In the following chapters, we will start addressing more business-oriented topics. Until then, I should provide you with some context on the whys and wherefores of blockchain and go back to where it all started, with the Byzantine Generals Problem.
The Byzantine Generals Problem is a real-life analogy for computer science that was expressed and partly answered in 1982 by Leslie Lamport, a famous American scientist and Turing Award winner, who raised the following question: how can you achieve a consensus in the presence of traitors or faults? Translated to the computer science world, this means: how can you achieve consensus in a distributed system where some computers may be malfunctioning or give conflicting information? This is how the issue came to be illustrated and known as the Byzantine Generals Problem.
The following diagram...
