The Internet of Money

by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

But when I searched the source code for sender, receiver or account, I didn’t find anything. Because none of those things actually exist in bitcoin.

Things get complicated because bitcoin isn’t what you think it is. It’s a platform. It’s not a payment network. It’s not a currency. It’s not a banking system. It’s a platform that guarantees certain trust functions. If you happen to have a platform that guarantees certain trust functions, one very useful application for that is to build a currency and a payment network, but you can build more things.

It’s either at the source or at the destination, atomically with one transaction. There is no intermediate state. It can’t be in limbo because bitcoin doesn’t transmit, it settles.