Proof Of Transaction Quotes

We may talk about our religion, we may discuss marvelous manifestations and revealed gifts and powers, we may profess high ideals and noble values; but the proof of our commitment lies in our performance in the daily transaction of our life.

And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It's better that Charlie and I didn't make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.

Bitcoin consists of: A decentralized peer-to-peer network (the bitcoin protocol) A public transaction ledger (the blockchain) A set of rules for independent transaction validation and currency issuance (consensus rules) A mechanism for reaching global decentralized consensus on the valid blockchain (Proof-of-Work algorithm)

We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power.

On one occasion, when in New York City, I was in the night season called upon to behold buildings rising story after story toward heaven. These buildings were warranted to be fireproof, and they were erected to glorify their owners and builders. Higher and still higher these buildings rose, and in them the most costly material was used. Those to whom these buildings belonged were not asking themselves: "How can we best glorify God?" The Lord was not in their thoughts. {9T 12.1} I thought: "Oh, that those who are thus investing their means could see their course as God sees it! They are piling up magnificent buildings, but how foolish in the sight of the Ruler of the universe is their planning and devising. They are not studying with all the powers of heart and mind how they may glorify God. They have lost sight of this, the first duty of man." {9T 12.2} As these lofty buildings went up, the owners rejoiced with ambitious pride that they had money to use in gratifying self and provoking the envy of their neighbors. Much of the money that they thus invested had been obtained through exaction, through grinding down the poor. They forgot that in heaven an account of every business transaction is kept; every unjust deal, every fraudulent act, is there recorded. The time is coming when in their fraud and insolence men will reach a point that the Lord will not permit them to pass, and they will learn that there is a limit to the forbearance of Jehovah. {9T 12.3} The scene that next passed before me was an alarm of fire. Men looked at the lofty and supposedly fire-proof buildings and said: "They are perfectly safe." But these buildings were consumed as if made of pitch. The fire engines could do nothing to stay the destruction. The firemen were unable to operate the engines. {9T 13.1}

For the first four years of Bitcoin’s life, a coinbase transaction would issue 50 bitcoin to the lucky miner. The difficulty of this proof-of-work process was recalibrated automatically every two weeks with the goal of keeping the amount of time between blocks at an average of 10 minutes.10 In other words, 50 new bitcoin were released every 10 minutes, and the degree of difficulty was increased or decreased by the Bitcoin software to keep that output time frame intact. In the first year of bitcoin running, 300 bitcoin were released per hour (60 minutes, 10 minutes per block, 50 bitcoin released per block), 7,200 bitcoin per day, and 2.6 million bitcoin per year. Based on our evolutionary past, a key driver for humans to recognize something as valuable is its scarcity. Satoshi knew that he couldn’t issue bitcoin at a rate of 2.6 million per year forever, because it would end up with no scarcity value. Therefore, he decided that every 210,000 blocks—which at one block per 10 minutes takes four years—his program would cut in half the amount of bitcoin issued in coinbase transactions.11 This event is known as a “block reward halving” or “halving” for short.

What Bitcoin does is run a computerised lottery, in a process called “mining.” Bitcoin miners guess a number. They take their guess, they combine it with a block of transactions that are waiting to be processed, and they do a simple calculation on them. If the calculation gives a small enough number, the miner wins six-and-a-quarter fresh new bitcoins! And their block of transactions is added to the public blockchain. The more guesses you make, the better your chances. In June 2020, Bitcoin miners were making 100 quintillion guesses every second. This used as much electricity as all of Austria.45 This is called “proof-of-work” — though it might better be termed “proof-of-waste.” Blocks come out approximately every ten minutes. If miners win coins too often, the difficulty goes up, to slow the system down — so the miners have to add more computers to compete. This results in spiraling electricity use — Bitcoin is, literally, anti-efficient. The point of all this waste is to secure the blockchain — the threat model is that nobody can change the blockchain without wasting at least as much electricity. The Bitcoin mining system is incredibly slow, and very hard to scale up. Bitcoin now consumes between 0.1% and 0.5% of all the electricity in the world — for the same seven transactions per second, worldwide, that it could do in 2009, when it was just running on Nakamoto’s desktop PC. Bitcoin is the most inefficient payment network in human history.

Outside of proof-of-work, other consensus mechanisms exist, such as proof-of-stake (PoS). Proof-of-stake can be thought of as an alternative form of mining, one that doesn’t require lots of hardware and electricity, but instead requires people to put their reputation and assets at risk to help validate transactions.

Outside of proof-of-work, other consensus mechanisms exist, such as proof-of-stake (PoS). Proof-of-stake can be thought of as an alternative form of mining, one that doesn’t require lots of hardware and electricity, but instead requires people to put their reputation and assets at risk to help validate transactions. Logistically, proof-of-stake requires transaction validators to “stake” a balance of the cryptoasset and then attest to the validity of transactions in blocks. If validators are lying or otherwise deceiving the network, they will lose their staked assets. As the name implies, in “proving they have something at stake,” the validators are incentivized to be honest.

Proof of Work In order to slow down attackers and guarantee blockchain security, there needs to be more honest verifiers on the network than dishonest attackers. In other words, since the blockchain is based on consensus, we need a system where people are rewarded for being honest and punished for creating false transactions. We also need to slow down block creation so that the whole network has a chance to verify transactions and certify new blocks before the next block is created.

