Gavin Andresen: A Technical Definition of Bitcoin

Engineers tend to be blinded by the details, getting caught up in the details and losing sight of the bigger picture.

I see this happen all the time (I've made this mistake myself) when they're optimizing something to make it faster. Their intentions are good, "It took 11 seconds to churn snarks, and 7 of those seconds were just for precomputing eigenwidgets."

So, they'll take a day and then precompute the eigenwidgets to make it 10 times faster.

Then they realize that with just one tiny tweak, a beautiful algorithm, and two hundred lines of code, they can make it 100 times faster!

So they spent a few days making the snark action 0.63 seconds faster (from 4.7 seconds to 4.07 seconds), instead of moving to the next performance bottleneck. They can focus on one small thing (performance! or security! or decentralization! or compatibility) and ignore everything else.

I would like to propose this big vision to give a technical definition of "Bitcoin":

"Bitcoin" is a not-previously-spent ledger of validly signed transactions included in the blockchain starting with the genesis block (hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f), with a total supply of 21 million coins and the most cumulative double double-SHA256-proof-of-work work mechanism ^[1] .

If we can agree that this is the definition of what we mean by Bitcoin, then I think we can avoid a lot of pointless arguments about "trees".

Majority accepting new types of nifty transactions? Yes, it's still Bitcoin. Different sorts of merkle trees included in block headers? Yes, it's still Bitcoin. Fixing an off-by-one error with cumbersome redirection code? Yes, it's still Bitcoin.

A minority hashrate forking the chain? No, that's not Bitcoin. Changing proof of work? No, that's not Bitcoin. A majority hashrate deciding 1% inflation is a good idea? No, that's not Bitcoin either.

Is there a better technical definition of whether it should be considered “Bitcoin”?

Notes (↵ returns to text)

1. Sorry if I accidentally stole this concept from someone, it seems to be well defined in Satoshi’s original white paper. ↵