Earthopoly: A Blockchain Story
One day, a fews friends decided to play Earthopoly. There were 100 properties on the board and whoever bought all of them would win. But the board game was missing a vital element: there were no paper coupons the players could use as currency.
One of the friends, Joe, suggested they use a Ledger. Eva asked: but what’s a Ledger?
Joe patiently explained: a Ledger is a record of transactions. We’ll start with a balance: everyone has 1000 coins. Now when you want to buy a property from me for 10 coins, we’ll make an entry in the Ledger. Minus 10 for you and Plus 10 for me.
They started playing and Joe kept the balances in the Ledger. They played for an hour and Joe was winning — so said the Ledger. Erik felt that it didn’t seem like Joe was winning even though his Ledger balance was the highest.
Erik started recording transactions and balances on his own private Ledger. Soon enough, he discovered Joe was transferring coins to himself when another player would sell a property. Joe was also creating coins out of thin air and adding them to his balance.
Erik shared his findings with everyone. First they thought about banning Joe and making Erik the Ledgerkeeper — or giving up the Ledger experiment altogether. Erik suggested a different approach.
Instead of trusting Erik or Joe with a Private Ledger, why not make everyone a Ledgerkeeper? That way everyone would know the balances and any false change — whether a mistake or intentional — could be stopped immediately. Thus was invented the Public Ledger.
So the next time Eva bought a property from Erik, Erik made an announcement: I’m buying Property X for 47 coins from Eva. Everyone updated their own Ledger: Erik -47, Eva +47.
There were 10 lines in a single page, every time a page completed…they would look at the entries and do a quick audit. If they had matching entries, the page was sealed and could not be tampered with. If, however, someone had different entries from the rest — the majority consensus would prevail.
A few days later, Eva said to the group: Earthopoly would be much more fun if we could play with friends from all 5 continents. But they can’t play on a board, let’s play Digital Earthopoly.
Digital Earthopoly was exactly the same as the board version but on a digital screen and the players were spread around the world. Since all the players were also Ledgerkeepers, they followed their previous method of everyone keeping track of all transactions — even though it was a bit more hassle, this method ensured transparency and trust.
So when Erik bought something from Lee, he would announce the transaction in the chatroom and everyone would update their Digital Ledgers. After every few minutes, someone would update a block of 10 transactions.
The Ledgerkeepers could either verify and accept it or propose a different block. If two blocks were proposed, the block that received acceptance by a majority would become a part of the immutable and public ledger.
So they started playing Earthopoly. It was fun but now their new friends in 5 different continents wanted to invite their friends. As the number of players grew into the thousands, their original idea of manual Ledgerkeeping by everyone became impossible.
Erik wrote a small piece of software. He called it: Blockchain. What it did was to automate the whole process: a copy of the Public Ledger was kept with everyone, transactions were recorded and verified by the players, blocks of transactions were joined together using cryptography and everyone knew exactly how many coins were owned by who.
With Blockchain, Earthopoly became a lot more fun with millions of players and a simple way to keep track of who owned what.
