Bitcoin White Paper: 1. Introduction

Too Long; Didn't Read

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving a strusted third parties to process electronic payments. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.