Satoshi Nakamoto

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Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

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‘It didn’t occur to me that he was anonymous or that it was a pseudonym at the time,’ Adam Back remarked about Satoshi’s early emails to him. There are not many Satoshi Nakamotos in the world. There was a Satoshi Nakamoto in Japan. He died in 2010. He was a concrete expert. There was also a Satoshi Nakamoto in Honolulu. He died in 2008. (There’s also an NSA station there, which has added to the theory that Bitcoin is actually the NSA and that the name was actually a tribute to a brilliant, dead, secret Japanese-American code-breaker.) And there was Newsweek’s Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who thought Bitcoin was called ‘Bitcom’. A quick search on LinkedIn reveals some other living Satoshi Nakamotos (and a load of bogus ones) but none fit the profile even remotely.

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, Unenumerated, May 28, 2011, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFbde. 95 Gwern Branwen, ‘Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto,’ Reddit/bitcoin, April 5, 2014, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7ND. 96 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 7, 2008, accessed February 19, 2013, http://bit.ly/1truasJ. 97 Ibid. 98 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 14, 2008, accessed February 19, 2013, http://bit.ly/1tru7NC. 99 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘[bitcoin-list] Bitcoin 0.3 released!,’ Sourceforge, July 6, 2010, accessed May 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7NE. 100 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 8, 2008, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truasP. 101 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 8, 2008, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1truasP. 102 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency,’ P2P Foundation, February 11, 2009, accessed January 28, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaWL. 103 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10,’ BitcoinTalk, August 19, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBchb. 104 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10,’ BitcoinTalk, August 15, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfts. 105 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10’, BitcoinTalk, August 15, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBchd. 106 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘tcatm’s 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10,’ BitcoinTalk, August 15, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBftu. 107 MoonShadow, ‘re.

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Once you’ve understood that, see the follow up here – http://bit.ly/1tru7NK. 109 ‘Bitcoin and me.’ 110 AnonymousSpeech.com, accessed January 22, 2014. http://bit.ly/1trBchh. 111 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: IPv6, headless client, and more,’BitcoinTalk, June 27, 2010, accessed March 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1pLBdbX. 112 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re. Potential Disaster Scenario,’ August 15, 2010, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJK. 113 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: wiki registration email,’ July 29, 2010, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJN. 114 Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcointalk, accessed February 26, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBfJQ and http://bit.ly/1trBchl. 115 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re:URI-scehem for bitcoin,’ BitcoinTalk, February 24, 2010, accessed March 10, 2010, http://bit.ly/1trBfJS.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

However, he said that he had been speaking of his work on classified systems for military contractors, and that he hadn’t even heard of Bitcoin (which he first called “Bitcom” with an M) until his son had been contacted by a reporter two months earlier. In the first sighting since 2011, the “Satoshi Nakamoto” account that had posted the 2009 announcement of Bitcoin 0.1 on the P2P Foundation forums commented on that post: “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” (Some noted that the comment could have been posted by a forum administrator and that it was not cryptographically confirmed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.)147 The Bitcoin world was both utterly unconvinced by Newsweek’s report, and outraged that they would violate an alleged Satoshi Nakamoto’s privacy in that manner.148 149 Newsweek defended its article,150 but eventually appended a statement from Dorian Nakamoto to the web version of the original piece in which he denied the whole story and noted the damage it had done to his livelihood.

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Andresen went to London to meet with Wright. Wright cryptographically signed a message as Satoshi Nakamoto on his own computer and verified it. Andresen wanted to check it on his computer, saying he had to be able to say that he’d checked it independently. Wright suddenly balked, not trusting Andresen’s hardware. A new laptop was obtained and unwrapped and Wright installed the Bitcoin Electrum wallet software.175 Wright opened the claimed Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin wallet on the new laptop and seemed to verify that he held a Satoshi Nakamoto private key.176 Wright performed a similar demonstration for Jon Matonis from the Bitcoin Foundation.177 None of this evidence was released for public review; Andresen said “I was not allowed to keep the message or laptop (fear it would leak before Official Announcement).”178 The PR team secured the BBC, The Economist and GQ; the journalists signed non-disclosure agreements and embargoes, and in late April Wright demonstrated use of the Satoshi key to each.

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Forbes (staff blog), 2 May 2016. (archive) [141] The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute site collects every public post by him, and emails people have released. [142] Gwern Branwen. “Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto”. Reddit /r/bitcoin, 5 April 2014. [143] e.g., Dominic Frisby. “The Search for Satoshi”. CoinDesk, 8 November 2014. [144] Gwern Branwen. “Blackmail fail”. [145] Leah McGrath Goodman. “The face behind Bitcoin”. Newsweek, 6 March 2014. [146] Ryan Nakashima. “Man said to create bitcoin denies it”. AP The Big Story, 7 March 2014. (archive) (video) [147] Satoshi Nakamoto. Comment on “Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency”.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

CHAPTER 3 29Before reaching out to Satoshi, Martti had written about Bitcoin on anti-state.org: Martti’s post, written under the screen name Trickster, is available at https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/17233-p2p-currency-could-make-the-government-extinct/. 30“The root problem with conventional currency”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency,” P2P Foundation forum, February 11, 2009, http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source. 33It also meant that Satoshi’s computers were still: Sergio Demian Lerner, “The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin Creator, Visionary and Genius,” Bitslog, April 17, 2013, https://bitslog.wordpress .com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/. 35“Be safe from the unstability caused by fractional reserve”: An archived version of the page designed by Martti is available at http://web.archive .org/web/20090511173000/http://bitcoin.sourceforge.net/. 35A few dozen people downloaded the Bitcoin program: Data on software downloads available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/stats/timeline. 37Starting in August, the log of changes to the software: The history of changes to the software is available at https://gitorious.org/bitcoin/bitcoind/activities. 37When the next version of Bitcoin, 0.2: Satoshi Nakamoto to DEV-LIST, December 17, 2009. 37the majority of coins were still: Lerner. 37throughout 2009 no one else was sending or receiving: Data on the number of transactions per block available at https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block. 38In the very first recorded transaction of Bitcoin for United States dollars: Information on the transaction is available at https://blockchain .info/tx/7dff938918f07619abd38e4510890396b1cef4fbeca154fb7aaf ba8843295ea2. 38NewLibertyStandard came up with his own method: The shuttered exchange is still online at http://newlibertystandard.wikifoundry.com/page/Exchange+Rate. 39Swap Variety Shop on his exchange website: The shuttered shop is still online at http://newlibertystandard.wikifoundry.com/page/Specialty+Shop.

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More impressive than that, though, was the security expert’s conclusion, from a careful analysis of the blockchain, that Satoshi had never spent a single one of the Bitcoins he had created. His work in creating the system really did seem to be a selfless act. In addition to what the day had revealed about Satoshi Nakamoto, the incident suggested that the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto really didn’t matter much. For a few hours on the morning of March 6, the world had believed that the creator of Bitcoin was an aging libertarian and model-train enthusiast living with his mother. The price of Bitcoin didn’t move much in either direction. The Bitcoin protocol was now maintained by Gavin Andresen and a team of developers and the code spoke for itself.

