Introduction to Bitcoin and Existing Concepts

History The concept of decentralized digital currency, as well as alternativeapplications like property registries, has been around for decades. Theanonymous e-cash protocols of the 1980s and the 1990s, mostly reliant ona cryptographic primitive known as Chaumian blinding, provided acurre… Bitcoin As A State Transition System From a technical standpoint, the ledger of a cryptocurrency such asBitcoin can be thought of as a state transition system, where there is a"state" consisting of the ownership status of all existing bitcoins anda "state transition function" that takes a state and a transaction andoutputs a new st…