You now have one apple and I have zero. That was simple, right?
Let’s look closely at what happened:
My apple was physically put into your hand. You know it happened. I was there, you were there – you touched it.
We didn’t need a third person there to help us make the transfer. We didn’t need to pull in Uncle Tommy (who’s a famous judge) to sit with us on the bench and confirm that the apple went from me to you.
The apple’s yours! I can’t give you another apple because I don’t have any left. I can’t control it anymore. The apple left my possession completely. You have full control over that apple now. You can give it to your friend if you want, and then that friend can give it to his friend, and so on.
So that’s what an in-person exchange looks like. I guess it’s really the same, whether I’m giving you a banana, a book, a quarter, or a fish!!
So far so good right? Cool.
now that we are beyond the physical representation of an Item. let move this Conversation to the Matrix.
Now, let's say I have one digital apple. Here, I’ll give you my digital apple. Ah! Now it gets interesting.
How do you know that digital apple which used to be mine, is now yours, and only yours? Think about it for a second. It’s more complicated, right? How do you know that I didn’t send that apple to Uncle Tommy as an email attachment first? Or your friend Joe? Or my friend Lisa too?
Maybe I made a couple of copies of that digital apple on my computer. Maybe I put it up on the internet and one million people downloaded it.
As you see, this digital exchange is a bit of a problem. Sending digital apples doesn’t look like sending physical apples.
Some brainy computer scientists actually have a name for this problem: it’s called the double spending problem. But don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that it’s confused them for quite some time and they’ve never solved it. Until now.
Each apple (which there is a set limit amount of them) has it's own unique serial number. Each and every-single one of those serial numbers exists on a physical ledger. what that means is that at any given time the serial number of your apple can be verified with the one on the ledger. And just to make sure that there is only one serial number per apple, the ledger works as a provenance. You see when I handed you my apple that triggered a movement in the ledger.
How does the ledger know that the apple moved you ask?
Every person can have their own ledger!!!!!
His ledger will tick that his apple with is own unique serial moved to your ledger and yours will tick the same movement, but so will every single ledger in the world.
