12 Comments

Great article 👏. Reads like a nice story from beginning to end.

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Great article. Thank you so much Aaryaman.

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Thank you Aaryaman! The conceptual clarity aside, this is an extraordinary piece of writing!

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Very useful read. Thanks for penning this down. I had one doubt :

"Supposing the message came accompanied by a digital signature, our general has all of the tools he needs to verify the signature for himself without trusting anybody else. The contents of the letter would be the message, the signature would be some alphanumerals that would be sent along with the letter, and the public key required for verifying the signature would be the public key of the purported sender of the letter."

Would a leak of someone's private key make it possible to do fraudulent transactions? Since the private key + the message + the public key is all that's needed to verify a transaction

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hello and thank you. yes, with another person's private key, you could generate signatures on their behalf which would lead to identity theft (in the case of the generals) or loss of bitcoin (because the attacker could publish properly signed transactions sending bitcoin out of the compromised public key/wallet)

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Succinct and well hashed article. Nice one.

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Lovely written BRO!!!! God Bless!!!

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Thank you so much for writing out this masterpiece on Bitcoin101.

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The most crystal clear foundational primer on crypto I have found. Would highly recommend this to everyone in my network. Thank you so much for this Aaryaman.

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This was just what I needed, thanks a ton!

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Thanks for the detailed article Aaryaman. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I had a doubt which wasn't covered in the Q&A:

> When reorganization happened, Abdullah and Beelzebub's computations to generate Block#21 would be wasted. That would imply every time "different" blocks are committed, thousands of nodes would end-up spending ~10 minutes (average time between 2 blocks being committed) trying to solve mining puzzle for a history that would be discarded. Do you know the number of nodes that have to do reoganization for every block being committed, and if this problem is being solved in some way?

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This was a great article on Bitcoin, and I loved the method you explained every single bit about it. Recently I came across something known as Lightning Network that helps in scaling the transactions on Bitcoin with the help of a channel system. It was a bit challenging to understand what exactly it is, how it works, and whether it even makes sense for the future of Bitcoin. Can you share any details or information about Lightning Network and its use cases for Bitcoin, if you know any?

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