Category: Forbes cross-posts

As I’ve described, cryptocurrency losses started long ago and have kept on mounting over the years. Most recently, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Canada, QuadrigaCX,  has experienced a little problem that has resulted in what appears to be a permanent loss of over $130 million for its many customers.

The losses don’t seem to make any sense. My account is stored in a ledger that’s immutable – it can’t be changed because it’s locked down by unbreakable cryptography. It can’t be lost because the ledger is distributed, so even if a few computers are lost, there are still loads of computers with a copy of my unchangeable account balances in them. So how can it be that I can lose my money? To further increase security, Bitcoin and the other crypto-currencies don’t identify me by my name, but by a really loooong string of letters and numbers. And that’s just the name – to make any changes, someone would need access to my private key. Remember, “private key” isn’t just some password that’s easy to remember and maybe someone could guess – it’s a long number that's part of a proven-unbreakable cryptography scheme, totally guaranteeing that no one but me can access my accounts? It’s impossible for anyone to break through these layers of security, that math guys everywhere calmly assert just can’t be cracked. So what are these losses about???

The only reason this is mysterious is because the vast majority of stuff we read about Bitcoin, blockchain, distributed ledger technology and the rest is produced by adherents to the new cult. They’re promoters, not evaluators. Let’s start with encryption. Loads of things are encrypted – it’s hardly something that started with Bitcoin. Most sessions with websites are encrypted, as you can see by the https in the URL bar in the browser. I hope you only use encrypted WiFi. Email is encrypted. All databases run by moderately competent professionals are encrypted. And so on. Are websites, email systems and corporate servers hacked in spite of it? You know the answer. People can wave their arms and babble with passion about the power of unbreakable encryption all day long, but bad things happen in spite of it. Is it because encryption is in fact breakable? Nope! It’s because even the biggest castle with the most unbreakable walls has to have doors that are easy to open and close, though which properly authorized people and goods go in and out. Bad guys waltz right into the castle with unbreakable walls through the same easy-to-open doors that all the residents and servants of the castle use! How are those doors locked and guarded? Using absolutely proven, tested, tried-and-true methods such as … user names and passwords! And sometimes even PIN codes on top of it!!

Oh, no, everyone but everyone talks about how safe and immutable the distributed ledger is – how is it possible for it to be broken, and why are ancient, obsolete things like usernames and passwords involved? It’s simple, really. Say you’re an experienced break-and-entry person. You walk down a block at night. Most of the houses you see have fences, big locked doors and lights on. One of the houses is dark, and its front door is swinging free. Which house do you pick? Everyone scans for opportunities and goes for the weakest point. So no one even tries to break the cryptography – it really IS secure. But what about the place where the long ID and the no-way-can-I-remember-it private key are held? AHA! We’ve gotten to the weak point of the system: the wallet.

Wallets are just pieces of software that run on your phone, your computer or even online. There are dozens of wallets available. They all claim to store your Bitcoin securely, and maybe they do – except they need to allow a normal human being to actually use them, so they need to be opened by someone a normal human being can handle, like a user name and password! The super-secret but impossible-to-remember private key is stored in the wallet, among other things. Without the private key, you have nothing. If you lose or break the phone that has the wallet, you are screwed. And of course if your phone or computer is hacked, someone else will immediately transfer your Bitcoin out of your account into theirs. There is no recourse. None. Think that never happens? It’s been going on for years, see this. A 20-year-old college kid was just sentenced to 10 years in prison for stealing more than $5 million by phone hacking, see this. That was a first-ever case – usually, no one is caught.

Some people, concerned about the security of their wallets, have turned to professionally-managed exchanges, which both store crypto-currency and enable it to be converted and transferred in and out. An example of such a company is Quadriga, which was the largest such exchange in Canada last year. Now it has made various court filings, and is unable to return its customer’s roughly $200 million in assets, see this. Why? Because those assets were held in a wallet on the now-deceased founder’s laptop computer, and no one can get into the computer – its contents are encrypted and the access information was last seen somewhere in what was the founder’s brain.

