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@ -22,6 +22,12 @@ _The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question,
I hope you can help me find and publish the "right answer" by the time this book is ready to print.
=== Why Are There Bugs On The Cover?
The Leafcutter Ant is a species that exhibits highly complex behavior in a colony super-organism, but each individual ant operates on a set of simple rules driven by social interaction and the exchange of chemical scents (pheromones). Per Wikipedia: "Next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth". Leafcutter ants don't actually eat leaves, but rather use them to farm a fungus, which is the central food source for the colony. While ants form a caste-based society and have a queen, there is no central authority or central planning in an ant colony. The highly intelligent and sohpisticated behavior exhibited by a multi-million member colony is an emergent property from the interaction fo the individuals in a social network.
Bitcoin, by comparison, is a highly sophisticated de-centralized trust network that can support a myriad of financial processes. Yet, each node in the bitcoin network follows a few simple mathematical rules. The interaction between many nodes is what leads to the emergence of the sophisticated behavior, not any inherent complexity or trust in any single node. Like an ant colony, the bitcoin network is a resilient network of simple nodes and can do amazing things without any central coordination.
=== Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book: