- Bitcoin was invented in 2007 (not 2008) per Nakamoto saying he'd
worked on it for about a year and a half prior to publication. Update
text to just say "first described in 2008"
- Of the inventions Bitcoin combined, b-money wasn't one of them. We
know that Nakamoto sent his original paper to Adam Back, Back told
Nakamoto about Wei Dai's b-mony, and Nakamoto contacted Dai in order
to add the b-money reference to his paper as an example of a previous
related idea. Nakamoto was aparently unaware of b-money before then
and so couldn't have combined it with other ideas in the creation of
bitcoin. Updated text from "b-money" to say "digital signatures",
which is a critical technology that was obviously part of Bitcoin's
original combination.
- The text describes "the" critical invention of Bitcoin as using PoW to
conduct an global election. Although that was critical, other factors
may also have been critical (e.g. difficulty adjustments to keep the
rate of issuance relatively constant). Updated text to say "a"
critical invention.
- Changed Bitcoin from exceeding the combined processing power of top
super computers to exceeding the number of computing operations.
It's not really fair to compare ASICs to general purpose CPU chips;
it's like comparing a wrench to your hand.
- Updated the dollar value of the largest transaction to "over a billion
dollars"; dropped the amount of the transaction fee. I think this
will better future-proof the text.
Previous text mentioned all bitcoins would be mined by 2140, which is
correct but easily confuses people who don't understand exponential
decay into thinking a substantial number of bitcoins will continue to be
mined for a century.
Previous text said they "verify" transactions, but that's not always the
case (e.g. validationless mining) and it may give readers the impression
that the entities primarily responsible for verifying transactions are
miners---when it's actually users who are ultimately responsible for
verifying the transactions they care about.
The commit ab5ae32bae is the last commit
for the second edition, so all changes since then are dropped except for
several commits for the third edition authored by Andreas Antonopoulos.
No attempt is made to remove CC-BY-SA or other licensed content present
in the already-published first or second editions.
This revert may itself be reverted for versions of the book published
under CC-BY-SA.
Before this change, project gets detected as:
Python 33.8%
HTML 28.7%
C++ 16.7%
Go 11.1%
CSS 8.6%
JavaScript 1.1%
After this change, project gets detected as:
AsciiDoc 94.9%
Python 1.7%
HTML 1.5%
C++ 0.8%
Go 0.6%
CSS 0.4%
JavaScript 0.1%
This change was added for a cosmetic effect on GitHub.