Yes, the distributed ledger is secure and immutable. Yes, the cryptography used is in fact unbreakable. Most descriptions stop there, leading you to think you’re protected against loss or theft. As I hope is now clear, Bitcoin and its numerous offshoots do indeed involve some amazing technology, as I’ve described here. But that doesn’t mean that it’s any more secure or protected against loss than any other software. Because of its immaturity, it is proving to be more vulnerable to loss and theft than “normal” money. And the non-monetary blockchain solutions are just as vulnerable.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.

Bitcoin is an amazing technology. I admire it. The central idea of how to implement a virtual currency with no one in charge, but where the “bank vault” is nonetheless pretty safe, is clever, as I explained here. However, the second you take this clever idea and apply it to situations for which it was not designed, it quickly becomes ridiculous – inferior by factors of thousands compared to existing solutions. It’s as though you liked hiking and camping in a tent — and went back to your home on your suburban block, knocked your house down, disconnected from electricity, municipal water and sewer, stopped garbage collection, sold your car and bicycle, and gloried in your new, improved way of living during cold winter nights. Good idea, but wrong place, and there's probably a reason few people choose to live that way.

As a start for understanding why private blockchain is a ridiculous notion, let’s imagine that we all live in buildings with municipal water supply, and that suddenly someone decided it would be cool to live “off the grid” in a dry area where it does rain, but infrequently. How are you going to get and store the water you need to live? Obviously, you have to somehow make maximum use of the rare rainfall that happens. You construct as wide and varied a system of rain-catchers as you can. If you have a house with a roof, you arrange the gutters to go to downspouts to rain barrels. You carefully construct the rain barrels so they don’t leak, since water is precious, after all – the rain barrels have to be “immutable.” You also stretch out any canvas or anything else you can scrounge up to capture the rain before it hits the ground, and route it to barrels. You construct a set of pipes to connect the barrels, to make sure that all the barrels have water, and none has too much. You end up with a distributed set of barrels, each containing the precious water you need to collect and preserve. The system is even more impressive when it supplies a small encampment of people, with pipes distributing the water among the barrels, assuring that everyone has enough water.

Anyone wandering in the wilderness who encountered this maze of connected, distributed, immutable barrels and rain catchers would be impressed at what a good solution it was to the problem of having enough water when there’s no municipal water supply. Someone might come out to the place, take lots of pictures and blog about it. It might catch on, and some homeowners with regular water supply might be attracted to the notion of being ready to survive when civilization collapses and everyone will be forced to live off the grid. Most people, of course, will be happy to continue enjoying normal hot and cold running water, available by turning the faucet.

The Bitcoin solution was specifically designed when you really don’t want a municipal currency authority. Like the distributed water catchers and barrels, it’s a clever solution for exactly that problem. What happens when you decide it’s OK after all to have someone in charge – you’re not in the desert, you’re not a survivalist, and you just want a convenient water supply? What kind of sense does it make to somehow get a private corporation to be completely in charge of the system of water catchers, pipes and barrels in a place where connection to central water is readily available? Do you think the new system would be less expensive, more convenient and less obtrusive? Do you think the privately run immutable distributed water system, with all its barrels, catchers and pipes would be able to handle sudden demands like filling your pool or even a few houses running their lawn sprinkling systems at the same time?

That’s exactly what’s happening with private blockchain implementations. Every single vendor that so enthusiastically promotes its private blockchain tells you quietly what’s wrong, things like the transaction rate is worse by factors of thousands compared to normal DBMS’s (of course they don’t put it that way), and a host of other deficiencies that they’re overcoming … by step-by-step adapting standard database techniques first deployed decades ago and by now standard methods, and making an “improved” private blockchain. Improved, but still dramatically worse by all measures compared to standard technology.

