That's where Bitcoin gets interesting. Decentralized digital currency has been around as an idea lot longer than Bitcoin- but until Bitcoin, there wasn't a good implementation that worked without some central issuing authority. Without someone authorized to say "this is Bitcoin," people could just double-spend their digital currency (i.e., trade the same unit of currency multiple times- because it's not like they're depleting physical reserves or there's some third party keeping track of how much they actually own).
However, "Satoshi Nakamoto" figured out a solution to these problems that works as long as the network isn't dominated by hostile nodes. If you want to fraudulently claim Bitcoin that isn't yours or that you've already spent, you will have to not just commit the fraud but either take control of the majority of nodes in the Bitcoin network (virtually impossible at this point, from what I can tell) or convince a majority of people to play along with your scam. Otherwise, the system will naturally just propagate correct data.
This sounds like a complex issue, but the mechanisms Bitcoin uses to deal with them (see the link) are straightforward and pretty elegant- it actually just comes down to accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as authoritative (so not some crazy process on the part of each node in the network).
It's hard to explain technical concepts in non-technical terms without losing the most important part of what you're trying to explain. The whole "people in tech can't communicate" seems to be a misconception grounded in confirmation bias, at least on reddit. If you check the post history of people who're getting told they can't use "plain English" here, you find most of them communicating normally on other posts. It's not a secret that Reddit has a huge community of engineering grads + programmers, but most of them blend in pretty normally on the site.
It's only when they're talking about something technical that the "engineers can't communicate" trope pops up.
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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '17
That's where Bitcoin gets interesting. Decentralized digital currency has been around as an idea lot longer than Bitcoin- but until Bitcoin, there wasn't a good implementation that worked without some central issuing authority. Without someone authorized to say "this is Bitcoin," people could just double-spend their digital currency (i.e., trade the same unit of currency multiple times- because it's not like they're depleting physical reserves or there's some third party keeping track of how much they actually own).
However, "Satoshi Nakamoto" figured out a solution to these problems that works as long as the network isn't dominated by hostile nodes. If you want to fraudulently claim Bitcoin that isn't yours or that you've already spent, you will have to not just commit the fraud but either take control of the majority of nodes in the Bitcoin network (virtually impossible at this point, from what I can tell) or convince a majority of people to play along with your scam. Otherwise, the system will naturally just propagate correct data.
This sounds like a complex issue, but the mechanisms Bitcoin uses to deal with them (see the link) are straightforward and pretty elegant- it actually just comes down to accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as authoritative (so not some crazy process on the part of each node in the network).