i.e. your Private/Public Keys.
• A software wallet allows for the connection to the network and for spending bitcoins.
• Two Types of Software Wallets: Full Client and Lightweight Client
• Full Clients involve verifying transactions directly on a local copy of the entire 134 GB+ bitcoin Blockchain.
• Full Clients, however, have a "pruned" mode, that allows for a much smaller subset of the Blockchain to be used while disabling other functions.
• Lightweight Clients simply connect to a third party Full Client, hence have the ability to be used on low-power, low-bandwidth devices such as smartphones.

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin White Paper, Double Spending, Timestamping, Mining

• "Satoshi Nakamoto" is the name used by the founder(s) behind Bitcoin's design and original implementation.
• The identity or identities of Satoshi is "unknown".
  ? MES Note: I don't buy this for a second… #NWO
  ? The CIA can spy on you through your TV even when it is turned "off"… #ThrowYourTVOutTheWindow
• Satoshi claimed to be born in Japan on 5 April 1975.
• In 31 October 2008, Satoshi published the whitepaper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System on The Cryptography Mailing list at metzdowd.com.
• On 9 January 2009 Satoshi launched the first ever Bitcoin software that launched the network and creation of the first ever bitcoins.
• Satoshi claimed to begin writing the code in 2007.
• Satoshi registered the domain bitcoin.org and continued to collaborate until mid-2010.
• Satoshi handed the source code and network alert key to Gavin Andresen, transferred related domains to various prominent members of the bitcoin community and stopped involvement in the bitcoin project.
• Satoshi left the text message in the first mined block "The Times 3 January 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", a headline from the British mainstream news outlet "The Times".
• The genesis block has a timestamp of 18:15:05 GMT on 3 January 2009.
• Satoshi has roughly 1 million bitcoins worth now about $6 BILLION USD (as of 11 October 2017).
• The implementation of Bitcoin was the first ever blockchain database and first digital currency that solved the double-spending problem.
• Double-Spending is an error in which a digital token or currency is duplicated or falsified, i.e. spent more than once, since it is just a digital file.
• Bitcoin uses a Proof-of-Work system, involving solving a cryptographic hash function, in the creation of a peer-to-peer distributed server to cryptographically timestamp each block in which the longest chain of these blocks, the blockchain, is the agreed upon order of timestamped events, thus preventing double-spending.
• Trusted Timestamping is the process of ensuring the creation and modification time of data is securely kept track of.
• Methods of Timestamping include a Centralized Authority, i.e. a mint or a bank, or a Decentralized Blockchain, i.e. using cryptographic hash functions stored in a blockchain.
• Each timestamped block of data contains the previous timestamp thus forming a chain.
• If the majority of "nodes" or peers (i.e. computers) are "honest" then they will form the longest chain, thus solving the Byzantine Generals' Problem! #Amazing
• Subverting the blockchain, i.e. modifying a previous block, requires redoing the proof-of- work of that particular block as well as ALL BLOCKS AFTER it and catching up with and SURPASSING the honest chain, hence forming the longest chain / proving majority CPU and achieving majority consensus.
• The proof-of-work difficulty increases based on the speed of which blocks are generated, thus hindering subversion even with really high CPU power.

Building Your Own Cryptocurrency, Modifying Source Code, Forks: Hard vs. Soft

• Many cryptocurrencies, such Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Steem are open source.
• Modifying the source code of an existing cryptocurrency is fairly easy if you have the right technical programming background.
• A project Fork is when a significant portion of the development team split off and begin independent development of a copy of the source code.
• A hard fork is when additions to the software are incompatible with the older software.
• A soft fork is when additions are still compatible with the older software.
• Both types of forks can have problems if not addressed properly.
• It is quite easy to simply use a third party service to automatically build your own cryptocurrency upon other Blockchains, namely the Ethereum Blockchain which is designed with this purpose in mind.
• Creating your own Cryptocurrency from scratch may require a team of software developers, but the real challenge is in maintaining an ecosystem of merchants, products, services, and cash exchanges.
• Thus whether you decide to create your own cryptocurrency or heavily invest in a relatively unknown blockchain/cryptocurrency, much of the time should be spent on understanding the company vision and specific applications to real world and market issues, as well as measures taken to address these challenges.
• Bitcoin mining refers to the process of doing the Proof-of-Work to create new coins; analogous to gold mining.

Hopefully this video helped you gain an overview of the Cryptography, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency world that the "real world" seems to be gradually shifting towards!

While these technologies pose some great solutions to some pressing issues of our time, it is always important to view them as a tool nonetheless, which can be both used for good or evil…

Full Disclosure: Trickle-Down Technology

In full disclosure for those that have not seen my earlier videos, in particular my 9/11 video series: https://mes.fm/911truth-playlist and Free Energy series: https://mes.fm/freeenergy- playlist, I am of the view that most technologies and advancements in technologies are just due to the powers-that-shouldn't-be trickling down these technologies gradually so that it doesn't cause too much of a disruption to the ruling establishment.

My view also extends to Blockchain technology; which can both remove authoritarian centralization of power but ironically as well can increase centralization.

• Note the usual accompanying cover story with such new technologies, i.e. "anonymous" Bitcoin/Blockchain paper by "Satoshi Nakamoto"…
• This is similar to Google's "founding in a garage" BS story… #DontYouBelieveIt

https://twitter.com/MathEasySolns/status/895802559872385024

- MathEasySolns

Retrieved: 11 October 2017
Archive: https://archive.is/XQ2He

For example, Blockchain tech can allow individuals to transfer value across the globe to other individuals without an intermediary. This is truly revolutionary!

But at the same time, government/corporate monopolies such as the CIA, Amazon, Google, Apple, IRS (which I view as just different aliases of the same entity) can UNIVERSELY RESTRICT ACCESS to their products from specific entities/people on a specific Blockchain(s).

For example, if Apple requires only people registered to their "AppCoin" blockchain platform (as well as some possible physical identification such as DNA/Fingerprint/Retina/Implanted Chip) to use their iPhones, then at any time as well they can restrict your access to all other iPhones/Apple Products forever! #NWO

Thus it is best to smarten up to the world around us and start developing our own technologies that make us truly self-sufficient and at the same time to stop buying into the over-consumerism propaganda being pushed at all stages of life. #YouDontNeedTheNewestiPhone #MentalSlavery

Blockchain technology, whether it is trickle-down or in fact truly an innovation by "Satoshi Nakamoto", is nonetheless a tool and in my view a special tool that if we use it properly can free us from some of the grips of the world government…

Oh, and #GetOnHive and follow me! https://peak.com/@mes