Blockchain is a pile of new software that was designed to solve a very special problem that does not occur in normal life. Private blockchain is an attempt to take that highly unique solution, designed for wilderness living with no central authority in charge, and apply it to normal urban/suburban life with a central authority. The amazing, cool and different things about blockchain were invented specifically to solve the problem of having no central authority. The second you introduce a central authority, i.e., make it a private blockchain, all those special things that make blockchain unique suddenly become huge impediments, obstacles with no redeeming virtues.  It makes as much sense as camping out in your suburban back yard — OK if you're a kid or want to give your tent a dry run, but nothing any sane person would think is an improved way of living.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.

Smart contracts are all the rage in the blockchain world these days. They are the key feature that has pushed Ethereum to prominence. They’re everywhere!

There are just a few little problems. They’re not smart. They’re not contracts. They’re rife with security issues. And they violate the core principles that are supposed to make blockchain wonderful. Other than that, they’re great!

There is a huge amount of rhetoric and propaganda about what Smart Contracts are supposed to be. Here’s the reality: A smart contract is a software program. It’s written in one of a variety of mostly brand-new languages, chief among them Solidity. A smart contract is the exact equivalent in the blockchain world of a “stored procedure” in the database world; this means that it’s embedded in the blockchain and has access to its internal functions.

At first glance, smart contracts can seem like a clever idea that enables endless extensions to the underlying “immutable distributed ledger” technology in which they’re embedded, greatly extending their flexibility and fields of application. Let’s take a look at how this first glance holds up under scrutiny.

Here’s a typical explanation of smart contract:

“Here’s a very reductive way of establishing a smart contract: let’s say you and I have agreed that if I write you a history of bitcoin, you’ll send me $10 on my birthday this year. We can do that via a legally enforceable contract, which involves lawyers, notaries, and so on — or we can do it via Ethereum. In the latter case, you put $10 worth of smart coins in escrow, and when the terms of the contract are met, those coins are released to me. If I don’t meet the terms of our agreement, the coins are released back to you.”

The key, innocent-sounding phrase in the above description is “when the terms of the contract are met.” When I write you a history of bitcoin, will you accept it if it’s a piece of crap? Probably not. Here’s what has to happen with the deal:

• We have to agree on the terms of the deal
  • This happens verbally, no matter what mechanism is used.
• We have to express the deal terms in a mutually acceptable way.
  • In the land of normalcy, either our verbal agreement would be OK, or we’d have an email or paper exchange.
  • In smart-contract-land, someone would have to write a program in an acceptable language such as Solidity. We would both have to have wallets and accounts in the same crypto-currency among the hundreds that are out there. We would have to agree that the Solidity program expressed our mutual agreement. How good are your Solidity reading and writing skills? You would also have to deposit $10 in your account.
• I would write up my history and send it to you
  • In real life, I’d get it to you using paper or email.
  • In smart-contract-land, there is no good way to send an email – and putting an email address into a smart contract would make it available to the public! There are some clever hacks involving external services that monitor accounts in the blockchain, but there’s no direct solution. So I’d have to get my history to you using plain old real-life methods.
• A decision would be made about whether the history I send satisfied the contract.
  • This would be done in real life by you reading the history and making a judgment.
  • Smart-contracts would remain blissfully unaware of this crucial step, unless and until an amazing advance in AI/NLP is somehow embodied in them.
• If the terms of the contract are met, the money would be sent to me.
  • In real life, you’d hand me the $10, mail it to me, or electronically transfer it to me via one of the widely available methods, for example Venmo, which handled over $12 billion in transactions in 2018.
  • In smart-contract land, you’ve had $10 tied up in your crypto account since the contract was agreed to and the program – oops, I meant the “smart contract” – was created by one or both of us. You would then send a transaction to the contract to transfer the money to my account, after which I could convert it to normal money, with fees taken out along the way.

Someone please explain to me how using a smart contract to embody and execute our agreement is an improvement on normalcy?

