Why Are There Bugs on the Cover?
The leafcutter ant is a species that exhibits highly complex behavior in a colony super-organism, but each individual ant operates on a set of simple rules driven by social interaction and the exchange of chemical scents (pheromones). Per Wikipedia: “Next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth.” Leafcutter ants don’t actually eat leaves, but rather use them to farm a fungus, which is the central food source for the colony. Get that? These ants are farming!
Although ants form a caste-based society and have a queen for producing offspring, there is no central authority or leader in an ant colony. The highly intelligent and so‐phisticated behavior exhibited by a multimillion-member colony is an emergent prop‐erty from the interaction of the individuals in a social network.
Nature demonstrates that decentralized systems can be resilient and can produce emer‐gent complexity and incredible sophistication without the need for a central authority, hierarchy, or complex parts.
Bitcoin is a highly sophisticated decentralized trust network that can support a myriad of financial processes. Yet, each node in the bitcoin network follows a few simple math‐ematical rules. The interaction between many nodes is what leads to the emergence of the sophisticated behavior, not any inherent complexity or trust in any single node. Like an ant colony, the bitcoin network is a resilient network of simple nodes following simple rules that together can do amazing things without any central coordination.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.
Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords. Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values deter‐mined by context.