本文翻译自 The Block
原文标题 Why We Follow Satoshi
作者 Matt
原文链接：https://www.theblock.co/post/275254/why-we-follow-satoshi
For those of us who may never get out of the rabbit hole, reading the history of cryptocurrencies and gleaning subtle yet profound insights into the details of their development always brings a unique sense of satisfaction.
Every time I open The Book of Satoshi, see the remnants of the first cryptocurrency war, or read debates on old forums, I feel transported to a completely different era. Come back to reality and be in awe of how far our adherence to fundamental principles and uncompromising commitment to our values can take us.
Let's start with history
The cornerstones of the online world we live in owe much to the brave attempts of the cypherpunk movement in the late 1980s. These pioneers bravely stood up to the might of the state while mastering the hidden arts of applied mathematics.
Until about thirty years ago, legal encryption techniques were limited to "weak encryption" that could be broken by the supercomputers of the day. The “strong” encryption we rely on today was once viewed as a weapon of war that no company would dare to promote on a large scale.
However, the cypherpunks adhere to a seemingly eternal but controversial belief in practice: privacy is a basic human right.
Cypherpunk member Phil Zimmermann convinced MIT Press to send his PGP email encryption source code to Europe on the grounds that the code was constitutionally protected speech, challenging then-Fed. law. The court eventually dismissed the charges for him, affirming that the code was essentially a form of speech.
The far-reaching contemporary efforts against end-to-end encryption are somewhat similar, but that’s a topic for another time.
这篇文章的主题是去中心化，因为它涉及应用数学的另一个产物：区块链。
Satoshi Nakamoto's invention
In Satoshi Nakamoto’s first forum post, the anonymous sage described Bitcoin as: “It is completely decentralized with no need for a central server or trusted entity because everything is based on cryptographic proofs rather than trust. .”
Those who know history will immediately notice the difference in this description. Previous digital currency attempts such as e-gold and Liberty Reserve, despite existing longer than many currently popular cryptocurrencies, eventually ended operations due to legal issues, with their core members being tried in federal court.
The fundamental reason why Bitcoin has been able to thrive while previous digital currency systems failed is that Bitcoin has completely abandoned the concept of operators.
This is not to say that Bitcoin is “decentralized enough” or any other compromising claim. Satoshi Nakamoto’s statement that “everything is based on cryptographic proof” is very true. Today, 15 years after the advent of Bitcoin, this sentence is still worth pondering.
Bitcoin is essentially just a series of specific, widely recognized mathematical operations, witnessed by society as a whole.
From a functional implementation perspective, Bitcoin is extremely simple. I'm sure someone could write Satoshi Nakamoto's paper on an index card. From this perspective, Bitcoin is more of an idea than an information system. The level of abstraction it has is amazing.
truly unique existence
It goes without saying that the scale of the challenges facing Bitcoin is huge. Since its inception, Bitcoin has been pitted against the most powerful forces known on the planet. Its existence is fraught with inherent dissent that no technology since the printing press has been able to match.
虽然美元霸权长期以来一直是美国全球力量投射的基石，但最近，高级官员已经开始承认比特币有潜力颠覆这一格局。
In the 21st century, the United States has become a virtually omnipotent and omniscient force. No matter how smart or fast the opponent is, or how confusing they are, they will eventually be discovered and their ambitions will be quickly ended.
This is reminiscent of the story of David and Goliath. David won with courage, wisdom and a stone, but what about Bitcoin?
Facing an omnipotent opponent, eliminating the inevitable consequences is the only defense.
Arresting Bitcoin users will not end Bitcoin. Arresting miners won’t end Bitcoin. Even the arrest of Satoshi Nakamoto himself would not be the end of Bitcoin.
It's like the mythical Hydra, which grows two heads when one is cut off, or my favorite, the starfish, which can regrow any severed arm and even has the ability to regenerate More starfish.
For Bitcoin, no matter how many Davids are destroyed by Goliaths, the end result is always a multiplication of Davids, creating an echo of the martyr ideology.
比特币本质上只是一系列特定的、被广泛认可的数学运算，由整个社会见证。
To become David, you just need to run software that enforces the system's rules and finds other nodes in the network. We know that code is speech; the spread of software is unstoppable.
The hype surrounding Bitcoin’s energy consumption problem has led to a devastating underestimation of the elegance of the Bitcoin system. However, it is this elegance that allows Bitcoin to survive in the toughest environments.
比特币的固有特征被扭曲成了 "区块链" 的梗，而人们往往不理解这样的机会为何会出现，以及为何能够自信地发表这些言论。
“We are here to solve problems” Blockchain
Bitcoin’s innovation cannot be overstated. Satoshi Nakamoto broke the mold and achieved a feat long considered impossible in the computer science community: a leaderless, permissionless distributed system.