In addition to the problems mentioned along the way, we’ve got these:

• If you love my history but want to cheat and not pay me, how does the smart contract help?
• If I’m worried about you paying me and want an enforceable contract, how does the smart contract help?
• If we make a written agreement, even a simple email one, at least we can probably both understand it. What are the chances that we are both fluent in Solidity?
• Assuming we somehow manage to write the code in some language, what if we’re less than perfect and have a bug in the code? The teensy weensy little problem with smart contracts is … they’re immutable (i.e., can’t be changed), along with the blockchain in which they’re stored!
• The key part of any agreement of this kind is the characterization of the history I’m supposed to write and the acceptance criteria. How can that be expressed or evaluated in lines of code?
• In terms of just moving the money quick and easy with minimal overhead, how is anything in crypto-land easier or better in any way than Venmo?

Smart contracts are a really cool idea. The best way to use them is in a sandbox where really smart, unemployed people can play games and make experiments, keeping them out of trouble and far away from real life and real problems that need to be solved.

This post originally appeared in Forbes.

Apple’s had a rough time recently, with bugs, security problems and sales issues. The recent Facetime bug is particularly embarrassing. It’s made the news! There are stories about it all over. Apple is scrambling to fix the issue and end the pain and embarrassment, pronto.

Blockchain has also had a rough time, with recent cavernous losses that extend a years-long pattern. Blockchain enthusiasts march on, seemingly oblivious to the intractable problems that cripple their beloved technology. So far as anyone can tell, no one is scrambling to fix the problems.

Comparing the two situations is interesting and educational.

The Apple bug was first discovered by a teenager while he was setting up a Facetime group chat.

• Most blockchain problems are discovered sometime after a substantial loss has taken place, when you go to check your account and are shocked to find it has a whole lot less value than it had last time you checked.

The boy and his mom were frustrated by how hard it was to get through to anyone at Apple to report the bug. They were doing the right thing, while Apple was being a typical lumbering, unresponsive bureaucracy.

• You discover the loss in your crypto account. You’re upset. Who do you call? Where’s the 800 number for customer support? If you didn’t know it already, you quickly discover that there’s no number, no one to call. There’s no organization in charge at all! And in those cases where there sort of is, they refuse to fix the problem.

In less than a week, Apple officials woke up to the fact that they had a problem. A big, ugly, embarrassing one. To their credit, they did two things.

• In some of the most important cases, such as Bitcoin, there is literally no one in charge – that’s the whole point of Bitcoin – it’s a system that was designed to have no one in charge. It’s brilliant, as I describe here. But it’s also fatal when the system is hacked.
• In other cases, such as exchanges, there is someone in charge. But their typical response is to claim, with good justification, that “fixing” the problem would destroy the fabric of blockchain. And after all, in many important cases, the funds have long since been converted to cash and are long gone – how can that be “fixed” without catching the bad guys? And as I’ve described, while bad guys in normal banking are often caught, in the crypto-currency world, they almost never are. So your money is gone. Gone!

The first thing Apple did was shut down their servers so that group Facetime was no longer possible. This didn’t happen all at once, but rolled through the system pretty quickly.

• Immediate action to fix the problem in blockchain? Doesn’t happen.

The second thing Apple did was announce that the bug would be fixed and released in about a week.

• Here’s where it gets really bad for blockchain: where’s the bug that can be fixed to solve the underlying problem? No one can say! So far as all the blockchain “experts” are concerned, there is no problem to be fixed. The silence is deafening. When have you ever read about any kind of crypto-currency loss, after which someone “in charge” said something like: “the loss was due to [this bug}, which we’ve found and fixed and will be effective on [this date]”? Anyone?
• When the responsible problem is in a so-called smart contract, it’s even worse. Smart contracts are stored in the immutable blockchain itself, and so, unlike normal programs, can’t be fixed or changed in any way. The geniuses who invented and support smart contracts consider this fatal flaw to be one of their great advantages. Go figure.

