Continuing my recent currency posts, I want to provide an analogy for what Bitcoin is as I understand it. This analogy may exist elsewhere on the web. To those authors who’s ideas I may be infringing upon it is not intentional and please notify me so that I may give the appropriate credit.  I read a great deal and don’t know where ideas come from, weather inside or outside my head.

Bitcoin is not so much a currency as it is a network protocol where the number of packets that can be exchanged grows at some fixed rate to a defined maximum. There are rules for how the packets are exchanged on a peer to peer basis to ensure that packets aren’t duplicated or lost. This is the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto. This is what he created. In this context the lines with what Bitcoin can become are very blurry. As I understand there are portions of the original source code that leverage the network analogy. Continue reading →