# How Bitcoin Rewired a Classic Computer Science Problem (ft. Tim Roughgarden and Ittai Abraham)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/a16z-crypto-show-5434524/how-bitcoin-rewired-a-classic-computer-science-problem-ft-tim-roughgarden-and-ittai-abraham
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/a16z-crypto-show-5434524/how-bitcoin-rewired-a-classic-computer-science-problem-ft-tim-roughgarden-and-ittai-abraham.md
Podcast: [a16z crypto show](https://stenobird.com/podcast/a16z-crypto-show-5434524)
Published: 2026-06-22T17:20:59+00:00
Episode link: https://web3-with-a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/introducing-first-principles-6Z4SDz5u
Audio file: https://mgln.ai/e/1344/afp-848985-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/bf52be5a-9faf-45fb-9bc3-bb4270ec53d9/episodes/62a22282-e1cb-4766-9940-78e06f296ab1/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=bf52be5a-9faf-45fb-9bc3-bb4270ec53d9&awEpisodeId=62a22282-e1cb-4766-9940-78e06f296ab1&feed=XPOpH7r4
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Duration seconds: 1200

## Resource

Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt. What Bitcoin did was something different: It solved a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a radically new, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi had done.

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## Transcript

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