The net effect of the Apple bug is that the privacy of certain Facetime users was compromised. Embarrassing. Bad. But your wallet is unaffected. But at least the news got out quickly, people can avoid the feature for a bit and then go back to using it, should they choose.

• The net effect of the myriad of Crypto and blockchain bugs and hacks is loss of the equivalent of real money, sometimes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. The only way to avoid the problem is to get out of crypto. Totally. And never go back.

The contrast between the Apple Facetime bug and the various crypto/blockchain bugs and hacks couldn’t be more stark. With Apple, there’s someone in charge; the someone wakes up to the problem within days, and moves decisively to first block the problem and then fix it. In blockchain, there’s no one in charge (by design!); the affected people wake up to their problem, whine about their often substantial financial loss, but are largely ignored by the community of experts and operators, who soldier on, promoting the wonders of the amazing immutable distributed ledger technology.

Here’s my prediction: the blockchain mania will continue to spread for a while, but then will slowly fade away, with few of the promoters admitting their lapse in judgment. As with most technology fads, everyone’s attention will simply shift to something shinier and newer as the problems grow too large to be ignored. There's a long shot there will be some shining successes with blockchain — but I predict that when you look under the covers, it won't really be blockchain doing most of the work.

(Disclosure: While I’ve read API’s and source code, I’ve never owned cryptocurrency of any kind, and don’t plan to any time soon.)

This post originally appeared on Forbes.

Insiders most like to describe Blockchain as Immutable Distributed Ledger technology. They love that it’s distributed, and a “ledger” rather than a database. But most of all, they seem to like that it’s “immutable.” To enthusiasts, this means that the unbreakable cryptography and other techno-nerd elements result in impregnable, hack-proof software. In a world filled with crappy software that’s thoroughly “mutable,” hackable, breakable and a smorgasbord of other criminal, consumer-hurting things, this is a wonderful thing. No wonder so many people and corporations are jumping on the Blockchain Bandwagon. The smell of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) fills the air.

The FOMO is really strong on Blockchain. So strong that it appears to prevent enthusiasts from paying attention to the fact that has been established over the last few years: Blockchain may indeed be Distributed and a Ledger (more on those in subsequent posts), but it’s hardly immutable. In fact, it’s just as hackable as any other piece of software – even more so because no one’s in charge of keeping it safe!

The latest loss is small by comparison to some of the earlier ones. The one announced on January 8, 2019 amounts to “just” $200,000 worth of ethereum classic. What’s worse is that the attack was at the core of  the blockchain. Apparently the attack was carried out by miners, the servers that are at the core of blockchain’s operations and security, the ones that perform the magic cryptography that supposedly prevents bad things from happening. The hack itself involved the absolutely worst thing that can happen to a crypto-currency – about 40,000 ETC was double-spent.

If this were the first loss, I would understand the blockchain folks minimizing its importance. It’s hardly the first loss. Who talks about the Mt. Gox hack, in which nearly half a BILLION dollars was lost? That happened about 5 years ago! Mt. Gox has been followed by an un-ending stream of other successful (for the criminals) attacks and losses. One of the more famous was the $50 million lost in the DAO hack. Less famous hacks resulting in losses over $10 million took place in 2018. The pattern of criminal success shows no signs of slowing down.

How can any sane person continue to back blockchain as a transforming technology due (in part) to its immutability and implied greater security in the face of this evidence? Obviously, what’s happening is that people are simply ignoring the evidence. That’s it!

Let’s put this in context. What would the stories be if anything comparable took place with plain old banks, with their supposedly obsolete software and security that’s primitive by comparison? While lots of normal banks are robbed every year, these are small-scale occurrences, and many of the perpetrators are caught. For example, here is the FBI’s latest news about bank robberies. You’ll see that there are loads of convictions and prison sentences. Here is a story from December 2018 about a man who robbed a local bank of $536 in order to pay his rent. He has just been sentenced to 46 months in prison.

