One about nodes and emergent consensus

Nodes and emergent consensus

How is it achieved that every participant in the network can trust that the bitcoin he owns is actually owned solely by him, and not multiple people at once ? How do we know who owns what, and why can we trust what we’re told ? Bitcoin has no central authority, still, every full node has a complete local copy of the blockchain, a public ledger that it can trust as the authoritative record.

The blockchain isn’t created by a single entity or central authority, but assembled independently by full nodes, which act on information transmitted across insecure network connections, and still, the full nodes arrive at the same conclusion and assemble a copy of the same public ledger as everyone else. How is this achieved ?

Satoshi Nakamoto’s main invention is the decentralized mechanism for emergent consensus. “Emergent”, because consensus isn’t a fixed moment, there are no elections for when consensus is achieved or done. It's a constant process that depends on thousands of independent nodes, all following simple rules. Bitcoin isn’t dependent on a central authority because of the invention of emergent consensus. The decentralized consensus emerges from the interplay of four processes that occur through node operators choosing to respect the same rules independently on nodes across the network:

● Independent verification of each transaction, by every full node, based on a comprehensive list of criteria

● Independent aggregation of those transactions into new blocks by mining nodes, coupled with demonstrated computation through a Proof-of-Work algorithm

● Independent verification of the new blocks by every node and assembly into a chain

● Independent selection, by every node, of the chain with the most cumulative computation demonstrated through Proof-of-Work