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CHAPTER 2 16As sociologist Nigel Dodd put it: Nigel Dodd, The Social Life of Money (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 17“We could envisage proposals in the near future”: Alan Greenspan, Conference on Electric Money and Banking, United States Treasury, September 19, 1996, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/19960919.htm. 17a British researcher named Adam Back released his plan: Adam Back to CYPH, March 28, 1997. 18a concept called bit gold, was invented by Nick Szabo: Nick Szabo, “Bit Gold,” Unenumerated, December 2005, http://unenumerated.blogspot .co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html. 19Another, known as b-money, came from an American named Wei Dai: Wei Dai to CYPH, 1998. 19Hal created his own variant, with a decidedly less sexy name: Hal Finney to CYPH, August 15, 2004. 20The nine-page PDF attached to the e-mail: the current version is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 22modeled after the contest that Adam Back: While this process was modeled on Back’s program, it also relied on the innovations of several other cryptographers and mathematicians, including Ralph Merkle, Stuart Haber, and W. Scott Stornetta. 25usually belonging to Satoshi: Satoshi’s mining activities were traced by the Argentinian researcher Sergio Demian Lerner. Sergio Demian Lerner, “The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin Creator, Visionary and Genius,” Bitslog, April 17, 2013, https://bitslog.wordpress .com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/. 25the first transaction took place when Satoshi sent Hal ten coins: Satoshi’s address for this transaction was 12cbQLTFMXRnSzktF kuoG3eHoMeFtpTu3S; Hal’s was 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxX tWAWgFt5Jvm3. 26Satoshi was using his own computers to help power the network: Lerner. 26When a programmer in Texas wrote to Satoshi late one night: The programmer, Dustin Trammel, posted the e-mails on his blog at http://blog.dustintrammell.com/2013/11/26/i-am-not-satoshi/.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

That’s the estimate that cryptographer Sergio Lerner: Sergio Lerner, “The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin Creator, Visionary and Genius,” Words on Bitcoin Design, Privacy, Security and Crypto blog, April 17, 2013, http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/. SecondMarket’s CEO, Barry Silbert, describes: Comments made at media roundtable sponsored by Circle Internet Financial, New York, December 10, 2013. Nick Szabo, whose writings, the forensics linguists tell us: Paul Vigna, “Bitcoin Creator ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ Unmasked—Again?,” Wall Street Journal, MoneyBeat blog, April 16, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/16/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-unmasked-again/.

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Bitcoin takes on the look of a religious movement: the meetups that are reminiscent of church socials, the cultlike crowds that sing bitcoin’s praises on social forums such as Reddit and Twitter, the movement’s evangelists—people such as Barry Silbert, Nicolas Cary, Andreas Antonopoulos, Charlie Shrem, and Roger Ver (whose nickname is Bitcoin Jesus). At the top of it all, ensconced firmly in a creation myth that inspires and nurtures the faithful, is Satoshi Nakamoto, the godhead of bitcoin. But cryptocurrencies could flame out entirely—like the Betamax video format (for those of you old enough to remember it). Or they could have only marginal real-world application, much as the once heavily hyped Segway has had. No less a dedicated bitcoiner than Gavin Andresen, the software engineer whom Satoshi Nakamoto effectively appointed to become the lead developer of bitcoin’s core software, articulates it this way: “Every time I give a talk, I emphasize that bitcoin really is still an experiment; every time I hear about somebody investing their life savings in it, I cringe.”

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If we apply the chartalists’ view that money is a social phenomenon, then this ongoing community expansion represents nothing less than a currency’s endeavoring to become money. Two GENESIS What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust. —Satoshi Nakamoto October 31, 2008, 2:10 P.M., New York time. The several hundred members of an obscure mailing list comprising cryptography experts and enthusiasts receive an e-mail from somebody calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto.* “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” he writes flatly. His brief text directs them to a nine-page white paper posted at a new Web site that he had registered two months earlier, which describes a currency system he calls bitcoin.

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

There is, of course, the long-held theory that Satoshi Nakamoto is/was Nick Szabo, who wrote publicly about concepts very similar to Bitcoin. There is also David Chaum, who certainly had the necessary experience and perhaps wanted to show the world that electronic cash was viable. Adam Back invented hashcash and commented on the B-money proposal when it was first proposed in the Cypherpunk mailing list, so he can’t be ruled out either. A man named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, who was living in a small house in California, was once “outed” as the real Satoshi Nakamoto by Newsweek in a highly controversial cover story.13 When the article came out, Satoshi Nakamoto’s email came back to life, only to post on the Bitcoin developer mailing list that he was “not Dorian Nakamoto.”

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Roger Ver: Angel investor and Bitcoin evangelist; CEO of Memorydealers.com, one of the first sites to accept Bitcoin, and founder of the company Blockchain. Cody Wilson: Dark Wallet co-creator and 3D-printed gun designer. Craig Wright: A recent addition to the search for Satoshi Nakamoto. Wired magazine recently reported he was “probably” the creator of Bitcoin (or wanted the world to think he was). In May 2016, he attempted to prove that he had created Bitcoin by signing a message using an account associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. Many were convinced at that point, including Gavin Andresen. However, much of the community remained skeptical. After promising to provide even more evidence, Wright backed out.

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No mint or other trusted parties. Participants can be anonymous. New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work. The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the network to prevent double-spending. —Satoshi Nakamoto’s announcement of Bitcoin, The Cryptography and Cryptography Policy Mailing List, November 1, 2008 With this message, an anonymous person or group posting under the name Satoshi Nakamoto started the revolution known to the public as Bitcoin. When the Internet first came into the public’s consciousness, people instantly began wondering how Internet commerce would be handled. A lot of people could see the potential of selling goods through the Internet, since—as I noted earlier—systems that enabled home shopping through computer terminals had been around since the 1970s.

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

Bitcoin block #170, which records a transaction of 10 BTC sent from Satoshi Nakamoto to developer and early blockchain pioneer Hal Finney Figure 1-8 illustrates why it would be hard to change a past transaction. Figure 1-8. Why it’s difficult to roll back bitcoin transactions Satoshi Nakamoto’s Disappearance Many are naturally curious about the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. After the Bitcoin whitepaper’s publication, Satoshi continued to be a figure in the community until 2012, helping bring Bitcoin into existence as a functional system. Journalists have long tried to discover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. However, it is possible that it’s not a single individual, but an amalgamation of a number of people working together who saw the financial crisis of 2008 as an opportunity to propose blockchain-based technology as a solution to the problems that caused the meltdown.

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Although manipulation, tax evasion, and money laundering are still prohibited, the Bahamas is taking a forward-looking approach to cryptocurrency in order to foster innovation. Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? The original Bitcoin whitepaper was released pseudonymously, and a number of people have made claims about who its author, Satoshi Nakamoto, might really be. However, there is little evidence to suggest any of these claims are true. Two of the most popular guesses are: Dorian Nakamoto In 2014, Newsweek published an investigation piece identifying this person as the creator of bitcoin. The article pointed to a man living in Southern California with the name “Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.” Although Dorian Nakamoto does have a computer science background, he himself denied his involvement in bitcoin.

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Because although many of the concepts and technologies underlying Bitcoin already existed in 2008, no one had ever put together all the pieces of earlier e-money concepts to create a system that enabled digital trust and transparency. The Whitepaper On August 18, 2008, >the domain bitcoin.org was registered. Then, written by someone or a group using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, a whitepaper was published on October 31, 2008, and shared on numerous software developer mailing lists. Titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” the paper provided a detailed proposal for creating a value system that existed only on the internet. The aim was to create a digital currency that could operate without any connection to a bank or central government, and to build a more transparent financial system that could prevent the catastrophic events of the financial crisis from ever happening again.

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

The cryptocurrency’s life started on 1 November 2008, when a message appeared on a cryptography mailing list from someone calling himself ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. ‘I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,’ said his first posting. He linked to a white paper and invited discussion from other cryptographers. Nakamoto took on advice and suggestions until bitcoin was properly unleashed in February 2009, when a modest post appeared on an obscure internet discussion forum, P2P Foundation, by Satoshi Nakamoto (male, 38, Japan): ‘I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called bitcoin . . .

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Mythology grew of the man who had apparently not made a single mistake – not in the code behind his invention, nor in covering his tracks, despite there being few people in the world who could possibly be him. The mystery spawned an entire industry, with T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?’ and ‘I am Satoshi Nakamoto’ selling in worldwide stores dedicated to technology buffs. If Nakamoto were a fictional character he would be the James Bond or Jason Bourne of cyberspace – a genius, an inventor, an outlaw with wealth beyond our imagination. He existed nowhere but in his online musings. He used his rare mathematical genius to create a virtual currency the value of which went from zero to a billion dollars in a couple of years and managed for years to evade every effort to track him down and unmask him.

