235: Incremental Correctness (feat. Guillermo Rauch)
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The Proof of Work of Bitcoin
I used to think that Bitcoin was an eventually consistent system. Instead, I read a blog post that really changed my mental model about how I think about consistency. It said Bitcoin is not an eventually inconsistent system. So there's no chance that the other block that was competing with your block five blocks ago will find its way into that same blockchain because miners decided to work at work to add their versions of the chain. But if I decide as a process that my read protocol is I consider transactions to be valid only if there are six blocks deep then that truth is absolutely cemented forever and ever in the future. And it's physically impossible to rewrite that history.
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