Most of the problems that humans have ever faced were coordination problems. One obvious solution is to create a dominance hierarchy and elect a leader on top of it.
Another issue with such structures is that there is one single point of failure, which makes them prone to corruption.
I can’t put my hand through a wall, or if I do, I need to push through the wall with greater force than the forces that hold the wall together, and my bones need to be able to resist the force with which the wall pushes back at me.
In the “digital world,” the rules are different and almost nonexistent, and that is great.
Here, you can send nude photos across the world, limited only by the speed of light.
Most of the time, we don’t really need to have a solid connection between the two worlds, as there are clear delimitations between them and expectations about their relationship.
This machine is incredibly dumb, as it can do only one thing: calculate as many SHA256 hashes as possible per unit of time.
Going through the pile of unconfirmed transactions with capitalistic desire, the machines sort the transactions by who is willing to pay more per virtual byte of block space and then pick the ones that are the most expensive.
Other data is also added to the block header: a reference to the previous block, a magic number that is really not that magic, and some nonspecific data.
The Sistine Chapel resembles Bitcoin in many ways: many people contributed to it, it is wonderfully complex, and regardless of the angle from which it is observed, it can provide some amazing insight.
At this moment of inception, we were not only touched by the divine, but we were divine, and we are made by it and of it, and as such, we inherit all the characteristics of God.
By inventing Bitcoin, we did the same thing that God did: we created an immovable digital object, and as a result, we began closing that gap between ourselves and divinity.
That is when, for the first time ever, the flow of energy changed direction: from left to right.
We can’t really say where man ends and God begins, as it is up to every man to draw that line for himself.
In the same way, there is also no such thing as the mempool: there is only your mempool.