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According to the paper, each user of the system could have one or more public Bitcoin addresses – sort of like bank account numbers – and a private key for each address. The coins attached to a given address could be spent only by a person with the private key corresponding to the address. The private key was slightly different from a traditional password, which has to be kept by some central authority to check that the user is entering the correct password. In Bitcoin, Satoshi harnessed the wonders of public-key cryptography to make it possible for a user – let’s call her Alice again – to sign off on a transaction, and prove she has the private key, without anyone else ever needing to see or know her private key. Once Alice signed off on a transaction with her private key she would broadcast it out to all the other computers on the Bitcoin network. Those computers would check that Alice had the coins she was trying to spend. They could do this by consulting the public record of all Bitcoin transactions, which computers on the network kept a copy of. Once the computers confirmed that Alice’s address did indeed have the money she was trying to spend, the information about Alice’s transaction was recorded in a list of all recent transactions, referred to as a block, on the blockchain. […] The result of this complicated process was something that was deceptively simple but never previously possible: a financial network that could create and move money without a central authority. No bank, no credit card company, no regulators. The system was designed so that no one other than the holder of a private key could spend or take the money associated with a particular Bitcoin address. What’s more, each user of the system could be confident that, at every moment in time, there would be only one public, unalterable record of what everyone in the system owned. To believe in this, the users didn’t have to trust Satoshi, as the users of DigiCash had to trust David Chaum, or users of the dollar had to trust the Federal Reserve. They just had to trust their own computers running the Bitcoin software, and the code Satoshi wrote,  which was open source, and therefore available for everyone to review. If the users didn’t like something about the rules set down by Satoshi’s software, they could change the rules. People who joined the Bitcoin network were, quite literally, both customers and owners of both the bank and the mint.” 3.5. That Satoshi and the Cypherpunks who participated in the initial experiments developed Bitcoin as an alternative to conventional currency, to counter the problems of debasement of currency by central agencies, was made clear by Satoshi himself when he said: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The Central Bank must be trusted not to debase the currency but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” 3.6. What attracted people to Satoshi’s proposal, was the fact that while Central Banks had no restraints in unlimited printing of money, thereby devaluing all savings and holdings, the Bitcoin software had rules to ensure that the process of creating new coins would stop after 21 million were out in the world. When Martti Malmi, a student at the Helsinki University of Technology, joined hands with Satoshi to improvise the project and to market it, he formulated the philosophy in the following words: