Johan Nygren, Bitnation, 2017
In 2008, Craig Wright published the Bitcoin whitepaper, and the idea to use proof-of-work as a trusted authority, provably distributed. This Nakamoto consensus allowed the Bitcoin ledger to extend itself in a way that was resilient to censorship as well as to servers being shut down, and in a way where as the security of the network grew, the number of users and therefore the value of the network also grew following Metcalfe´s Law. Bitcoin was the beginning of what can be broadly defined as “network-states”, successors to the nation-state consensus.
The next generation of a distributed authority for a “network-state” was developed in 2014 by Vlad Zamfir, with the Casper protocol and “consensus-by-bet”, an evolution of the idea of proof-of-stake. With consensus-by-bet, validators would stake their capital in a betting game, and converge on a block, in a way that was also resilient to being shut down,