From Byzantine Generals to Bitcoin: The Birth of the Crypto World – An Answer … · @FengjiOnchain · TwKit

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From Byzantine Generals to Bitcoin: The Birth of the Crypto World – An Answer Paid for Generations Today, transferring digital assets on our phones might only take seconds. But have you ever wondered: how far has humanity come to reach a consensus among a group of distrustful individuals, without a central referee? The story begins with a famous problem. I. The Byzantine Generals: Whom Can We Trust If Someone Lies? Imagine an army besieging a city. Several generals are stationed in different locations, and they must collectively decide: attack or retreat. The problem is, they can only exchange orders through messengers. What if someone is a traitor, deliberately sending contradictory messages to different generals? One general receives the order to attack, while another receives the order to retreat. Everyone fears being the only one to act and ultimately being defeated by the enemy. The real difficulty isn't making the decision, but ensuring that all loyal generals act according to consistent rules, even if someone deliberately lies and sends contradictory information. In 1982, Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease published their famous paper, "The Byzantine Generals Problem," which systematically presented this problem. It discussed how distributed computing systems can reach consensus when some participants act maliciously or malfunction arbitrarily. This wasn't a real ancient war record, but a technical challenge that computer scientists needed to solve, modeled after a war scenario. This concept later became one of the most important ideological foundations of the blockchain world. Replace the generals with network nodes, the messengers with internet messages, and the battle orders with transaction records. The problem then becomes: How can we collectively maintain a trustworthy ledger when someone in the network is dishonest, offline, or tries to deceive others? This is one of the challenges the crypto world must face. But to find the answer, humanity needs to overcome another hurdle. II. The 1970s: A Cryptographic Revolution That Changed the Digital World In the 1970s, computer networks began to demonstrate their potential to change the world. However, early cryptographic technology faced a thorny problem: both parties typically needed to share a secret key beforehand to securely encrypt communication. If you wanted to send a secret message to someone far away, you had to first find a way to securely hand over the key. But what if even the key could be intercepted? In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published the paper "A New Direction in Cryptography," which propelled the development of public-key cryptography and proposed the now-famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange method. They opened a new path: even without sharing the secret beforehand, it was possible to establish a common secret key through public communication. Subsequently, the RSA public-key cryptosystem further advanced encryption and digital signatures. What does this mean? It means that people have the opportunity to communicate securely on open networks without having to hand over all secrets to a middleman beforehand. Today, when you visit websites, verify digital signatures, or use digital wallets, these ideas likely continue to influence your thinking. But remember, back then, there was no mature cryptographic infrastructure like we have today, nor the standards and tools accumulated over decades of industry practice. Every breakthrough means researchers must confront problems unsolved by predecessors. They don't work on today's answers. They search for answers in the dark. III. From Digital Cash to Bitcoin: The Real Difficulty Isn't Creating Money, But Creating Trust As cryptography matured, some researchers began to consider another question: If information can be protected by cryptography, can digital currency also circulate freely on the internet? The following is in the comments section.

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