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That the coins had remained untouched sparked another round of conspiracy theories: that he had died, that the coins were held on a corrupted hard drive and could therefore not be recovered, or that he couldn’t cash out without destabilising the currency or revealing his identity. Satoshi Nakamoto was named Business Insider’s most important person of 2013 and was a contender for the title in several other publications, including The Guardian. Journalist Andrew Smith wrote a lengthy piece for the UK’s Sunday Times in late February 2014 about his personal hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto. Smith interviewed the suspects (or at least, those who agreed to speak to him) and found evidence lacking for each. All those who had been ‘unmasked’ by various publications over the years continued to deny they were the pseudonymous creator.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

Sometimes Charles seemed to hint that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has been the source of endless speculation, but very few have claimed his identity, knowing they would be met with demands for proof and dogged scrutiny from the crypto community. For someone in crypto, Charles might as well had been saying he was the messiah. It was early March 2014, the day after they had moved in the Zug house, when Newsweek magazine came out with the headline “The Face Behind Bitcoin” splashed across its cover. The reporter on the story claimed Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was a Japanese-American engineer called Dorian S.

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Timothy May wrote in the manifesto: Timothy May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” November 22, 1992, https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html. 3. “ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin P2P E-cash Paper,” Cryptography Mailing List, October 31, 2008, https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/#selection-75.18-83.27.18. 4. Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the paper: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 5. “Bitcoin offers a way to fix this”: Vitalik Buterin, reply to “Bitcoin Weekly Looking for Writers,” BitcoinTalk, March 25, 2011, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?

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Cypherpunks had continued incrementally improving past work until the major breakthrough came in October 2008, when an anonymous person or persons going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto emailed the group. “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” the email began, and linked to a nine-page PDF that underlined how the system worked. He said he proposed solving the double-spend problem by using a “peer-to-peer network which timestamps transactions by linking them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work.”3 In the paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a network of computers, where each computer holds the copy of the entire transaction history for the network, a ledger with what everyone owns.

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

The unification is only now, a dozen years after Bitcoin’s creation, becoming accepted as a monetary discipline. Before we speculate on how it will play out, we must understand Bitcoin’s origin, early history, and the evolution of its own money pyramid. Satoshi Nakamoto and the Bitcoin White Paper The paper published on October 31, 2008 that changed the world of money forever was written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Anonymity and mystery surround the Satoshi persona and his, her, or their writings. The creator remains unknown even now, something that strengthens Bitcoin’s neutrality, as no leader exists who wields too much influence, can be coerced or blackmailed, or will try to change Bitcoin’s rules.

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Bitcoin mining is also called performing proof-of-work, which was invented before Bitcoin in 2002 by cryptographer Adam Back, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Exeter. Satoshi Nakamoto cites Back in his white paper and bases much of Bitcoin’s original credibility upon using proof-of-work, a proven technology by 2008. Proof-of-work in Bitcoin is equivalent to digging for gold as stated in the Bitcoin white paper: The steady addition of a constant amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. Make no mistake, this isn’t just an analogy. Satoshi Nakamoto was tremendously deliberate in the design of Bitcoin; it was meant to mimic gold because gold is historically our planet’s most enduring counterparty-free form of money.

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Perhaps the fabricator wanted to provide the world with a new first-layer money that didn’t originate from the balance sheet of a central bank. Visions of Layered Bitcoin The first vocal advocate for the Bitcoin software after Satoshi Nakamoto was cryptographer Hal Finney. Before Bitcoin’s creation and building on the groundwork laid by Adam Back, Finney advanced the application of proof-of-work by designing the reusable proof-of-work system used by Satoshi Nakamoto in the design of his software; Finney’s contribution to Bitcoin was cemented even before he became a Bitcoin user. Finney was Satoshi’s earliest and most passionate enthusiast. He was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent him 10 BTC on January 12, 2009.

Bitcoin Internals: A Technical Guide to Bitcoin by Chris Clark

bitcoin, fiat currency, information security, peer-to-peer, Satoshi Nakamoto, transaction costs, Turing complete

Recently, ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) have been developed that are orders of magnitude faster than GPUs. At this point, miners need to have custom hardware to make mining a profitable investment. Bibliography [1] Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," referenced in e-mail sent to cryptography@metzdowd.com mailing list, October 31, 2008. http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09959.html [2] "Satoshi Nakamoto," Bitcoin Wiki, June 13, 2013. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Work [3] "Bitcoin Ladder," Bitcoin Wiki, June 14, 2013. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Ladder#Top_companies [4] Andy Greenberg, "Black Market Drug Site ’Silk Road’ Booming: $22 Million In Annual Sales," Forbes, August 6, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/08/06/black-market-drug-site-silk-road-booming-22-million-in-annual-mostly-illegal-sales/ [5] Reuben Grinberg, "Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency," Hastings Science & Technology Law Journal (4) (2011): 160. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1817857 [6] Ralph Merkle, "A certified digital signature," Proceedings on Advances in cryptology (CRYPTO ’89) (1989): 218-238.

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Bitcoin started as a free, open-source computer program written by an author or group of authors who used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The pseudonym was used in both the source code3 and in the white paper that describes the idea.[1] Nakamoto’s possible motivations for creating Bitcoin can be gleaned from some of his or her discussions on mailing lists: "[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I’m better with code than with words though." - Satoshi Nakamoto[8] It is estimated that Nakamoto now owns over $100 million worth of bitcoins, as of May 2013.[9] Nakamoto’s involvement with the Bitcoin project faded in mid-2010, after which the open-source community, headed by Gavin Andresen, took over responsibility for the source code.[2] Why do bitcoins have value?

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Originally submitted to CACM, 1979. http://www.merkle.com/papers/Certified1979.pdf [7] Claude Shannon, "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems," Bell System Technical Journal 28 (4) (1949): 656715. [8] Satoshi Nakamoto, e-mail to cryptography@metzdowd.com mailing list, November 14, 2008. http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10001.html [9] Adrianne Jeffries, "Four years and $100 million later, Bitcoin’s mysterious creator remains anonymous," The Verge, May 6, 2013. http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/6/4295028/report-satoshi-nakamoto [10] Timothy Lee, "An Illustrated History Of Bitcoin Crashes," Forbes, April 11, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/an-illustrated-history-of-bitcoin-crashes/ [11] Laurie Law, Susan Sabett, Jerry Solinas, "How to make a mint: the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash," National Security Agency, Office of Information Security Research and Technology, Cryptology Division, June 18, 1996. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm [12] David Chaum, "Blind signatures for untraceable payments," Advances in Cryptology Proceedings of Crypto 82 (3) (1983): 199-203

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

The genesis of that subversive idea was, of course, Bitcoin, which, when boiled down to its most basic concept, is founded on the upkeep of a digitized ledger, a record of exchanges and transactions. What makes this ledger so radical, so controversial, is the way in which this record of transactions, known as a blockchain, is created and maintained. Bitcoin, released in 2009 by a person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was designed to be an end-around to the banks and governments that have for centuries been the guardians of our financial systems. Its blockchain promised a new way around processes that had become at best controlled by middlemen who insisted on taking their cut of every transaction, and at worst the cause of some man-made economic disasters.

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Can a blockchain, which is continuously open to public inspection and guaranteed not by a single bank but by a series of mathematically secured entries into a ledger that’s shared and maintained by many different computers, help us rebuild our lost social capital? The God Protocol On October 31, 2008, while the world was drowning in the financial crisis, a little-noticed “white paper” was released by somebody using the pen name “Satoshi Nakamoto,” and describing something called “Bitcoin,” an electronic version of cash that didn’t need state backing. At the heart of Nakamoto’s electronic cash was a public ledger that could be viewed by anybody but was virtually impossible to alter. This ledger was essentially a digitized, objective rendering of the truth, and in the years to follow it would come to be called the blockchain.

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Picture a fraud like Bernie Madoff’s, in which Madoff was simply making up transactions and recording them in completely fictitious books, and you can see the value in a system that can verify accounts in real time. Before Grigg, in the 1990s, another visionary had also seen the potential power of a digital ledger. Nick Szabo was an early Cypherpunk* and developed some of the concepts that underlie Bitcoin, which is one reason why some suspect he is Satoshi Nakamoto. His protocol has at its heart a spreadsheet that runs on a “virtual machine”—such as a network of interlinked computers—accessible to multiple parties. Szabo envisioned an intricate system of both private and public data that would protect private identities but provide enough public information about transactions to build up a verifiable transaction history.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

By 2012, when Brian started Coinbase, a bitcoin was no longer worth pennies but a few dollars. Now, millions of people around the world knew what it was and how to use it. What people—including Assistant US Attorney Katie Haun and her boss—still did not know was, who was behind it? There was only that nine-page paper by the person with the strange pseudonym: Satoshi Nakamoto. So who is Satoshi Nakamoto? This is a taboo topic among most bitcoin believers, who don’t like to discuss it. This is by design. As authors Paul Vigna and Michael Casey explain in The Age of Cryptocurrency, bitcoin is a religion as much as it is a technology. And like every good religion, its origin story is surrounded in sacred mystery.