In its early days, due to its unprecedented nature, Bitcoin was often misunderstood as a joke, a scam, or an endeavor destined to fail. Today, the world is filled with incentives to make you believe that Bitcoin has improved. However, it seems reasonable to remain skeptical of expansions in this area until time reveals their trade-offs and proves their long-term value.
This may be considered a radical idea today, but if a system could be paused and restarted deterministically, it might be useful for many applications, but it is not the same as the system in the intuition of Satoshi Nakamoto and other cypherpunks. Belong to the same category.
Rather, it is a system with a concept of an operator.
From savvy operators to the general public, just about everyone is able to bypass critical thinking and salivate at the chance to recreate Bitcoin’s meteoric rise.
As mentioned before, early digital currency solutions, such as Liberty Reserve and e-gold, outperformed almost all smart contract platforms in runtime (except for Ethereum, which to its credit did improve in many aspects Bitcoin, although these improvements come with compromises).
Most well-known smart contract platforms now adopt PoS mechanisms, which allows VCs to gain significant share on these platforms. The subsequent token issuance of these platforms is deterministic, that is, based on staking, and the cost to the stakers is almost zero. Apart from the threat of regulation, there is no natural mechanism to rotate out these stakeholders.
Even Worldcoin, with its ostensibly noble goals, set aside an airdrop equivalent of 100 million iris scans to its original development team and investors.
In this model, certain entities have outsized control from the outset and lack the incentive to change this. This subtle distinction is often overlooked in persuasive arguments and may seem irrelevant from a narrow, profit-oriented perspective.
然而，从长远来看，我们是否可以将这看作是比特币早期效应的一种延续，或者这完全是一个不同的现象？
Check Bitcoin
尽管某些读者可能觉得下面这句话已经耳熟能详了，但对另一些读者来说，这可能是他们首次听说：
在 PoW 系统中，生成区块的成本很高，但验证它们的成本却很低。
In a PoS system, the cost of generating blocks is low, but the cost of verifying them is high.
This trade-off involves the consumption of a lot of physical resources, but for what purpose?
objectivity
Mining a Bitcoin block requires a brute force calculation of a very unlikely but certain outcome.
Typically, a block can be mined every 10 minutes on average through a few gigabytes (10 to the 16th power) of algorithm execution. This is because miners will keep trying randomly until they find a result that satisfies the conditions. Each block references the previous block, so each block actually contains the proof-of-work of countless computers that have collectively witnessed Bitcoin’s history, encoded into a 48-byte microscopic space middle.
(For demonstration...this row has about 48 bytes of data)
To fully understand Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention, compare it to existing technology in distributed systems:
There’s a devastating irony to Bitcoin’s “efficiency” in this regard.
The combination of probability theory and cryptography allows anyone to confirm the vast amount of calculations involved in producing Bitcoin's history in a matter of seconds.
Rational economic behavior ensures that recorded history has a high probability of being accurate, as miners are only rewarded for valid blocks. These features are unique to PoW and cannot be reproduced in PoS systems.
With knowledge of the on-chain history, users can connect directly using “light clients” without relying on any third-party services (such as centralized RPC providers). Bitcoin’s UTXO accounting model also enables users to construct transactions independently.
Although the popular science about UTXO and light clients is not the focus of this article, interested readers can learn more about it through relevant links.
The potential problems associated with relying on RPC providers may seem alarmist, but there are actually countries where network traffic is geo-blocked.
In fact, the stronger the assumption in the protocol design that users will access network functions through specialized gateways, the stronger the argument is that these service providers are actually acting as "carriers."
It is worth mentioning that compared to PoS and account model systems, the PoW and UTXO models reduce the hardware requirements of end-user nodes.
不提供资金
In the world of Bitcoin, there are no privileged identities, no validator addresses, no stake balances, and no attribution of any responsibility for the operation of the system. Even the concept of “transaction confirmation” is outside the scope of the protocol.
In the Bitcoin network, transactions are included in the chain’s history once they are deemed valid. However, these transactions never received a “confirmed” finality. Any transaction can be overturned through the reorganization of the blockchain, so the authenticity of a specific transaction in the system depends entirely on the user's judgment.
In this model, miners don't really claim any authority, they just try to extend the chain with what they think is the most likely prior history.
Over time, reversal of transactions becomes less and less feasible (Bitcoin’s experience is 6 block confirmations). This is a distinctive detail.
We can compare this model to a PoS system, which provides certain "finality" to transactions through a quorum of signatures from a specific validator key. This means that in a PoS chain, the development of the chain and the flow of funds depend on the behavior of specific entities specified in the protocol.
In other words, PoS chains inadvertently reintroduce the concept of operators to the blockchain, which is contrary to the essence of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention.
While miners also provide services to the decentralized network, they are external to the system and do not require any specific miner or group of miners to operate.
