My kid sister asked me for bitcoin lessons for Christmas this year. Paper wallet, hardware wallet, and home built pi node with umbrel. What am I missing?
https://ift.tt/3H7U7d6
Do you understand how Satoshi “solved” the byzantine generals problem? Teaching something to someone else is the best way to improve your own understanding of it.
Trying to simplify concepts like consensus, decentralization, proof-of-work and attack vectors to the point a kid could appreciate them would be quite the challenge. Which actually makes it that much more valuable of an exercise. It will push your teaching skills to the limit, and her learning skills to the limit.
It might be frustrating at first, but keep trying. Eventually it finally clicks how all the incentives fit together just right for a blockchain to generate a distributed consensus. It’s such an amazing feeling when you finally “get it”.
It’s an even better feeling when your trying to teach it to someone else, and their questions start getting less and less dumb… then they start asking some questions that are actually really good… then you see that moment when it clicks for them. It’s the best.
My favorite part is that the two generals problem is proven to be insolvable, but Satoshi Nakamoto realized that you don’t have to truly solve it. If you could just get 99.99999% of the way there it’s close enough.
We often talk about something “working in theory but not in practice”. Satoshi flipped that concept on it’s head and used some clever economic incentives to make something that works in practice despite being impossible in theory.
Because you have to remember that bitcoin technically isn’t immune to attackers. The network is just strong enough at this point that the resources required to successfully perform such an attack would be unimaginably vast.
I think the basic game-theory at the heart of bitcoin is the most beautiful part. Depending on how young your sister is, it could be years until she finally gets it herself. But it’s worth it. Both to help her out, and to make sure you understand it yourself.
Here’s Satoshi’s original explanation:
Cryptocurrency
