Satoshi Once Said !!!

Time is sunrise and sunset, time is morning clock and evening drum, time is the second hand ticking. But these are phenomena that change over time, not time itself. Where is the time? What is the time? We don't know about these problems.

In the agricultural age, people work at sunrise and rest at sunset, sowing and harvesting according to the seasons. It is enough to rely on the movement of the sun and the earth to guide one's own production and labor. But time is not in the sun, nor in the earth.

In the industrial age, people began to work in factories, and assembly line production put forward strict requirements for the close coordination of all links, which required the possibility of large-scale simultaneous production. So people began to use clocks and watches in large quantities, and went to work, off work, and get off work at the same time at the specified time. But time is not in the clock on everyone's wrist, nor in the roaring machinery of the factory.

Modern physicists use atomic resonance frequencies to calibrate time more accurately. This is the atomic clock. The information age requires more precise time synchronization. High-performance distributed computer clusters, such as Google Spanner, use atomic clock timing to ensure that nodes distributed in different computer rooms around the world have high-precision synchronized clocks. But time is not in the atomic clock, nor in the computer server.

Therefore, as the German philosopher Kant said, time is not in our external world, but in our hearts. It is that we first have the abstract ability to perceive time, and then we can feel the passage of time from the outside world. Time is an involuntary feeling, an involuntary imagination. When we observe certain conditions, it will arouse our feelings about time.

According to the Nobel Prize winner Prigogine, there are three types of things that can stimulate our sense of time: the first type is the movement of matter, such as the rising of the sun and the west setting; the second type is the increase in entropy, such as wax torches. Ashes and water cover are difficult to harvest; the third category is the bifurcation of chaotic systems, such as the rise and fall of a country, changes in cities, and things that are wrong. The common phrase "we can't go back anymore" in romantic dramas is a perceptual portrayal of the passing of time and the right and wrong of things.

Lao Tzu, the curator of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty Library, once wrote, “Things are mixed, born innate and lonely, independent and not changed, and can be the mother of heaven and earth. I don’t know the name, but the word is Tao. , The name of the strong is big. The big is the passing, the passing is the far. The far is the opposite. "Heaven and earth are space, this week is not dead, and the name is not known, is it time? The sun rises as usual, clocks and clocks circle twice a day, maybe the time in the eyes of the ancients is circled?

"The Analects" records that Confucius stood on the bank of the river, looking at the surging river, and said with emotion: "The dead are like a husband, and will not give up day and night." A deeper understanding.

The great scientist Einstein discovered that there is no absolute time in the outer universe, so he invented the theory of relativity. In fact, the astronauts working on the Tianhe space station, they experience a little bit slower than the passage of time on our planet. There are actually countless events in our universe that allow us to feel time, but due to the limitations of our perception, we can only imagine a one-dimensional, continuous, and irreversible time coordinate, and take all the time we feel from all events Are all merged into this single coordinate. When the relative movement of these events with each other changes, we will perceive the relative change in time.

In the permissionless Bitcoin system, we cannot trust the timestamp of the local clock reported by any node. This is not because of the time zone problem, but because the timestamp can have errors and errors. Even maliciously tampered with. Bitcoin adopts a model that is not based on trust, and even for time reports outside the system, we cannot trust it. It is precisely because the timestamps of all computers participating in the Bitcoin network are calibrated outside the Bitcoin system, so these calibration times cannot be trusted by the system.

Bitcoin needs an endogenous time through a native timestamp service. This timestamp service is the blockchain. Bitcoin uses its own block time (block height) as its timing basis instead of any external timestamp.

Therefore, Satoshi Nakamoto opened the third section "Timestamp Server" in "Bitcoin: A Point-to-Point Electronic Cash System" published on October 31, 2008: "Our solution starts from a timestamp server. Start." In the illustration in this article, the block data does not contain the external timestamp reported by the miner. The "timestamp" in this section refers to the timestamp of the Bitcoin blockchain, that is, Bitcoin. The block time of the coin. This native timestamp is the hash of the block.

Bitcoin's blockchain and its block production movement are monotonous, one-dimensional, and continuous, and proof-of-work calculations ensure that it is difficult to reverse. This is in line with our perception of time, so we can perceive time from it.

In order to keep the block time of Bitcoin synchronized with the clock time of the external real world, Satoshi Nakamoto designed the ability of automatic difficulty adjustment for the Bitcoin network. The method is to allow miners to report the miner’s local timestamp in each “tick” block while pushing the blockchain clock forward through the proof-of-work calculation. Although this time stamp has the possibility of deviation, error or even forgery, the random selection of nodes in the proof of work and the limitation of the time drift range make this local time stamp still have a relatively safe reference significance.

In the past 12 years of Bitcoin's history, due to fluctuations in computing power, the blockchain clock has been fast and slow. When the blockchain clock is too fast, increase the difficulty and slow it down; when the blockchain clock is too slow, reduce the difficulty and make it faster. In the past few months, due to the collective shutdown of Chinese miners, we have seen the largest drop in computing power in Bitcoin's history. The block generation rate once dropped from about 6 blocks per hour to only 4 blocks per hour. The currency network continuously lowers the difficulty coefficient and restores the block production speed, that is, to speed up the block chain clock, showing amazing flexibility and adaptability.

In the genesis block of the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain on January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the front page of the Times of the day, "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". The English name of The Times is TIMES.

@TheRandomRewarder am still waiting for you to say something or am I not welcomed ?