Miners of Ethereum would be processing transactions that could transfer not just ether but also information among programs. Just as Bitcoin miners were compensated for supporting the network by earning bitcoin, so too would Ethereum miners by earning ether, and the process would be supported by a similar proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

Proof-of-work (PoW) ties together the concepts of a distributed, cryptographic, and immutable database, and is how the distributed computers agree on which group of transactions will be appended to Bitcoin’s blockchain next.

The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.

Blockchains are possible because of consensus protocols – sets of rules that determine what kinds of blocks can become part of the chain and thus the “truth.” These consensus protocols are designed to resist malicious tampering up to a certain security bound. The blockchains we focus on currently use the proof of work (PoW) consensus protocol, which relies on a computationally and energy intensive lottery to determine which block to add. The participants agree that the longest chain of blocks is the truth. If attackers want to make a longer chain that contains malicious transactions, they must outpace all the computational work of the entire rest of the network. In theory, they would need most of the network power (“hash rate”) to accomplish this – hence, the famous 51 percent attack being the boundary of PoW security. Luckily, it is extraordinarily difficult for any actor, even an entire country, to amass this much network power on the most widely used blockchains, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

We had observed a real-estate transaction that takes place each night when we sleep. Fitting the notion of a long-wave radio signal that carries information across large geographical distances, the slow brainwaves of deep NREM had served as a courier service, transporting memory packets from a temporary storage hold (hippocampus) to a more secure, permanent home (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had helped future-proof those memories.

In a little more detail, why is the Bitcoin blockchain so resistant to the rewriting of history? To falsify the “who” of a single transaction you’d need to fake a digital signature, to falsify the “what” you’d need to break a hash function, to falsify the “when” you’d need to corrupt a timestamp, and you’d need to do this while somehow not breaking all the other records cryptographically connected to that transaction through the mechanism of composed block headers. Some call the Bitcoin blockchain a timechain, because unlike many other blockchains, its proof-of-work mechanism and difficulty adjustment ensure a statistically regular time interval between blocks, crucial to its function as a digital history.

In the past, businesses were built on the brick and mortar model, transactions were done in triplicate, using carbon paper, and success was based on educational background and certificates. Fast forward to today. The internet, connectivity and emerging technologies have completely changed the game. To compete and survive in this new era requires a disruptive approach.

Recall is an act of disciplined reimagination, and the remote past may be beyond anyone's ken. All this is resolved through the miracle of writing. Writing traditions usually begin in some kind of process of accounting records-at least tallies and tokens are often the earliest clear predecessors of written documents to survive-the intent being to provide objective proof of the quantities involved in some transaction. But with practice it often became clear that the symbols were in principle capable of recording any message, and as facility in handling the symbols grew they became usable as a direct aide-memoire even for fluent speech.

Naturally, payment networks want to prevent fraudulent transactions, banks want to avoid bad loans, airlines want to avoid hijackings, and companies want to avoid hiring ineffective or untrustworthy people. From their point of view, the cost of a missed business opportunity is low, but the cost of a bad loan or a problematic employee is much higher, so it is natural for organizations to want to be cautious. If in doubt, they are better off saying no. However, as algorithmic decision-making becomes more widespread, someone who has (accurately or falsely) been labeled as risky by some algorithm may suffer a large number of those “no” decisions. Systematically being excluded from jobs, air travel, insurance coverage, property rental, financial services, and other key aspects of society is such a large constraint of the individual’s freedom that it has been called “algorithmic prison” [82]. In countries that respect human rights, the criminal justice system presumes innocence until proven guilty; on the other hand, automated systems can systematically and arbitrarily exclude a person from participating in society without any proof of guilt, and with little chance of appeal.

Performing a proof-of-work mechanism or calculating the results is called "mining". Miners try to find a result with certain properties by executing arithmetic operations billions of times. If you have met such a result, you will be rewarded the so-called block reward which is a certain amount of tokens. Transactions are grouped into a block

Indeed, only a public chain is truly trustworthy for high-value transactions, because only a public chain is secured by so much proof of work.

From what Steel was learning, the language of the deals made them look less like aboveboard legal transactions and more like cover-ups. The agreements included one restrictive clause after another. The women were obliged to turn over all their evidence—audio recordings, diaries, emails, backup files, any other shred of proof—to O’Reilly and his lawyers. They and in one case their attorneys were prohibited from helping any other women who might have similar claims against the host. If they received subpoenas compelling them to talk, they were required to notify O’Reilly and his team, who could fight their being called to testify. The lawyer for one of the women agreed to switch sides, to “provide legal advice to O’Reilly regarding sexual harassment matters,” according to the language of the agreement. Another of the alleged victims promised never to make disparaging statements about O’Reilly or Fox News, “written or oral, direct or indirect,” and not to respond—ever—to any journalists who might contact her about the matter. As part of the deal, she confirmed that she had not filed a complaint with any of the government agencies responsible for fighting sexual harassment, including the EEOC. In return, one alleged victim received about $9 million, and another got $3.25 million. If either woman violated any of these clauses, she could lose the money. Whatever O’Reilly had or hadn’t done to the women was thus dropped down a deep well, never to be recovered. Cash for silence; that was the deal.