I’ve been looking out for some real-life situations where double spending was possible and I found on this
article bitcoin is time about George C Parker a man that sold the Broklyn Bridge more than twice, I research about him on the
historynaked site and discovered he sold the bridge for more than 2 times a week. As we know, double spending is hard to achieve in the physical realm compared to the digital realm. The physical law states that you cannot spend again what you’ve given out to someone else. Unless you are so smart a con artist like Parker. Why Parker succeeded with his con was that it wasn’t recorded anywhere that he’s made the first sales. Don’t confuse it, he doesn’t own the bridge yes, but sometimes people who own a property often times sell it more than once to different buyers.
But in the digital realm, it is a trouble that we discuss a lot and a solution to it was never discovered until Satoshi surfaced with a great idea. Where he called bitcoin a clock.
In this paper, we propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer distribution timestamp server to generate a computational proof of the chronological order of transactions - Satoshi Nakamoto (2009) Seeing a block as a clock can also help make the understanding of the difficult bitcoin concept much easier. A person can reset a clock in their possession to anytime but it won’t affect other people’s clock, in this sense, even if a block is compromised, it doesn’t affect the network.
Copy and paste is a well-known term in the digital realm, which made double spending a difficult task to handle, anybody can copy a file as many time as they want to and they was no means of tracing the actual time he made the first copy. Hence, Satoshi didn’t stop the copying of information. Every component of bitcoin can be copied, private keys, address etc, but Satoshi was able to build a system that makes rule breaking copies to be worthless. It’s written in the article, Who should be in charge of time if putting someone in charge is not allowed? How can you have a reliable clock if there is no Central frame of reference?
Satoshi settled the problem, but he wasn’t the first person who thought about finding a solution to the problem. D. Bayer, Habler and Stornetta in 1992 (reference on the bitcoin whitepaper) “ To establish that a document was created after a given moment in time, it is necessary to report events that could not have been predicted before they happened”
That means the idea existed. Satoshi managed to arrange them together in a way that excludes the “time stamping company” which is controlled by the government and not reliable. So, Satoshi’s idea was linked to the fact that we know what will be next, but it’s unpredictable. We can’t predict what will happen in the next hour, even if we know what time it’ll be in the next hour.
Similarly, we can’t predict what transaction would enter the next block and also the person who will solve the problem cannot be predicted (proof of work). So, without unpredictability, the whole concept wouldn’t have made sense.
In a nutshell, proof of work shouldn’t be considered as just a record of an event, it is the record itself. It requires lots of guess work to find a valid proof of work.
Hence the probabilities sum of these guesses is what builds up the timechain that is bitcoin
It must be stressed that the impossibility of associating events with points in time in distribution system was the unsolved problem that precluded a decentralized ledger from ever being until Satoshi Nakamoto invented a solution. Gregory Trubetskoy 2018
Time defines bitcoin, can you please add to why you think that bitcoin is mainly about timing?
You can read the main write up to understand better
https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/GoodLuck.
