November 2014
Intermediate to advanced
240 pages
5h 55m
English
Content preview from The Bitcoin Big Bang: How Alternative Currencies Are About to Change the World
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Chapter 4 Byzantine Generals' Problem
He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.
—Sun Tzu
Successful entrepreneurs are constantly surveying the landscape for problems to solve. Being the first to solve major societal problem can not only lead to substantial wealth accumulation, but it can make the entrepreneur more popular than she ever imagined. We need not look much further than Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for a prime example; he was frustrated with the inability to communicate with fellow students and was stymied by an exclusionary culture. His solution was to create a communication platform that was open to all—well, open to all that had the aptitude to attend Harvard. His solution became known as the social network; he became a billionaire and had a major motion picture made about the development of Facebook.
It is a safe bet that Hollywood will eventually make a movie about Satoshi Nakamoto, even if they have to make it up. The Bitcoin creator has gone to great lengths to conceal his/her/their identity, which makes the story even more fascinating. However, the attention that both the creator and price rise has garnered masks the real reason why Bitcoin is a game changer. The problem that Bitcoin solved has eluded every computer scientist since its conception; it's called the Byzantine Generals' Problem.
The Byzantine Generals' Problem was first proposed by computer scientists Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease in 1982. The ...
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