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“The formative internet companies had been built, and the revolution had happened.” He was wrong, of course. The internet revolution is still blazing, and entrepreneurs, for better and worse, are using it to remake our homes and our lives. And in late 2008, a mysterious person using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page white paper on the web that would bring that same revolution to money. Brian discovered that paper a year later. It was Christmas, and Brian was in his old room back at his parents’ house in San Jose, reading tech news on the internet, as usual. Someone had posted Satoshi’s paper on a computer discussion forum.

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In startup land, it was the equivalent of cutting off a spouse from a joint bank account. But it had to be done. The point on which Brian and Ben had disagreed wasn’t an aesthetic one or even a strategic one. It was an existential one. Their dispute turned on a near-religious clash about what bitcoin was supposed to be. When the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto revealed bitcoin in his nine-page paper, he described the invention of a new and decentralized technology. That word, decentralized, is critical. It meant no single person, company, or government could control the network on which bitcoin is built. Meanwhile, people who bought and sold bitcoin could not rely on a bank or anyone else to manage their stash of digital money.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 3: THE AUDITOR none fared worse than Armenia: Margaret Shapiro, “Armenia’s ‘Good Life’ Lost to Misery, Darkness, Cold,” Washington Post, Jan. 30, 1993, washingtonpost.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Participants can be anonymous”: Satoshi Nakamoto, email with subject line “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,” Oct. 31, 2008, archived by Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, nakamotoinstitute.org. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 4: CRYPTOANARCHY Gavin Andresen giving a talk: Amherst Media, “Making Money—Gavin Andresen @ Ignite Amherst,” Feb. 17, 2011, youtube.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT chronicled the cypherpunk movement: Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets (New York: Dutton, 2012).

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the first payment with real value: Galen Moore, “10 Years After Laszlo Hanyecz Bought Pizza with 10K Bitcoin, He Has No Regrets,” CoinDesk, May 22, 2020, coindesk.com. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Some linking is still unavoidable”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Oct. 31, 2008, archived by Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, nakamotoinstitute.org. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT called a “change” address: For the Swiss and German researchers, see Elli Androulaki et al., “Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin,” in Financial Cryptography and Data Security, ed.

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Transactions flowed from one address to another, with none of the names or other personal details that a bank or payment service like PayPal might collect. “Participants can be anonymous,” read one line in an email sent to a cryptography mailing list by the currency’s mysterious inventor, known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin burrowed into the very center of Gambaryan’s mind, at the point where his obsessions with computers and forensic accounting converged. As an IRS investigator tasked with following the money, he considered the notion of anonymous digital cash vaguely foreboding. Who would pay taxes on these “anonymous” transactions?

Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, carbon footprint, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, diversification, diversified portfolio, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, liquidity trap, litecoin, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Satoshi Nakamoto, the medium is the message, Vitalik Buterin

Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, Tron: Legacy On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper,1 a manifesto for monetary independence. The nine-page paper unveiled the technical details and rationale for a robust new system that envisioned using digital signatures to authorize the transfer of scarce electronic coins. The transactions and whereabouts of every fraction of every coin would be documented on a public ledger that would be freely available for download and inspection. The name Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym. Satoshi’s true identity is unknown, and that anonymity has forever shrouded Bitcoin in mystery.

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By converting chaotic energy into an orderly monetary system, it accurately compensates costly effort with value, and through proof-of-work, it methodically documents irrefutable evidence of its own authenticity. In this sense, Bitcoin is like catching lightning in a bottle, since it forges and secures trustworthy money from energy. 2.6 Fixed Supply: The Promised Land “The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.” Satoshi Nakamoto, Creator of Bitcoin The Bitcoin network does not actually consume energy itself, but computer processing power, which is fueled by energy. This consumption process is known as “mining,” and it performs two very valuable tasks. First, mining enables Bitcoin’s native monetary units, called “bitcoins,” to be found and spent, and second, it provides security to the network.

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As of May 2020, with the US national debt at a staggering $25 trillion (over $75,000 per American), it is worth asking – on what basis is the fiat monetary system credible? Source: US Federal Reserve 3.5 Fiat Functionality “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.” Satoshi Nakamoto, Creator of Bitcoin Today, fiat functions as money because it satisfies the three primary functions – albeit tenuously. Medium of exchange: Legal tender laws require that, to varying degrees, fiat be used within a country for commerce. Legally enforcing fiat assures a high degree of acceptability, even if it is somewhat constrained by borders and red tape.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The original blog post is available at Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin P2P e-Cash Paper,” Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (blog), October 31, 2008, https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/. The paper (Nakamoto 2008), at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, succinctly sums up the objective of Bitcoin: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” The quoted text is from Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency,” Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (blog), February 11, 2009, https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/.

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The April 12, 2009, email between Satoshi Nakamoto and Mike Hearn that includes the text attributed to Nakamoto is archived here: “Satoshi Reply to Mike Hearn,” Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, April 12, 2009, https://nakamotostudies.org/emails/satoshi-reply-to-mike-hearn/. The website notes that this email was provided by Hearn and cannot be confirmed independently but appears consistent with many other Nakamoto writings. For more discussion of the twenty-one million limit, including some suggestive mathematical calculations, see David Canellis, “Here’s Why Satoshi Nakamoto Set Bitcoin’s Supply Limit to 21 Million,” TNW, July 8, 2019, https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/08/heres-why-satoshi-nakamoto-set-bitcoin-supply-limit-to-21-million/.

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Coinmarketcap.com has an up-to-date list of active cryptocurrencies, their prices, and market capitalization. It does not take much to issue one’s own cryptocurrency, so there were in fact a few thousand more cryptocurrencies as of December 2020, some with trivial or zero market value. The Building Blocks The quoted text is from Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency,” Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (blog), February 11, 2009, https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/. Cryptography For an engaging tour of cryptography, ranging from the ancient past to modern quantum cryptography, see Singh (1999). For a more comprehensive overview, see Kahn (1996).

Bitcoin for the Befuddled by Conrad Barski

Airbnb, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Isaac Newton, MITM: man-in-the-middle, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, node package manager, p-value, peer-to-peer, price discovery process, QR code, radical decentralization, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, software as a service, the payments system, Yogi Berra

It is possible for the rules of hockey to change, but only if everyone agrees to the new rules. Bitcoin is the same way.” (http://www.research.utoronto.ca/what-is-bitcoin/) 3. We actually don’t know whether Satoshi Nakamoto is a man, a woman, or a group of people. 4. Hal Finney developed a reusable proof-of-work system that overlaps significantly with Bitcoin’s proof-of-work used in mining. 5. On March 6, 2014, a user account belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto posted on the P2Pfoundation forum to clarify that he was not Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a man who at the time was being harassed by journalists because they mistakenly believed he was the inventor of Bitcoin. 6. These are only rough estimates; the computing power of supercomputers and such projects is often measured in the number of floating-point operations per second (FLOPs).