Are there bank robberies in which large amounts are stolen? Check out the list of them in Wikipedia. The list goes back more than a century. The largest robberies don’t come close to the criminals of the blockchain world. The most recent one listed was 20 years ago, when the Bank of America was robbed of less than $2 million. Peanuts!

OK, you might say, but what about cyber-crime? There’s actually quite a bit of it. But digging into the exact nature of the crimes and how they’re committed is quite interesting. It may exist, but I couldn’t find ANY cases of the core bank systems being hacked. And NONE of the central database (the equivalent of blockchain)! In every case I’ve seen, it was plain old systems network hacking and/or criminal employees that were the problem. Yes, some large amounts were involved, for example in the Bangladesh robbery. But in that case as in many others, corrupted insiders were involved. It had nothing to do with the security of the banking software itself!

If normal banks had been hacked the way blockchain has been hacked, you’d find that the core banking system itself was breached, or the central database itself. In no case that I can find has this happened. What this means is that blockchain, in its short existence and with its relatively tiny fraction of money, has been hacked more successfully and more deeply than any normal banking software has been. “Immutable,” huh? Explain that again, please. But stick to the facts this time.

The conclusions we can draw from these facts are simple, clear, and hard to dispute:

• Blockchain is highly susceptible to being hacked in a wide variety of ways.
  • This has been demonstrated by events for more than 5 years; the hacks are on-going.
  • Large amounts of money are lost in the hacks.
  • The hackers aren't caught, much less punished.
• While there are lots of physical robberies of old-style banks, the amounts involved are small, the perpetrators are often caught, and consumers are not hurt.
• While there are hacks on old-style banks, they have had little success in US banks, and the same kind of cyber-security breaches that occur everywhere are involved.
  • In no case have the hacks been as deep in the software as many attacks on blockchain have been.

There's lots more that could be said about this, but here's the bottom line: if you want to keep your money safe, put it in a traditional bank, whose software systems are indeed immutable. Any blockchain storage is more susceptible to attack and loss than the software used by traditional banks.

This post originally appeared at Forbes.

There aren’t many true and surprising new things in software technology, in spite of all the gushing about new stuff. At the center of Bitcoin is a tech advance. Not a minor step forward. Not an enhancement fueled by faster chips. An amazing idea that is the engine that has fueled its explosive growth. It’s not something people talk much about, sadly. They should. The core of the idea is the miners that are the heart of the Bitcoin engine.

If you’ve heard anything about Bitcoin, you’ve probably heard that it’s a crypto-currency. You’ve heard it’s totally secure because lots of computing locks the data in an air-tight vault secured by the latest cryptology algorithms. You’ve heard that it’s a ledger of transactions, and that the ledger is distributed, which somehow makes it better. All these things that you’ve heard are correct – and it’s the miners at the heart of every one of those true things.

First, let’s step back a minute and understand the problem that Bitcoin solves. Bitcoin isn’t cool in the abstract – it’s cool because it’s a creative solution to a really hard problem. The problem, in a nutshell, is to create a currency, like US dollars or Euros, that isn’t controlled by any central authority. That’s a HARD problem. How can you have a currency that people accept with no one to issue it? If it’s somehow issued, who’s going to do the work of creating and managing it?

Long ago, currency consisted of fairly scarce, valuable objects, like sea shells. Then, precious metals were used. Since it was hard to judge how valuable a piece of metal was, people in authority created standard sizes, shapes and values – today’s coins. Then paper money was issued by early banks, with the precious metals in the banks backing it up. Central government authorities then replaced the banks, and currency became a per-country thing. Finally, it became detached from the coins, a.k.a. “the gold standard.” That’s where we are today, with huge government authorities issuing and controlling abstract and paper currency at will, manipulating it to meet political goals. The problem at the heart of Bitcoin is, how can you create an abstract currency that people can trust without a central authority of any kind, much less a government? I trust you’ll agree, that’s a truly hard problem.

