Bitcoin, Decentralization and the Nash Equilibrium →
“Technological historians will for a long time see Bitcoin as a fundamental innovation in Internet technology. It’s the first distributed electronic currency that enforces a prohibition on double spending, something which was earlier thought to be inherently impossible - it is inherent in the nature of data that it can be copied, and media companies have tried for a decade to find a way to prevent their products from being copied and have had only limited, transient success; every scheme they devise is eventually broken. Bitcoin may indeed become the world’s great internet currency and overturn the world financial system. But even if Bitcoin fails, the concepts behind it are revolutionary by themselves. The idea of a cryptocurrency is not itself the innovation - it is merely one of the most obvious applications of a more fundamental advancement: for the first time, we have seen a computer network that prevents cheating not by being proprietary, but by the protocol itself being a Nash equilibrium - a state where no deviation from the equilibrium strategy (ie. the standard client software) can result in a gain for the deviant.”
- Vitalik Buterin