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A trusted central mediator such as PayPal can track payments and money transfers in a privately held account ledger, but it wasn’t clear how a group of strangers who do not trust each other could accomplish the same transactions dependably.4 Sometimes referred to as the Byzantine Generals’ Problem, this fundamental conundrum also emerges in computer science, specifically in how to achieve consensus on a distributed network. In 2008, the problem was elegantly solved by Bitcoin’s inventor, known pseudonymously as Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi’s significant breakthrough made it possible for a digital currency to exist without relying on a central authority. Satoshi described the solution to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem and the invention of Bitcoin in a white paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

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Bitcoin Units As explained in Chapter 1, Bitcoin refers collectively to the entire currency system, whereas bitcoins are the units of the currency. Although the total currency supply is capped at 21 million bitcoins, each one can be subdivided into smaller denominations; for example, 0.1 bitcoins and 0.001 bitcoins. The smallest unit, a hundred millionth of a bitcoin (0.00000001 bitcoins), is called a satoshi in honor of Satoshi Nakamoto. As a result, goods can be priced in Bitcoin very precisely, and people can easily pay for those goods in exact change (e.g., a merchant can price a gallon of milk at 0.00152374 bitcoins, or 152,374 satoshis). Rather than writing the term bitcoins on price tags, merchants commonly use the abbreviated currency code BTC or XBT; 5 bitcoins would be written as 5 BTC.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Imagine a technology that could preserve our freedom to choose for ourselves and our families, to express these choices in the world, and to control our own destiny, no matter where we lived or were born. What new tools and new jobs could we create with those capabilities? What new businesses and services? How should we think about the opportunities? The answers were right in front of us, compliments of Satoshi Nakamoto. THE SEVEN DESIGN PRINCIPLES We believe that this next era could be inspired by Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision, designed around a set of implicit principles, and realized by the collaborative spirit of many passionate and equally talented leaders in the community. His grand vision was limited to money, not to some greater goal of creating a second generation of the Internet.

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God being the ultimate in confessional discretion, no party would learn anything more about the other parties’ inputs than they could learn from their own inputs and the output.”4 His point was powerful: Doing business on the Internet requires a leap of faith. Because the infrastructure lacks the much-needed security, we often have little choice but to treat the middlemen as if they were deities. A decade later in 2008, the global financial industry crashed. Perhaps propitiously, a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto outlined a new protocol for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system using a cryptocurrency called bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies (digital currencies) are different from traditional fiat currencies because they are not created or controlled by countries. This protocol established a set of rules—in the form of distributed computations—that ensured the integrity of the data exchanged among these billions of devices without going through a trusted third party.

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We believe the advent of a decentralized world-wide ledger coupled with powerful encryption to mask the identities of buyer and seller will be attractive to the art world.”28 The artist becomes what could be called a “rights monetizer” with the technology making deals and collecting revenue in real time. You could apply this same model to other fields as well. In science, a researcher could publish a paper to a limited audience of peers, as Satoshi Nakamoto did, and receive reviews and the credibility to publish to a larger audience, rather than assigning all rights to a scientific journal. The paper might even be available for free but other scientists could subscribe to a deeper analysis or threaded discussions with the author about it. She could make her raw data available or perhaps share data with other scientists as part of a smart contract.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Chapter 1 1. https://www.stlouisfed.org/financial-crisis/full-timeline; http://historyofbitcoin.org/. 2. http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/651322.pdf. 3. http://wayback.archive.org/web/20120529203623/http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profile/SatoshiNakamoto. 4. http://observer.com/2011/10/did-the-new-yorkers-joshua-davis-nail-the-identity-of-bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto/. 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#cite_note-betabeat-12. 6. http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21698060-craig-wright-reveals-himself-as-satoshi-nakamoto. 7. https://www.wired.com/2016/05/craig-wright-privately-proved-hes-bitcoins-creator/. 8. http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21698294-quest-find-satoshi-nakamoto-continues-wrightu2019s-wrongs. 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/business/17bear.html?_r=0. 10. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_bearstearns.htm. 11. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123051066413538349. 12.

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In the four months of August to October 2008, an unprecedented series of changes occurred: Bitcoin.org was registered, Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in American history, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch for $50 billion, the U.S. government established the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper that founded Bitcoin and the basis of blockchain technology.1 The entwinement of the financial collapse on the one hand and the rise of Bitcoin on the other is hard to ignore. The financial crisis cost the global economy trillions of dollars and burned bridges of trust between financial titans and the public.2 Meanwhile, Bitcoin provided a system of decentralized trust for value transfer, relying not on the ethics of humankind but on the cold calculation of computers and laying the foundation potentially to obviate the need for much of Wall Street.

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The financial crisis cost the global economy trillions of dollars and burned bridges of trust between financial titans and the public.2 Meanwhile, Bitcoin provided a system of decentralized trust for value transfer, relying not on the ethics of humankind but on the cold calculation of computers and laying the foundation potentially to obviate the need for much of Wall Street. WHO IS SATOSHI NAKAMOTO? Referring to Satoshi as “he” is simply a matter of convenience because to this day no one knows exactly who or even what Satoshi is. He, she, they, or it remains totally anonymous. On a profile page Satoshi created for the P2P Foundation—which he used to communicate with others as he spun up Bitcoin—he wrote that he was a 37-year-old male living in Japan.3 Yet outside of Japan, fact digging has led people to believe Satoshi resided in the United Kingdom, North America, Central America, South America, or even the Caribbean.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

It is the inherent nature of Bitcoin that such knowledge cannot be delegated or outsourced. There is no alternative to personal responsibility for anyone interested in using this network, and that is the real investment that needs to be made to get into Bitcoin. Notes 1 The full email can be found on the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute archive of all known Satoshi Nakamoto writings, available at www.nakamotoinstitute.org 2 The now‐defunct New Liberty Standard. 3 Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold (Harper, 2015). 4 In other words, in the eight years it has been a market commodity, a bitcoin has appreciated around almost eight million‐fold, or, precisely 793,513,944% from its first price of $0.000994 to its all‐time high at the time of writing, $7,888.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available: ISBN 9781119473862 (Hardcover) ISBN 9781119473893 (ePDF) ISBN 9781119473916 (ePub) Cover Design: Wiley Cover Images: REI stone © Danita Delimont/Getty Images; gold bars © Grassetto/Getty Images; QR code/Courtesy of Saifedean Ammous To my wife and daughter, who give me a reason to write. And to Satoshi Nakamoto, who gave me something worth writing about. About the Author Saifedean Ammous is a Professor of Economics at the Lebanese American University and member of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University.

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But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future. Nassim Nicholas Taleb January 22, 2018 Prologue On November 1, 2008, a computer programmer going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto sent an email to a cryptography mailing list to announce that he had produced a “new electronic cash system that's fully peer‐to‐peer, with no trusted third party.”1 He copied the abstract of the paper explaining the design, and a link to it online. In essence, Bitcoin offered a payment network with its own native currency, and used a sophisticated method for members to verify all transactions without having to trust in any single member of the network.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

Although cryptographers, mathematicians and coders have been working on increasingly specific and advanced protocols in order to get stronger and stronger privacy and authenticity guarantees out of various systems—from electronic cash to voting to file transfer—progress was slow for over 30 years. The innovation of the blockchain—or, more generally, the innovation of public economic consensus by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009—proved to be the one missing piece of the puzzle that single-handedly gave the industry its next giant leap forward. The political environment seemed to almost snap into place: the great financial crisis in 2008 spurred growing distrust in mainstream finance, including both corporations and the governments that are normally supposed to regulate them, and was the initial spark that drove many to seek out alternatives.

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Tomorrow, we will perform the equivalent of “googling” to verify records, identities, authenticity, rights, work done, titles, contracts, and other valuable asset-related processes. There will be digital ownership certificates for everything. Just like we cannot double spend digital money anymore (thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto's invention), we will not be able to double copy or forge official certificates once they are certified on a blockchain. That was a missing piece of the information revolution, which the blockchain fixes. I still remember the initial excitement around being able to track a shipped package on the Web when FedEx introduced this capability for the first time in 1994.

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Separately, these fields have existed for a long time, but for the first time, they have together intersected harmoniously and morphed inside blockchain technology. Game theory is ‘the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.”4 And this is related to the blockchain because the Bitcoin blockchain, originally conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto, had to solve a known game theory conundrum called the Byzantine Generals Problem.5 Solving that problem consists in mitigating any attempts by a small number of unethical Generals who would otherwise become traitors, and lie about coordinating their attack to guarantee victory. This is accomplished by enforcing a process for verifying the work that was put into crafting these messages, and time-limiting the requirement for seeing untampered messages in order to ensure their validity.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The assembled masters of the high-tech universe may have understood him about as well as the mathematicians in Königsberg understood the twenty-four-year-old Gödel in 1930, though the audience at Asilomar had advance notice of the significance of Buterin’s work. Buterin succinctly described his company, Ethereum, launched in July 2015, as a “blockchain app platform.” The blockchain is an open, distributed, unhackable ledger devised in 2008 by the unknown person (or perhaps group) known as “Satoshi Nakamoto” to support his cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Buterin’s meteoric rise was such that soon after the Asilomar conference the central bank of Singapore announced that it was moving forward with an Ethereum-backed currency, and other central banks, including those of Canada and Russia, are investigating its potential as a new foundation for money transactions and smart contracts.

