In the previous episode we saw that Bitcoin works on the basis of trust in mathematicians. Here is a tiny bit more detail on this, as well as on developers!
The cryptographic building block used in Bitcoin is the SHA256 hash function. We trust that it is a "one-way function". A one-way function f is a function such that f(x) is simple to compute for any input x, but given some desired output y, there is no cleverer method of finding an x such that f(x)=y, than to try out all possible x's.
This is truly a point of trust, because there is no mathematical proof that finding x for a given y is hard. We base our trust in the fact that no mathematician has published an efficient method. The rationale is that a mathematician would be very famous if they were the first to solve this, and so the incentives are very high to publish a method if one is found. However, if the discovery also gives you the ability to potentially get a large amount of BTC for free, the question is whether this assumption is truly well founded. Any feedback on this point is highly welcome in the comments section!
Another process we put our trust in when using Bitcoin is the competence and collective honesty of the Bitcoin maintainers/developers. Bitcoin is a software network, which gets patched, upgraded and improved over time, which requires people to change the code (and the network to collectively "fork" to the new version when it becomes available). We trust that the open source process is sufficiently robust to withstand corruption.
We've come a long way! We went from "trust in math" to "trust in the incentive structure of the mathematical community and in the robustness of Bitcoin's open source development process".
Check out the next episode for thoughts on a trustless society!
[Image taken from here]