Last night, I was watching the news and found that there was someone arrested for creating counterfeit cash. After that, I posted on noise.cash about the topic if the US dollar bills have counterfeit measures, and saw that there was. It made me curious about the bills we use for our day-to-day lives and then I remembered something on my games, and that is PayDay 2 has a mission where you go and save counterfeit money from being burned by the FBI. Any duffle bags of cash you manage to save actually adds up to the digital currency you have on your game, which meant that these counterfeit bills are actually usable in day-to-day lives and it made me wonder about security.

Specifically, security in the digital world.

The Internet Is Just Computers

One of the things that people sometimes forget about the Internet, thinking about servers and computers is that the internet is just a global network of computers. Each IP you head to leads to a computer running the data that is discoverable by everyone else.

Before anyone asks why an IP address, not a website, that is because websites are merely a part of a complicated process of the World Wide Web which allows you to connect to an IP address. This means that sites like google.com and facebook.com have IP address equivalents, and they do.

You have an IP address, but it's not really yours as it is much your internet provider's assigned IP address.

One might now be thinking, how secure would it be to connect to someone's computer using an IP address? It's been slowly being patched up, but it's not really that secure. All a target computer needs to get hacked is a simple way in, like back door access or a malicious program.

The Internet Isn't Safe for Transactions

This is why Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper about a peer-to-peer electronic cash system was about solving a problem with the way people transacted.

You see, every action on the internet is done by checking a third-party software (i.e. browser) to check a third-party server, and that server then checks if their system is working, and then that system reports it back.

This is just a very simplified version that I can understand, but it is how the Internet works. Transacting on the Internet is also the same way, but this time the third-party software is used to connect to the server that allows the banks to use it.

The thing when connecting to various other servers is that each of them has a weak point that allows malicious people can exploit to get back their cash and potentially drain the bank of their cash.

Satoshi Nakamoto's way of verifying transactions using a time-locked signature via cryptographic functions solves this point. However, there is still the fact that computers still require data to be stored somewhere, and whoever owns the computer where the data is stored can control it.

Satoshi solved this too by making it peer-to-peer and placing them in blocks that computers can download and verify.

The Security that Secures the Unsecurable

In of itself, the blockchain system might look like another middleman system on itself, but this time the middleman are those who have downloaded the blockchain.

No, that's false, and if you had that idea, it's not even remotely correct.

You see, the only way to properly control a system that uses a blockchain is to find a way to calculate the cryptographic functions it requires and find the correct sequence of numbers called a hash. This process, called mining, also requires the previous block's hash, to create the next hash.

How secure is this hash? I'm not too sure either, but then, can you even know what this set of letters and numbers mean?:

e9033b102814a4408afe69fc32f9c76ca08588c6087a1a4eaa4bb3d42bbaa1b3

Can't really tell either. However, if you plug it into a BCH explorer (specifically a BCH SLP explorer), you'll find this cutie.

Yes, that's my waifu from the transaction. It was also created by scanning the hash that created its transaction and using neural networks to create that image.

Pretty cool, huh? But you can't know how the hash was made because it was all created using the programs used to handle the blockchain.

Hashrate-based Security

It's a well-known point of debate against Bitcoin Cash that hashrate provides security, and price follows the hashrate, and Bitcoin Cash has low hashrates.

The thing with relying on the hashrates is that this metric changes when price changes as well. Since Bitcoin Cash uses SHA256 to create its hashes like Bitcoin and other coins like Hathor, Bitcoin ABC/eCash, and Bitcoin SV, this allows miners to simply switch coins at will, a process called switch-mining. Hathor has a function called merge-mining that allows it to mine alongside Bitcoin and SHA256 coins.

Bitcoin Cash unfortunately really would've faded to obscurity because of Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment schedule of 2016 blocks, and this difficulty adjustment algorithm allowed Bitcoin to have mined new blocks every 10 minutes.

Bitcoin Cash solved that by replacing it, and the latest iteration of the new DAA is called ASERT DAA, which brings the block times to an average of 10 minutes, despite having larger blocks due to the blocks not being immediately mined.

Having enough hashrate that the DAA immediately adjusts is one of the securities Bitcoin Cash has.

Multiple Points of Failure better than One Point of Failure

Among all of the coins seen in the top 50, there are only a few coins that have multiple nodes taking governance of the chain.

Bitcoin Cash has six full reference nodes.

Usually, in cryptocurrencies, there is only one full reference node, the main client which handles the blockchain's rules and algorithms. For Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin Core. For Monero, it's Monero. Ethereum consists of multiple nodes, each with its own way of contributing to the network.

Like Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash is the same with having multiple nodes, but due to its nature as a fork of Bitcoin itself, there are greater amounts of clients running that are from the older nodes that still exist, like Bitcoin Unlimited, whose node count is roughly half of the total accessible nodes that run the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash doesn't recognize any of the nodes as a "reference client", and this was merely a byproduct of Bitcoin ABC taking the lead. With this in mind, Bitcoin Cash has effectively called out the point that if a node client goes down, there will be many other nodes that won't be affected.

Developers Know Better Than Investors

The thing with the current cryptocurrency market is that all of them are currently influenced by speculation and large influencers, having able to build from the base of what it really was. But developers know better than the price, and it is through this that developers chose their coin, after all.

There is a reason people flocked to Ethereum, and that is because developers wanted to use Bitcoin but they couldn't. In essence, this is Bitcoin's fault that Ethereum is getting high fee problems.

Now, if Bitcoin Cash was truly something undesirable as Bitcoin said, there wouldn't be developers, would be?

Epilogue

Bitcoin Cash is digitally secure. Everyone knows that already, and this is just me repeating known knowledge. But if you have learned something new, that's good. We all learn something new, after all.

At the end? Bitcoin Cash is secure because of the cryptographic functions used in the blockchain itself. Miners keep the functions rolling, and due to the fact that BCH uses the same algorithms to calculate for the hash with BTC, it means that we're definitely going to have these large swings when BTC rises.

Kinda sad the Bitcoin Cash community no longer has moderators, though.

This is Rowan, signing off. Have a nice day, and yes this seems a bit abrupt, but this is what I thought for a while.