With Crypto Mania raging the past few months, I’m sure that most of us feel like Cady Heron on her first day at North Shore; a homeschooled jungle freak who is just emerging into the cut-throat world of public high school.
By 2018, most of us have lived a life of US Dollars, Wire Transfers, and Venmo, so all of this talk of cryptocurrency, Blockchain, and Bitcoin can be overwhelming.
If you didn’t know by now, Blockchain technology is the foundation that (almost) all cryptocurrencies are built on, and it is becoming more and more clear that Blockchain may be the next wave of earth-shattering technology, on par with the discovery of the Internet. That’s why it’s so important to get a grasp on how it works.
I have been wrestling with the concept myself for the past few years and I think I’ve developed an example that illustrates the functionality of Blockchain as simply as possible by showing how Blockchain makes vote-rigging impossible. And what better way to explain this concept than with a movie dripping in technological metaphors (not really), Mean Girls.
Quick recap of vote-rigging in Mean Girls
As part of the plan to destabilize the hierarchy of the plastics and tear down Regina George, Damian hacks the election for Spring Fling Queen. He, as a member of the Student Activities Committee, sneaks a stack of fake votes for Gretchen Wieners into the system, successfully getting her nominated.
This Spring Fling voting system is synonymous with how almost all voting systems work in real life; we trust some central entity, in this case, the Student Activities Committee, to accurately process our votes. But one malicious actor with high-level access can throw off the whole election.
This is exactly the problem that Blockchain solves; it makes the voting system unhackable, or at least incredibly improbable to be hacked. Let me explain…
What if the Spring Fling King and Queen voting system imitated a Blockchain system?
Imagine, instead of everyone in the school handing in their own individual votes and submitting them to someone in the Student Activities Committee, we do this instead:
On election day, everyone in the school convenes in the gymnasium; one big room where everyone can see and hear each other, and there, everyone screams out their vote for king and queen, one by one.
One person shouts, “I vote for Regina George for Spring Fling Queen.”
Another person shouts “I vote for Cady Heron.”
Another person shouts “I vote for Glen Coco” (you go Glen Coco).
Now, also imagine that everyone in the gymnasium brought their own notebook and is writing down everyone else’s votes as they’re being called out.
When someone shouts a vote for Regina, everyone makes a tally mark next to Regina’s name in their own notebook. When someone shouts a vote for Cady, everyone makes a tally mark next to Cady’s name in their own notebook.
Imagine you do this process for everyone in the gymnasium, what would you end up with?
You’d end up with everyone in the gymnasium having their own vote count in their own notebook, and everyone would know who the winner is. So fetch!
How would Damian go about rigging this vote? He couldn’t! Even if he took one person’s notebook and changed the votes there, it would be obvious that that notebook didn’t align with everyone else’s notebooks. He would have to go to every person’s notebook and change the votes consistently across the whole gymnasium of hundreds of students. This would, of course, be totally impractical.
What does this have to do with Blockchain though?
The notebook tracking method we described is a metaphor for how the Blockchain public ledger works. It’s a system where everyone is keeping track of everyone else’s activities, so no one can violate the rules of the system without it being obvious. This is exactly the system that allows Bitcoin to behave like a digital currency. No one can pretend they have Bitcoins that they don’t have.
Every time someone pays someone else in Bitcoin, it’s announced to the Bitcoin public ledger and verified by *all* the computers (nodes) that are keeping track. Faking a Bitcoin transaction would be as difficult as hacking every node, across the globe, at the same time. While not technically impossible, it would be incredibly impractical. And the number of resources needed to pull a hack off would most likely outweigh the potential gains.
In reality, Blockchain solves more problems than what we just reviewed, but this serves as a great starting point for people who are just getting into the crypto space and are curious about how it actually works.
If you liked this concept and are interested in other crypto topics, write it below in the comments.
Some future article suggestions:
- How Paper Wallets Store Digital Currency
- How Bitcoin Mining Works
- How do Public and Private Keys work
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