view the rest of the comments
No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
Thank you for finally making me understand blockchain.
As a non-technical person - how can I trust that there really is no centralized authority? Wouldn't whoever built the blockchain system retain some kind of power over it?
Bitcoin is a protocol, kinda like HTTP or Morse code, whoever created it can't change what things mean unless those using it accept it.
To answer your question with some more technical details, Blockchain use a public/private key pair, explaining what they are and how they work is quite difficult without going deep into mathematics, but in short a private key is a secret number so big it would take billions of years to brute force even with the entirety of the computational power of earth. In short, it's impossible to guess a private key. On the other hand a public key is a number that's derived from that first number without a way to going back to it, a very dumb down example would be think on 2 numbers (123 and 5) multiply them and you have your private key (615) add them and you have your public key (128), knowing just the public key you can't know what the private key is.
Ok, so you have a number no one can guess and another number derived from it, so what? Well, because of the way the public key is derived from the private one you can encrypt things with the public key that only the person with the private key can decrypt, which is cool and all, but the important part here is the other way around: you can sign a message with a private key that anyone with the public key can verify. This is extremely important, because it means that if we use the public key to identify someone, only the person who knows the private key can sign as them, and no one (not even the creator of Bitcoin) can falsify that signature, because to do that they would have to know the private key.
With that knowledge understanding what Bitcoin is is much easier. Imagine your public address is 12345 and you want to send 1 coin to me, my public address being 54321, you essentially send a message saying "12345 gives 1 coin to 54321" and sign it, now a miner will see that transaction, and if you have 1 coin to give they'll try to build a block of transactions which includes yours. Eventually your transaction will make it into a block, and all blocks that are built on top of it will make it more difficult to revert.
Final details, how do they know you have 1 coin? They tally all of the coins 12345 has received and sent over time. They store the total for each account in memory so they don't have to calculate it every time, but that's how they know if you have enough. And finally, every time someone creates a block they can claim a special transaction that creates a specific amount of new coins to any public key they want, that's how new coins are created.
As you can notice, you sign transactions and no one can falsify that, miners group transactions and it's in their best interest to be honest (otherwise other miners won't accept their block and they will have spend computer power for nothing). It's a system where everyone is kept honest because attacking the system is more expensive than playing by the rules. And the rules are set and forget, although miners can change the rules collectively it requires lots of people to be in agreement and it won't happen to revert your purchase.
In short, it's not exactly 0 trust, but it uses game theory to make sure that you can trust the system as it's in everyone's best interest that the system remains honest.
If you have any other question let me know.