Introduction to blockchain and bitcoin

The concept of bitcoin first became public in a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. The author’s name appears to have been a pseudonym and the identity of the author (or authors) of the paper is not publicly known. The paper laid out the mathematical and cryptographic underpinning of a system for performing decentralized financial transactions.

In a centralized financial system, the operation of the system relies on entities such as governments and banks to monitor and control system activities and to regulate what users of the system are allowed to do.

The bitcoin concept has no centralized regulator and relies entirely on networked peers to competitively interact in a manner that maintains stable system operation. Anyone can join the network as a peer and immediately gain all the privileges available to network participants.

One important feature of the bitcoin design...