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Simply: Who are Alice and Bob, and why are they mentioned in every Bitcoin-related article I read about that talks about Bitcoin transactions?
What is the history or mystery of these two?
Who are Alice and Bob?
Answers
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Fictional characters. Cryptography (and other) books use names like that often.
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Alice and Bob are placeholder characters corresponding to the letters of the alphabet. They are used especially in computer science to describe use-cases or scenarios. The scheme is used because it's more convenient to say "Alice sends money to Bob" than to say "Party A sends money to Party B". As each name has a different initial, diagrams can fall back to single letter labeling.
It's a well-known meme:
The list usually goes something like this: Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave, Erin, Frank,…
Other names are used to represent attacker types or other recurring roles:
- Carole, the oracle
- Eve, the eavesdropper
- Mallory, the man-in-the-middle attacker with malicious intent
- Sybil, the attacker with lots of identities
- Trent, the trusted entity
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First hit on google explains everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob
– Greg Hewgill – 2014-05-16T00:58:31.1875I had to upvote. This is the funniest question on the site. – Kinnard Hockenhull – 2014-05-16T03:00:09.887
2This question appears to be off-topic because it is not Bitcoin or cryptocurrency specific and is trivially answered by a web search. – dchapes – 2014-05-17T11:43:10.400
Lacking research effort certainly, but I wouldn't say the question is off-topic: At last, it is a question about terminology/culture of the Bitcoin community (even though not exclusively so). I also found it somewhat amusing as Kinnard did, and found it useful in that by reading the link from the answer, I learned about the complete roster surrounding Alice and Bob. I must say I diverged quite significantly on my order book example. ;)
– Murch – 2014-05-19T21:46:14.350This made me lol. <3 – ecurrencyhodler – 2018-05-21T02:20:24.150