Saturday, February 14, 2015

Bitcoins Simplified - I

For the past few weeks I have been reading up and studying the technology behind Bitcoin. I have found this exploratory activity to be truly exciting, and I have often admired the application of technology to solve this problem.

Here is my take at simplifying the technology behind the working of bitcoin:

Bitcoin is
  1. electronic currency: it does not rely on electronic tokens rather than physical tokens to represent money
  2. decentralized (peer-to-peer): there is no central authority (like a central bank etc.) responsible for creating the currency, or responsible for managing transactions of this currency

Let's begin by assuming that there is such a currency in an electronic form, then look at the various problems that such a currency would pose.

Ownership
Since the currency is electronic, how do I prove ownership? Anybody could make a copy of my currency and claim that it is theirs.
If your mind is thinking about PKI, you are in the right direction. Digital signatures have been used for a long time now, to ensure the authenticity of the source of a message. The same principle is used for signing transactions. Since I am the only one who has the private key, I am the only one who can sign the transaction. That proves ownership.


In the example above, Mark owns bitcoin X. When he performs a transaction, his transaction will be treated as valid, since he can generated a valid signature. Larry cannot spend Bitcoin X, since he cannot generate a valid signature for bitcoin X.
You may be wondering how exactly would you know what public key should be used to validate the signature. Hold on to that thought, we will come to it in a minute.

Transfer of Ownership
Ok, now how do I transfer that ownership to someone else? What signifies ownership in this case?
I know the answer is forming in your head :).

Since we are using digital signatures, my signed transaction should include the 'public key' of the recipient. Thus the public key of the current owner will be encoded in the bitcoin transaction.

In the example above, Mark transfers Bitcoin X to Larry. He does so by including Larry's public key in the transaction.

So what does this mean for Larry, when he is spending Bitcoin X? He should sign the transaction with a private key that corresponds to the Public key that was encoded in the previous transaction. Only that will allow him to unlock/transfer the Bitcoin to the next recipient. This is shown below.


In this transaction, Larry transfers Bitcoin X to Elon. Larry's signature can be verified by anyone, since it is already encoded in Bitcoin X's previous transaction. After this transaction, Elon now owns the Bitcoin X.

So far so good, but the biggest question is, how do you ensure that Mark only spends Bitcoin X only once? What is to stop him from sending the same Bitcoin X to multiple people? This is where the distributed ledger concept of Bitcoin kicks in. It is a central part of the bitcoin innovation. More on that in a follow-on blog post.




2 comments:

Amey Inamdar said...

There is no unique number associated with each bitcoin. So instead of saying bitcoin X, saying x bitcoin is more appropriate. Mark can spend x bitcoin again if there is balance of 2x bitcoin in his wallet.

Kedar Sovani said...

Amey, agreed!