It is almost a year when I come to know about bitcoin for first time. I started taking interest in bitcoin and large number of altcoins for investment purpose. Anyways within months I understood that most of the altcoins are scam and I put my full focus in understanding the bitcoin. Recently I understood how much of the facts that were hidden from us when we generally read the introductory articles on bitcoin.
I think most of us here thought that Satoshi was one of the first to create a crytocurrency so bitcoin become popular but it is not true. In reality Satoshi is first to create a Proof of work consensus method that can work in decentralized way and that is the real backbone of bitcoin and real genius of Satoshi. When most of the literature point to the anoynomus Satoshi in bitcoin development, they really writing off all the researches already done in this field by the people like Hal Finney and Nick Szabo and numerous other with whom Satoshi corresponded. I am not denying Satoshi acheivement but I am trying to make emphasize on point that Bitcoin is not something that is got created on one fine day of 2009 but instead it is a result of decade of research of many .
Bitcoin in technical side solve the "Byzantine General's Problem" by the use of blockchain and Proof of Work consensus algorithim. Byzantine Fault tolerance or Byzantine General's Problem is a real challenge for any distributed system to work flawlessly.This is the reason that government/people who do not want bitcoin but still embracing the block chain technology.
CAP (Consistency,Availability, Partition Tolerance) theorem in distributed sytem put a limit that you can have only 2 out of these 3 available parameters. Bitcoin distributed cannot ovefride this theorem but it is designed is such a way that it is least impacted with the limitation put in by this theorem by the mechanism of eventual Consistency.
Bitcoin still functioning well to be used as to make your own bank, giving you freedom to transact without being restricted by countries boundaries and making it truly global in Nature.
So friends, when next time if someone ask you about bitcoin, try to tell them about some computational problems that bitcoin solves. Try to read some technical documents and books instead of relying on some random articles.
I hope Bitcoin will keep gaining popularity and its usage and might be Satoshi will be awarded
Turing_Award in future.
Refernces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem https://paulkernfeld.com/2016/01/15/bitcoin-cap-theorem.html Mastering Blockchain by Imran Bashir
Mastering Bitcoin - by Andreas M. Antonopoulos