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The three young men often talked technology and libertarian philosophy late into the Atherton nights and worked on their companies nearly all other hours. All of them shared and re-enforced each other’s frustration with Silicon Valley’s software obsession and abandonment of manufacturing. And all of them soon came to see this abandonment as a gigantic opportunity. CHAPTER 11 The Heist In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto announced “the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority.” He went on to specify: Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It’ll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years.

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Central Bankers meet solemnly to decide on levels of “quantitative easing”—on how many trillions of dollars of bonds to buy or sell, thus issuing new money into a flagging economy or sopping up money from a booming one. They hope against hope that these metafictional money fabrications can somehow overflow into the real world of economics and job creation. Lots of luck with that. Perhaps they should consult a novelist. Meanwhile, somewhere over the rainbow, a possibly mythical man, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, invents a new currency called bitcoin that is spurring a new financial system. This is not fiction, although Stephenson’s fingerprints are all over the story, which uncannily resembles the made-up world of Reamde. According to some of bitcoin’s protagonists, such as the legendary Hal Finney, the first user of the program, it emulates “Galt Gulch” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.4 Consider it a virtual domain where titans of finance can retreat to conduct their business out of the reach of governments.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

It was called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Bitcoin! The stranger who invented bitcoin was almost certainly not named Satoshi Nakamoto, but that was the name on the top of the bitcoin paper, and the name in the email to Wei Dai, and the name the creator (or creators) of bitcoin used to talk up bitcoin on the crypto email lists. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows as I write this, who Satoshi Nakamoto is (or are) or was (or were). Satoshi Nakamoto could be a cypherpunk living in an underground bunker in New Zealand or an executive at a bank in London. She might be a priest or he might be a criminal or they might be a cabal scheming to take over the world.

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She might be a priest or he might be a criminal or they might be a cabal scheming to take over the world. But fundamental to the genius of bitcoin is this: it doesn’t matter at all who Satoshi Nakamoto is. It would be catastrophic if the CEO of a bank was delusional, or the chairman of the Federal Reserve was inclined to commit fraud. Those institutions depend on the choices made by the people in charge. The point of bitcoin is that no one is in charge. (You could also say that everyone is in charge, but that amounts to the same thing.) In classic cypherpunk style, Satoshi (“Satoshi”) owns no patents on bitcoin. The full codebase was published online for everyone to see and use and tweak however they want.

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The full codebase was published online for everyone to see and use and tweak however they want. Money is always and everywhere based on trust. Modern currency is based on trust in the government that issues it. Bitcoin is also based on trust. But the dream of bitcoin is that you don’t have to trust a government, or a bank, or Satoshi Nakamoto; you just have to trust the code. And the code for bitcoin is very clever! Satoshi took ideas from Back’s hashcash and Wei Dai’s b-money and added to them a few brilliant twists that seemed to make bitcoin the thing cypherpunks had been dreaming of for years: an anonymous(ish), money(ish) thing that buyers and sellers could exchange over the internet without any bank or tech company in the middle.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

The lesson of information theory is that irreversible money cannot be the measure of itself, defined by the values it gauges. It is part of a logical system, and like all such systems it must be based on values outside itself. It must be rooted in the entropy of irreversible time. When the bitcoin innovators Satoshi Nakamoto and Nick Szabo sought to invent new forms of money, they explicitly designed algorithms that nullified the effects of technological advance in computer technology. As Moore’s Law improves the computer systems used to validate transactions and integrate them with the bitcoin blockchain, for example, the “proof of work” challenge in the algorithm becomes proportionately more difficult and the reward smaller.

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Names and passwords and other authentication details do not need to be stored. An effort to hack one of the computers and change the blockchain ledger would be pointless, as the correct ledger would exist on myriad other computers. Gold, however, remains the leading player. In fact, bitcoin’s mysterious, pseudonymous founder, one “Satoshi Nakamoto,” specifically mimicked gold in developing his digital money, which becomes more difficult to “mine” with the passage of time. Its value, like gold’s, is ultimately based on its scarcity. It is not a competitor with gold but an Internet money that simulates the properties of the monetary metal and offers a path toward a gold-inspired standard for the net.

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A shrewd analyst and historian of the evolution of money, Szabo in the 1990s threw a wrench into the Drexlerian nanotech movement, with its dream of building new molecules from scratch using nano-replicators, offering a prize to anyone who could create a macro-replicator out of Lego blocks or other toy-like potential replicators. If you can’t build a macro-replicator, you probably cannot build one with nano-pincers and electron microscopes.4 There was no one to claim the prize. Since then Szabo has been focusing on the easier enigmas of money and gold. Though he denies it, Szabo has long been suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto, and several analyses have shown his prose above all others to conform to the idiosyncrasies of Nakamoto’s bitcoin paper. Known in the early 1990s for his canny ruminations on strategies for network anonymity and pseudonymity, Szabo now writes a pithy, original, and very occasional blog on money matters called Unenumerated5 but is otherwise scarcely or skittishly represented on the Internet.

DeFi and the Future of Finance by Campbell R. Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro, Vitalik Buterin, Fred Ehrsam

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, collateralized debt obligation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, initial coin offering, Jane Street, margin call, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, rent-seeking, RFID, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, smart contracts, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

PayPal,3 founded more than 20 years ago, is a forerunner in the payments space; in 2017, seven of the largest U.S. banks added their own payment system called Zelle.4 An important commonality of these cost-reducing fintech advances is that they rely on the centralized backbone of the current financial infrastructure. BITCOIN AND CRYPTOCURRENCY The dozens of digital currency initiatives beginning in the early 1980s all failed.5 The landscape shifted, however, with the publication of the famous Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper6 in 2008, which presents a peer-to-peer system that is decentralized and uses the concept of blockchain. Invented in 1991 by Haber and Stornetta,7 blockchain was initially primarily envisioned to be a time-stamping system to keep track of different versions of a document.

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PayPal, founded as Confinity in 1998, did not begin offering a payments function until it merged with X.com in 2000. 4. Other examples include Cash App, Braintree, Venmo, and Robinhood. 5. C. R. Harvey, “The History of Digital Money,” 2020, https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/697_2020/Public_Presentations_697/History_of_Digital_Money_2020_697.pdf. 6. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 7. Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document,” Journal of Cryptology, 3, no. 2 (1991), https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/BF00196791. 8. Adam Back, “Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure,” August 1, 2002, http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf. 9.

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Finally, it is difficult for the regulator to hire in this space because potential employees have many other options. NOTES 1. Bloomberg, “How to Steal $500 Million in Cryptocurrency,” Fortune, January 31, 2018, https://fortune.com/2018/01/31/coincheck-hack-how/. 2. Szabo, Nick. 1997. “Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks,” Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, https://nakamotoinstitute.org/formalizing-securing-relationships/. 3. dForce, https://dforce.network/; bZx, bZeroX, 2021, https://bzx.network/; Andre Shevchenko, “DForce Hacker Returns Stolen Money as Criticism of the Project Continues,” Cointelegraph, April 22, 2020, https://cointelegraph.com/news/dforce-hacker-returns-stolen-money-as-criticism-of-the-project-continues; Adrian Zmudzinski, “Decentralized Lending Protocol bZx Hacked Twice in a Matter of Days,” Cointelegraph, February 18, 2020, https://cointelegraph.com/news/decentralized-lending-protocol-bzx-hacked-twice-in-a-matter-of-days; Quantstamp, 2017–2020, https://quantstamp.com/; Trail of Bits, https://www.trailofbits.com/; PeckShield, 2018, https://blog.peckshield.com/. 4.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Bitcoin as a Human-Interest Narrative The Bitcoin narrative is a motivating narrative for the cosmopolitan class around the world, for people who aspire to join that class, and for those who identify with advanced technology. And like many economic narratives, Bitcoin has its celebrity hero, Satoshi Nakamoto, who is a central human-interest story for Bitcoin. Adding to the romance of the Bitcoin narrative is a mystery story, for Satoshi Nakamoto has never been seen by anyone who will testify to having seen him. One early Bitcoin codeveloper said that Satoshi communicated only by email and that the two had never met in person.8 On its website, Bitcoin.org says only, “Satoshi left the project in late 2010 without revealing much about himself.”