Before diving into the solution to this problem, it’s worth understanding why it’s a problem. The core issue is the money supply, and how central authorities manipulate it to implement monetary policy in various ways, shifting with the political winds. Central bankers can print more money, take money out of circulation, raise and lower interest rates and do other things on a whim. Other branches of the government closely monitor who does what with their money via extensive, ever-growing, onerous regulations that make everything harder, slower and more expensive. How can we get out of this? How can we escape the armies of faceless bureaucrats who control the money and watch what we do with it?

The solution has to somehow make everything work with no one in charge. Get people to do lots of work and spend lots of normal money to create and maintain a robust system of virtual currency, and somehow get those people to be absolutely incorruptible?! They’ll be in charge, but not tempted even a little to use their power to enrich themselves? How is THAT supposed to happen??

That, my friends, is the genius of Bitcoin. The genius is embodied in the design of the miners.

Miners are volunteers. No one selects them – they just step up, get their hardware and software together, and start mining. All on their own – without permission and without even an invitation! Here’s the key part: when you mine, you make money, in the form of newly-issued Bitcoin. The formula and the rules are built into the software that everyone uses. When you mine, you make money. The more you mine, the more you make. If you’re ever tempted to think about fiddling with the software, cheating and just taking a bunch of money (Bitcoin), you immediately think of the huge investment you’ve made in mining equipment, which isn’t good for much of anything except mining. If people started thinking that miners were self-dealing corruptocrats, the value of Bitcoin would immediately plummet, and the miner’s investment would be worthless. Your thought of cheating, just a little, quickly flies out of your head, and you go back to being a straight-up miner – and, by the way, watching the other miners closely to make sure none of THEM cheat; if they did it would hurt you. Badly.

The miners are un-recruited, unmanaged groups who put up their own money and time to make money, and are thoroughly incented to play it straight, without cheating.

What the miners actually do is solve computationally intensive problems – all using standard software on juiced-up hardware – that does two important things.

• First, the computing assures that each new transaction that someone tries to put in the ledger follows the rules. Simple rules that are essential to virtual currency working. Things like you can only spend money you have. You can only spend it once. Stuff like that, things you don’t even think about when your money is physical and sits in a wallet — but when it’s digital, has to be enforced.
• Second, the computing puts a lock on the new transaction, a special fancy lock that links to all the earlier locks on all the prior transactions. For ease of computing, the transactions are grouped into blocks, and it’s actually the blocks that are locked up tight and chained together with cryptology. Thus the name “blockchain.”

The rules built into the Bitcoin/blockchain software used by all the miners are the key to everything. Since all the miners run the same software, everyone follows the same rules. These rules enforce the fact that, at any given moment, there are a known amount of Bitcoin, with the ledger tracking who owns how much. The number of Bitcoin is fixed – until a miner earns some as a result of the mining work. In that case, brand-new Bitcoin are created – according to an established formula – and deposited in the miner’s own account in the ledger. Once the miner has the earned Bitcoin, he can do anything he likes with it, like any normal owner of Bitcoin.

Finally, it’s true that the Bitcoin miners see each and every transaction. Each transaction is vetted to assure that the rules are followed. But the owner is identified only by a VERY long string of letters, a key, so no one knows who the owner of Bitcoin is in physical life. This is the capstone of Bitcoin’s solution to the problem of government-issued currency. No snooping!

Net-net: There is a publicly known amount of Bitcoin in the world, which slowly grows as it is created to pay the miners who earn it by running the system. There are a large number of volunteer miners keeping transactions flowing, safe and secure, without depending on any of them. Bitcoin buying and selling is easy, inexpensive and private. Because of thousands of volunteer miners crunching away. No one’s in charge. Miners want to work and are incented to be honest. No governments, no bureaucracies, no politics, no one snooping on you. Problem solved!

That’s why Bitcoin/blockchain is new and deserves the attention and credit it’s gotten.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.