挑事儿就有得受
A popular opinion about PoS is that anyone can run a validator node.
However, this is a technically demanding and fault-tolerant job that also requires significant capital investment (as well as physical constraints).
Natural economic forces (specialization and economies of scale) inevitably lead to the centralization of verification power. While this is similar to the situation in PoW, there is one clear difference: miners need to constantly fight against entropy, and they cannot permanently secure their monopoly or control the entire chain.
In a PoW system, miners need to pay real costs and their future is uncertain.
Another slang term that works well here is “fuck around and find out.”
In the PoW system, there is a direct linear relationship between "provoking trouble" and "getting it" - blocks that do not comply with the system rules will be rejected by the nodes, and miners will bear huge costs for this and will not be able to obtain it. income. In other words, in a PoW system, participants in the network cannot easily try to fool the system because they immediately “get something”.
相对地，在 PoS 体系中，生成区块的成本几乎被消除，使得 “挑事儿” 与 “有得受” 之间的联系变得模糊。
在几乎零成本的情况下，验证者可以胡作非为并产生一个不遵守共识规则的区块（他们会因为错过时间段而受到惩罚）。这看似微不足道，但在我看来，这种做法类似于放飞一个试探性气球，作为改变既定秩序的一种有用策略。
还存在一种可能性，即区块链的利益相关者中有足够多的人接受区块中的共识变更。
我们已经探讨了渐近线的一端，那另一端呢？在 PoS 体系中，“有得受” 相当于社会性的惩罚，这是一种删除攻击者代币的协调行动。这听起来很牵强，但一段时间以来，它一直是以太坊社区的最后手段了。
But who has the right to delete other people’s tokens? This is ultimately a political process with uncertain consequences. The best analogy I can think of is a game theory analysis of Circle's possible role in a contentious hard fork.
The PoW system cannot completely escape the influence of political factors. In a permissionless blockchain system, social consensus is the final arbiter. However, by increasing the cost of reaching consensus, rational economic behavior becomes a rare balancing force, which lays the foundation for every operation of a public, ownerless system.
Conclusion
Last November, CKB experienced an “outage” event.
My first reaction is that we are no different than Solana, we are all hypocrites.
This service outage was caused by an incompatibility of the mining pool middleware and the activation of a soft fork. A few hours later, a mining pool accounting for about 10% of the total hash power deployed a fix. Just a few seconds later, a new block was successfully mined, followed a few minutes later by another block.
Under the influence of cortisol, I finally understood a truth.
We don't need to "call out validators on Discord" or reach a quorum of specific entities required to "restart" the chain. To put it simply, we only need someone somewhere to mine a block according to consensus rules.
Eventually, someone did it because the PoW mechanism properly incentivized them and allowed them to do so. This is a good reminder that PoW is self-healing.
This also reminds us of the greatness of Satoshi Nakamoto’s inventions. While many smart contract chains describe Bitcoin as an obsolete product, CKB is inspired by this and believes that Bitcoin is the result of decades of philosophical and technical exploration by the pioneers of computer science.
Unlike those blockchains that need to be ripped up and restarted, CKB inherits Bitcoin’s clever designs, such as the proof-of-work (PoW) and UTXO models, and then goes one step further.
Just like Bitcoin, CKB is a “cryptographic proof” that we can observe. In fact, the PoW chain never "goes down"; it never even needs to be "restarted."
This system is completely asynchronous, and what we call the “Bitcoin blockchain” is simply an aggregation of independent observations, akin to our society’s collective perception of “reality.” This fact changes with the widespread acceptance of new valid blocks.
This is critical because we are building a public, ownerless system that must run in the public interest. It relies on the participation of countless individuals, which makes the system almost impossible to fail. While this path may not be sexy, efficient, and sometimes even difficult to understand, it is indestructible—and that’s what matters.
Permissionless blockchain offers us the promise of self-sovereignty, whereby the system itself must be sovereign, free to pursue the destiny shaped by its technological and social DNA.
While “decentralization”, or more accurately, “lack of center”, may seem like a mysterious and boring concept for a long time, given enough time, it will prove to be an absolute necessity.
I can only speak for myself and others in our community, but this reality is why we follow Satoshi Nakamoto.
In CKB, we discovered something surprising: Satoshi's work not only provided a solid foundation for the public system, but also elegantly facilitated many of the landmark features pursued by the entire industry, including state leasing, Account abstraction, transaction parallelism, intents, localized fee markets, and trust-minimized light clients.
To learn more about CKB and Nervos Network, please visit:
https://www.nervos.org/
Special thanks go to Stefan Stankovic for his extensive exploration of these topics, on which this article is based. Follow the author @matt_bitcoin on X. $BTC $CKB #CKB是最好的BTCL2 #CKB #UXTO #POW