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The Merkle tree and the digital signature algorithm are essential elements of the Bitcoin protocol described in the original Bitcoin paper signed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The equilibrium of the congestion queuing game is described in Huberman et al., 2017. 4. Proudhon 1923 [1840], p. 293. 5. Sterlin Lujan, “Bitcoin Was Built to Incite Peaceful Anarchy,” https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-built-incite-peaceful-anarchy/. Passage is dated January 9, 2016. 6. Ross, 1991, p. 116. 7. Himanen, 2001. 8. Zoë Bernard, “Satoshi Nakamoto was weird, paranoid, and bossy, says early Bitcoin developer who exchanged hundreds of emails with the mysterious crypto creator,” Business Insider, May 30, 2018, http://www.businessinsider.com/satoshi-nakamoto-was-weird-and-bossy-says-bitcoin-developer-2018-5.

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At one point, the total value of Bitcoin exceeded US $300 billion. But Bitcoin has no value unless people think it has value, as its proponents readily admit. How did Bitcoin’s value go from $0 to $300 billion in just a few years? The beginnings of Bitcoin date to 2008, when a paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” signed by Satoshi Nakamoto, was distributed to a mailing list. In 2009, the first cryptocurrency, called Bitcoin, was launched based on ideas in that paper. Cryptocurrencies are computer-managed public ledger entries that can function as money, so long as people value these entries as money and use them for purchases and sales.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Forensic analysis of his style, his idiosyncrasies, his likely age and the pattern of his activity has led the author Dominic Frisby and others – including a team of forty forensic linguists from Birmingham University – to the conclusion that Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo. Suspiciously, the normally prolific Szabo went unusually silent around the time Satoshi Nakamoto became active, and vice versa. However, Szabo has denied on Twitter that he is Satoshi. (Some still think that he and Hal Finney collaborated as Satoshi, giving each deniability.) Szabo himself keeps a low profile. No photograph of him can be found on the net. Whoever he is, ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ knows a lot about computer programming and economic history – a rare combination. There is little doubt that bitcoin is one of the most significant inventions of our lifetime (though I doubt it would have remained uninvented if Satoshi had not existed: someone else would have come up with some form of self-verifying currency).

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Then there was e-gold, a digital payments system run from the Caribbean by an oncologist called Doug Jackson that rocketed to $1.5 billion in transactions before being shut down on the grounds that it was allowing illegal money transmission. Governments do not take kindly to money that is outside their control. Hence the shyness of bitcoin’s founder. The mysterious founder Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Newsweek magazine thought it had found him in March 2014 when it identified a sixty-four-year-old Japanese-American programmer named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto living near Los Angeles. The baffled and beleaguered Dorian, an unemployed man in poor health with a clumsy command of English, protested that he had nothing to do with bitcoin, did not understand what it was, and thought it was called ‘bitcom’.

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Clearly, he was trying to think how to recreate online the key steps in the evolution of real money. Some years went by. Then, on 18 August 2008, a month before the financial crisis broke in earnest, a new domain name was registered anonymously: bitcoin.org. Two weeks later, somebody with the user name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ posted a nine-page paper outlining an idea for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system called bitcoin. The bitcoin system went live a few months later, on the day the British government reported its second bailout of the banks, an event referred to by Satoshi, who quoted a headline from The Times in his announcement of bitcoin’s birth.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

They change how people think about fairness and justice, how companies organize themselves and innovate, how governments approach taxation and trade, and so on. Economists think about exchange, a fundamental and universal human activity, so their biggest ideas on the subject have had a huge impact. Bitcoin: The Pseudonymous Revolution Satoshi Nakamoto’s ideas have also had a huge impact, even though nobody knows who he or she is.† On October 31, 2008, a person or group going by that name posted online a short paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” It addressed a straightforward question: Why do online payments have to involve banks, credit card companies, and other financial intermediaries?

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The miners and others who built the Bitcoin network were behaving just as Keynes had predicted, but with some fascinating twists. They weren’t madmen, and most of them weren’t in authority, but they were still “distilling their frenzy” not from some academic scribbler, but instead from a pseudonymous one: Satoshi Nakamoto. The Ledger, Not the Currency: Waking Up to the Blockchain’s Potential Throughout this time, most mainstream economists were skeptical, even dismissive, of Bitcoin’s potential as a rival to the world’s established currencies. Two of the main functions of any money, they pointed out, were a means of exchange (I give you these dollars or euros or yen and you give me that house or car or chicken dinner) and a store of value (my total net worth is X dollars, euros, or yen; with this amount of wealth I can buy so many houses, cars, or chicken dinners).

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. §§ The parties involved in a blockchain transaction can decide to include a transaction fee, which will be awarded to the miner that creates the block. These voluntary fees are intended as an additional incentive to miners. ¶¶ Settlement risk is the possibility that one side of the transaction might not deliver the shares as promised once the other party has paid for them, or vice versa. ## Many believe that Szabo is, in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto. He has repeatedly denied this claim. *** Our literary agent is the eminently trustworthy Raphael Sagalyn. ††† There were fewer signals to Norton that the two of us would be good authors for them to work with. We’re grateful that they took a chance on us. ‡‡‡ If we were worried that Norton might not have enough money to pay us, we could include an escrow account or other contingency within the smart contract.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

After an uneventful day spent commenting on a variety of hacking forums, Charlie had suddenly seen a strange little email that had been sent out to a cryptography mailing list. The email had come from someone named Satoshi Nakamoto. In the email, Satoshi had stated that he’d developed a brand-new virtual currency, which he’d then described, in detail, in an attached “white paper.” At first, Charlie had thought the email was a joke. Stupid bullshit, he’d told himself. Who was this Satoshi Nakamoto, anyway? Charlie looked around hacker forums for more background on this Satoshi character but could find nothing. Stranger still, Satoshi, who claimed to be a Japanese man in his midthirties, wrote his emails in perfect, idiomatic English.

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No bank or government sits in judgment of transactions, or takes a piece of each slice of pie. Middlemen are replaced with math, or in the case of your example, an army of Charlie Buckets.” “And the Willy Wonka of Bitcoin,” Tyler said. “Who set all of this in motion: Satoshi Nakamoto.” Cameron knew from his reading that the creator of Bitcoin was no less mysterious than the fictional character from his analogy. On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto had published his famous white paper titled: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, to the Cryptography Mailing List—“a low-noise moderated mailing list devoted to cryptographic technology and its political impact,” laying out “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”

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Although the area had a reputation for being a bit of a party destination itself—not on par with Ibiza, but speckled with exclusive restaurants and summer outposts of notable Manhattan nightclubs—the twins had spent most of their time relaxing on the beach and devouring anything they could find on the subject of Bitcoin. At the time, not a single book on Bitcoin had been published; but by diving deep enough into the internet, the twins were able to find blog posts, Reddit posts, and articles written by early adopters, known as “Bitcoiners,”—as well as Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin white paper. They’d also reached out by email to former professors at Harvard and Oxford, where they’d earned MBA degrees, to get more academic opinions on this new virtual currency. None of the professors they’d contacted—some of them among the most elite economics professors in the world—had ever heard of Bitcoin.

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

The blockchain industry is using these terms interchangeably sometimes because it is still in the process of shaping itself into what could likely become established layers in a technology stack. Bitcoin was created in 2009 (released on January 9, 20096) by an unknown person or entity using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The concept and operational details are described in a concise and readable white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”7 Payments using the decentralized virtual currency are recorded in a public ledger that is stored on many—potentially all—Bitcoin users’ computers, and continuously viewable on the Internet.

