The Mathematical Certainty of Bitcoin
There is beautiful re-assurance in code
Recently, I was asked a question at a book signing I was doing by someone many would consider to be the unlikeliest of people exploring Bitcoin.
She was an elderly lady, probably in her 80’s, and she was clearly interested in the concept. However, she struggling with some parts of it in the same way many of us do when we first embark on our journey of cryptocurrency exploration.
She’d got that it was digital money based on computers, she could see the possibilities it held, but she was still struggling with the lack of apparent support that this self managing system naturally comes with, i.e. none.
“How can I be certain that sending money from my wallet to another person’s wallet will get there?” she asked.
It’s a fair question and one I hadn’t been asked before, not in its direct form anyway, which, when I thought abut it later, surprised me a little.
The room of around twenty people immediately looked to me for an answer. I hesitated for a second. I could think of a number of ways of answering it, but was immediately rejecting each of them in my mind because they were too technical. After all, explaining Bitcoin is a bit like peeling a potato, you need to keep it in small, thin slices. One cut too deep and you’ll end getting stuck and making a mess of the job.
The true answer was actually as short as it was appropriate: Mathematics.
One of the pure beauties of Bitcoin — and one that’s arguably not discussed enough — is its mathematical certainty. There has never been, and never will be, a case where a payment has been lost or has not completed, assuming, of course, the humans involved haven’t made a silly error to start with.
To put it another way and without delving too deeply into hard core coding, the chances of any Bitcoin you send from one wallet to another actually arriving is 100% so long as, by way of a simple analogy, two plus two equals four.
This is incredibly difficult for our brains to understand. We’ve been taught that no system is perfect. We’ve been told that there will be exceptions and that things will go wrong from time to time. So, how to we find a way to explain this in way that doesn’t sound incredulous? Surely, as this lady later when on to elaborate, there must be a phone number we can call to get hold of someone to look at a transaction if it fails?
There isn’t. There can’t be due to the very nature of the beast, but there doesn’t need to be as long as the laws of numeracy stay in place.
Mathematics is one of the few certainties we have in life, along with the oft quoted death and taxes. It is a universal language that obeys the exact same laws and acts in the exact same way no matter where you originate or whether you even believe in it. Mathematics was here before you and will continue to be here long after you’ve gone, using the same format and, most importantly, the same rules.
That ‘two plus two’ quoted earlier will always therefore continue to equal four and that basic premise is enough to create an indefatigable, perfect system that removes the uncertainty of human intervention.
And this is, in some ways, is also the second half of the same point. The fact is, we humans have a very tricky relationship with money. First, we are terrible at being trusted with it as history — and even present day — so often shows, and second, we are prone to making all sorts of mistakes with it.
We can’t remove the second point completely as we still need to be able to interact with the system and use it, but Bitcoin does succeed in reducing human intervention to the very periphery of it.
We can, however, completely take the first issue out of the equation — pun intended. When you send Bitcoin to your friend, colleague or trader, you can trust that it will get there, irrespective of whether you intrinsically trust the person concerned. Why? Because, remember, two plus two always equals four.
Bitcoin is a beautiful construct of proven, clever coding that, once running, completely eliminates the need for human intervention. Your transaction forms part of the very fabric of the system and generates it’s own algorithmic security both based on and entirely unique to your inputs, using absolute and established rules, all behind the scenes.
This ‘block’ of information joins other blocks, each with their own set of uniquely mathematically generated rules, that are processed by the miners you often hear about. These are the people who run expensive, power hungry and highly specialized equipment that is dedicated to one job — to find the mathematical key that confirms the transactions.
It does this by guessing the answer to the cryptographic lock consistently, over and over again, literally the computerized equivalent of a child playing a guessing game.
Once found, this key is easy to confirm by everyone else on the network, a bit like someone filling in a crossword puzzle that you just couldn't do, but can easily see when someone shows it to you. At that point, the transaction is universally agreed globally and recorded in its ledger.
But because this process is entirely autonomous and works using only perpetually consistent and entirely unambiguous absolutes, the answer will always be the same: success.
But our brains still won’t accept this. We’re just not built that way and this fact is quite easy to demonstrate.
Let’s say we had a piece of paper with the question ‘What does two plus two equal?’ printed a thousand times on it, each requiring your answer. The chances are that even though you know what it is with absolute certainty, we’d still get one or more wrong somewhere, either due to the monotony of the task or another human specific error.
Then, if we took it a step further and added a single different question buried somewhere in the middle that asked ‘What does two TIMES two equal?’, the chances are most of us would miss it completely for the same reasons.
But a computer wouldn’t. A computer would get every answer on that sheet correct no matter how many times you presented it. It would calculate each equation with the same level of interest and enthusiasm — if computers had such a thing — every single time and always apply the same rules.
If we can all accept THAT as fact, what does it really matter if the maths is a little harder and there are more variables? That, potential Bitcoin user, is why we can be certain of the result.
Of course, this doesn’t take into account the weak link in the chain, ie us humans.
If you copy and paste the Bitcoin address incorrectly, you’re going to irreversibly send it to someone else. You won’t even know who it was sent to, so you can’t ask for it back either.
Interestingly, this still happens with banks in the traditional system if you enter someones’s account number incorrectly. Sure, there’s someone to call in that case, but they’ll often tell you it’s your own fault, despite the ‘code of conduct’ that was agreed a couple of years ago in the UK. Yes, it’s possible you’ll get your money back, but it’s also possible you won’t.
In short, It doesn’t matter which system you’re using, human errors in payments can be an expensive mistake. They’re best avoided.
It’s also possible you can leave a transaction in limbo for a long time by trying to get clever with the fee and reducing it to such a low level that no miner will want to process it. But even then it’s not lost and will happily sit on the sidelines waiting for it’s turn that may never come, unless the transactions drop right down to make it worthwhile or you Replace By Fee what you’re prepared to pay. In practice, if a transaction isn’t processed within, say, a week it will be returned to the originating wallet. It will still be safe.
So what does all this mean?
It means the Bitcoin network is a thing of technical and mathematical wonder, driven by a superbly clever bit of code based on a brilliant, but simple, concept. Its enormous number of decentralized working parts create something that is theoretically bulletproof, self-sustaining, self-adjusting, self-administrating and entirely independent of human intervention.
And I find that reassuringly beautiful.
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