| -Scientia Revivificare Anima | Knowledge revivifies the soul- | |
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As a welcoming post to this series I wanted to briefly describe the amazing beauty that characterizes the Bitcoin technology. I will use an analogy to describe what I feel Bitcoin represents and how it is similar to many things in our reality.
To begin, I want to introduce Ralph Merkle, inventor of cryptographic hashing and also namesake of the Merkle tree. He describes Bitcoin as a new form of life, something which I feel correctly describes what this revolution actually is.
“Briefly, and non-technically, Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if any one copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss or muss. It lives because it is radically transparent: anyone can see its code and see exactly what it does.”Ralph Merkle
In the same way as this image shows a picture of the universe filled with empty space and clusters of connected galaxies, bitcoin nodes allow for a decentralized peer to peer network with no single point of centralization. This similarity also appears in the way the internet or the neurons in your brain forms its connections, and from this perspective it's clear the radical potential of such a technology.
Mycelium, the vegetative part of any fungus, grows beneath every major old growth forest in the world, and forms a massive web of information and a marketplace for every single living plant in the forest. Through it's decentralized nature it is able to provide nutrients to any tree who needs them and can signal potential threats or pathogens to the rest of the vegetable life in contact with this entity. The similarities with Bitcoin are shocking. Not only does a new bitcoin block get transmited towards every single node in the network, but also any potential threat, as is the case with a fraudulent block, gets automatically discarded and rejected by every other node.
(Image by Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards)
This beautiful artistic representation of the neurons in our brain also share a strong resemblance to the structure of the Bitcoin network, reinforcing the idea I have been trying to convey throughout this article that Bitcoin is a truly living organism.
I wish this new series of articles will be welcomed by the leo community and I will pay close attention to all your comments and proposals to help this series improve over time.
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De la misma manera que esta imagen nos muestra un universo lleno de espacios vacios y cúmulos de galaxias, los nodos de Bitcoin permiten una red descentralizada y de pares (P2P) sin un solo punto de centralización. Esta similitud también se observa en cómo el propio internet o las redes neuronales del cerebro realizan sus conecciones y, desde este punto de vista, es clara la potencia de esta tecnologia.
Micelio, la parte vegetativa de los hongos, crece sin límites por debajo de todos los grandes bosques del planeta, formando una gran telaraña de información y un mercado de nutrientes para todas las plantas y árboles del bosque. Gracias a su naturaleza descentralizada es capaz de proveer de nutrientes a cualquier planta que los necesite y puede señalizar de potenciales enemigos o patógenos al resto de la vida vegetal para que produzcan armas defensivas. Las similitudes con Bitcoin son impresionantes! No solo en el blockchain de Bitcoin se propagan las nuevas transacciones a traves de bloques hacia cada nodo de la red, sino que los potenciales peligros o enemigos como los bloques fraudulentos son eliminados y descartados antes de que puedan producir ningún daño.
Esta preciosa representación artística de las neuronas en nuestro cerebro también comparte una increible similitud a la estructura de la red Bitcoin, reinforzando la idea que he intentado transmitir con este artículo de como Bitcoin es verdaderamente un ser vivo.
Espero que esta nueva serie sea bien recibida y pueda promover una nueva relación entre la comunidad de Leo.
Prestaré atención a todos sus comentarios y sus propuestas sobre como mejorar esta nueva serie en la cual me estoy embarcando.