Prepare, brace your self. Studying this may enrage and confound you, it’d confuse you, you may even get mad sufficient to punch your display (don’t try this.) Take into account this a set off warning.
Bitcoin is a database. Interval. That’s what it’s. The blockchain is a database for storing previous updates to have the ability to reproduce the present state of that database, the UTXO set. Your entire Bitcoin protocol is constructed round the database. What’s a sound entry in that database, and what’s not a sound database entry? Who’s allowed to suggest entries to that database, how do you make sure that solely these customers’ entries can be thought-about and accepted? What’s the authentication mechanism limiting writing entries to this database? How do you throttle database entries so that individuals can’t make so many it overloads or crashes the software program managing the database? How do you make sure that folks can’t make single entries which are massive sufficient to trigger different denial of service issues?
It’s all in regards to the database.
Proof-of-work? Your entire function of that within the protocol is to handle who can truly course of updates to the database. Bitcoin is supposed to be a decentralized system, so it wanted a manner for the database to be up to date in a decentralized manner whereas nonetheless permitting customers to come back to consensus with all their particular person copies of the database on a single replace to it. If everyone seems to be simply updating their very own copy of the database by themselves, there isn’t a manner everybody will come to consensus on a single model of the database. Should you depend upon some authority figures to deal with updates, then the replace course of just isn’t really decentralized. This was the purpose of POW, to permit anybody to course of an replace, however not with out incurring a verifiable value in doing so.
Proof-of-work is just a decentralized mechanism for updating a database.
Your entire peer-to-peer community structure? It exists solely to propagate proposed database replace entries (transactions), and finalized database updates (blocks). Nodes verifying transactions as they enter their mempool? It’s to pre-filter proposed entry updates to the database and guarantee they’re legitimate. Nodes verifying {that a} block meets the required problem goal? It’s to pre-filter a proposed database replace and guarantee it is legitimate earlier than passing it on to different nodes to replace their native copy.
The peer-to-peer community exists purely to reconcile a number of copies of the identical database.
Bitcoin script? It actually exists for the only function of functioning as an authorization mechanism for entries within the database. As a way to delete an present entry within the present database state, the UTXO set, a consumer proposing that replace should present authentication proof assembly the circumstances of the script locking the present database entry. Solely present entries, or UTXOs, will be “spent” as a way to authorize the creation of latest entries into the database. Miners are the one ones within the protocol allowed to create entries with out assembly the situation of eradicating an present one by assembly the authorization necessities set out in it’s locking script.
Bitcoin script is just a mechanism to manage and prohibit who can write to the database.
Each single facet of what Bitcoin is revolves across the core central perform of sustaining a database, and guaranteeing that many community members all retaining their particular person copies of that database stay in sync and agree on what the present state of the database is. All the properties that make Bitcoin worth as a type of cash, or a method of cost, are actually derived from the way it features as a database.
Many individuals on this area assume that this database ought to be used solely for a method of cost, or a type of cash, and I empathize with that view. I too assume that’s a very powerful use case for it, and I feel that each effort ought to be taken as a way to scale that individual use case as a lot as doable with out sacrificing the sovereignty and safety of having the ability to immediately work together with that database your self.
However it’s nonetheless only a database while you boil right down to the target actuality of what Bitcoin is. Individuals keen to pay the prices denominated in satoshis to write down an entry that’s thought-about legitimate beneath the foundations of that database can achieve this. There’s nothing you are able to do as a way to cease them in need of altering what is taken into account a sound entry in that database, which entails convincing everybody else to additionally undertake a brand new ruleset concerning what’s a sound entry.
Individuals can freely compete throughout the consensus guidelines to write down no matter they wish to this database, so long as they pay the prices required of the foundations and incentive construction of mining to take action. Interval. Are most of the issues folks can and are coming into into the database silly? Sure. After all they’re. The web is suffering from thoughts numbing quantities of silly issues in siloed databases all over. Why is that? As a result of individuals are keen to pay the price to place silly issues in a database.
Whether or not that’s customers of the database paying the supplier and working, or the operator themselves permitting sure issues to be entered as a part of operations with out passing the price to a consumer, is irrelevant. These silly issues solely exist someplace in digital kind as a result of indirectly, the price is paid to take action.
Bitcoin is essentially no totally different from some other database in that regard. The one distinction is that there isn’t a singular proprietor or gatekeeper dictating what’s allowed or not. Each proprietor of a duplicate of the Bitcoin database is able to permitting or not permitting no matter they need; the issue is that if they select to refuse one thing that everybody else finds acceptable, they fall out of consensus with everybody else. Their native database is not in sync with the worldwide digital database that everybody else is following and utilizing.
Should you discover sure database entries unacceptable, then by all means change the foundations your native copy validates new entries in opposition to. However that’s slicing off your nostril to spite your face. On the finish of the day Bitcoin runs on one easy axiom: pay to play. If folks pay the payment, they get to play. That’s simply the way it works.
On the finish of the day, it’s solely as much as each particular person what they wish to permit or not permit of their database, however slicing by way of all of the semantics and philosophical debates occurring proper now one factor stays unquestionably and objectively true: Bitcoin is a database.
