Get ready, brace yourself. Reading this might enrage and confound you, it might confuse you, you might even get mad enough to punch your screen (don’t do that.) Consider this a trigger warning.

Bitcoin is a database. Period. That is what it is. The blockchain is a database for storing past updates to be able to reproduce the current state of that database, the UTXO set. The entire Bitcoin protocol is built around the database. What is a valid entry in that database, and what is not a valid database entry? Who is allowed to propose entries to that database, how do you ensure that only those users’ entries will be considered and accepted? What is the authentication mechanism restricting…

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