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However, nearly every other US government agency—including FinCEN (financial crimes enforcement network), banking regulators, and the CFPB, SEC, CFTC, and DOJ—regulate Bitcoin as a currency.31 Chapter 2. Blockchain 2.0: Contracts From its very beginning, complexity beyond currency and payments was envisioned for Bitcoin; the possibilities for programmable money and contracts were baked into the protocol at its invention. A 2010 communication from Satoshi Nakamoto indicates that “the design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third-party arbitration, multiparty signature, etc. If Bitcoin catches on in a big way, these are things we’ll want to explore in the future, but they all had to be designed at the beginning to make sure they would be possible later.”32 As we’ll see in Chapter 3, these structures could be applied beyond financial transactions, to any kind of transaction—even “figurative” ones.

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The key idea is that the decentralized transaction ledger functionality of the blockchain could be used to register, confirm, and transfer all manner of contracts and property. Table 2-1 lists some of the different classes and examples of property and contracts that might be transferred with the blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto started by specifying escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third-party arbitration, and multiparty signature transactions. All financial transactions could be reinvented on the blockchain, including stock, private equity, crowdfunding instruments, bonds, mutual funds, annuities, pensions, and all manner of derivatives (futures, options, swaps, and other derivatives).

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Television and computer screens worldwide broadcast images of its twenty-five thousand employees streaming out of the firm’s global offices, carrying their belongings in bankers’ boxes.1 The same week, the sixty-thousand-strong “herd” of Merrill Lynch, the world’s largest brokerage, whose bull logo also symbolized Wall Street, suddenly found itself reporting to a group of what some employees saw as “hillbillies” at North Carolina–based Bank of America.2 In mid-October, the S&P 500 suffered its worst week since the Great Depression, while the Dow’s loss broke its Depression-era record.3 But the damage wasn’t contained to one week: year to year, as much as $8.4 trillion in investor wealth had vanished. And then, although it generated no news at the time, on October 31, a person or group named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that described how people could bypass banks and use the internet to send each other money.4 Over the next nine years, during which a seven-year stretch of 0 to 0.25 percent interest rates managed to produce only the slowest economic recovery in history, this strange new network attracted a peculiar pastiche of supporters.5 Geeks were seduced by its magical fusion of cryptography, game theory, and the age-old ledger.

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It has a healthy satellite industry that provides products and services based around it, and it has its own business and advocacy organizations, but there is no central Gold Corporation.”13 When the first printed edition arrived, he saw it featured twelve articles on topics such as the personality of anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, the history of previous attempts at cryptocurrency, and the Bitcoin bubble of 2011. (The price had barely budged from Christmastime and was now about $5.) Scanning the magazine’s sixty-nine pages, Vitalik realized that nine of the twelve articles were by him. Concluding they must have had a hard time finding other writers, he was grateful for the opportunity.

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Although Charles could be charming—even in a bright blue Oxford, pens in his pocket, the CEO could wow the troupe with his performance in promo videos—he could be discourteous, like the time he left his nail clippings on the Meierskappel Airbnb staircase. There were red flags too. One day in Meierskappel, when Charles was alone with Roxy, he told her he was Satoshi. He said he’d created Bitcoin in an attempt to distract himself after a woman had left him. Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity is the ultimate mystery in cryptocurrency, and he, she, or they are now, for all intents and purposes, a god in the crypto community for performing the ultimate cypherpunk act: creating a decentralized currency that no government can control and walking away for seemingly zero personal gain.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Meanwhile, as governments and companies fight over who gets to define our future fiat-backed currency system, we cannot discount the role of decentralized alternatives such as Bitcoin, even as sideline players. David and I might disagree on this, but I see post-Covid-19 political fragmentation breeding demand for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention, which will represent an alternative – if not a more stable – store of value. Trust in both governments and corporate gatekeepers will be challenged by Covid-19 politics. Those who bemoan the lack of accountability in unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus packages could be very amenable to a new idea of money.

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There is no need for an in-depth history of Bitcoin here (for that, I strongly recommend Paul Vigna and Michael Casey’s The Age of Cryptocurrency), but it is useful to highlight a few points that will be relevant to our discussion about forms of digital currency later on. Bitcoin The Bitcoin story is, by now, well known. A person or persons unknown, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, published a white paper setting out how to create a person-to-person e-cash system without a central system operator or database (Nakamoto 2008). At the core of the Bitcoin system were three main concepts: to replace a central database with a shared ledger, to use a new consensus technique to build that ledger absent a central coordinator (this is the ‘Nakamoto consensus’ that uses ‘proof of work’ to determine which version of the ledger is correct), and to use a particular kind of mathematical puzzle to incentivize this proof of work.

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Chapter 2 Technology as catalyst [Bitcoin] is a remarkable cryptographic achievement … The ability to create something which is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value … Lots of people will build businesses on top of that. — Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google (2013) Whether Bitcoin is the future of money or not, there is no doubt it was the release of Satoshi Nakamoto’s now-famous white paper in 2008 which catalyzed the new era of e-cash that may well lead to digital currencies being put to mainstream use in the foreseeable future. Schmidt’s point is surely correct: people will build businesses on top of cryptocurrencies. Perhaps some of those businesses will form a new DeFi system that will overthrow the IMFS and all of its institutions.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

But all the social and intellectual heavy lifting begins now. 5 Cryptocurrency The computational guarantee of value All written accounts of the technological development we know as “the blockchain” begin and end the same way. They note its origins in the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin, and go on to explain how Bitcoin’s obscure, pseudonymous, possibly even multiple inventor “Satoshi Nakamoto” used it to solve the problems of trust that had foxed all previous attempts at networked digital money. They all make much of the blockchain’s potential to transform the way we exchange value, in every context and at every level of society. And they all gesture at the exciting possibilities that lie beyond currency: the world of smart contracts, distributed applications, autonomous organizations and post-human economies, all mediated by “trustless” cryptographic techniques.

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Perhaps people simply had more pressing concerns on their mind, and weren’t necessarily inclined to take a wild leap into the technological unknown. Or maybe that’s looking at things the wrong way around. Maybe a time of cratering confidence in existing institutions is precisely the correct moment at which to propose something fundamentally new. Enter “Satoshi Nakamoto.”2 Nakamoto’s was the sole name on a nine-page paper describing the proposed design of a new digital currency, first posted to the Cryptography mailing list on Halloween 2008, and in one or two other places around the internet soon thereafter.3 There is still very little we can say about “him” for sure, even whether he wasn’t actually a team of close collaborators producing work under a collective pseudonym.

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It sometimes seems that every age gets the technological icons it deserves, and if so it would be hard to invent a character more pungently appropriate to our own than Vitalik Buterin. Though an identifiable, individual, flesh-and-blood human being, Buterin is in every other way almost as much of a cipher as the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. We know a few biographical facts; we know too that he is evidently a fierce believer in the decentralization of power. But otherwise he is a blank. So little personal information about him is available that it’s all but impossible to get a sense of who he is, or what values he might cherish beyond this one core conviction.1 Born in Russia in 1994, Buterin was just shy of twenty when he dropped out of Ontario’s Waterloo University, spurred by a $100,000 grant from the foundation of libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

A powerful narrative developed from the tragedy, that of regular people getting screwed over by the elites. On the left, this helped inspire the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the right, it was the Tea Party. On the internet, through a pseudonymous author (or authors), another story was born. On Halloween night 2008, someone or some people calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto published what would come to be known as the Bitcoin white paper. We still don’t know who Satoshi was, but their white paper would have a profound impact on financial innovation and the future of digital money. Satoshi had a clear vision: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. . . . 

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Some tried to blur this essentially corporate dynamic by paying lip service to decentralization, or developing a foundation, or describing developers as volunteers. But these were still business ventures pushing what looked like digital securities. The goal was to make these companies and digital assets rise in value, like any business enterprise. As for Bitcoin, it’s true we don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but it was someone or some people. The Bitcoin white paper was not brought down a mountain by Moses. And despite the high-minded goals of its authors, over time, Bitcoin, or at least the economy surrounding it, has proven highly centralized, dependent on whales, major exchanges, and other institutional gatekeepers.

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But the reality is that Bitcoin’s ownership is actually extraordinarily centralized, concentrated in a tiny group of whales and mining pools. In fact, just two mining pools account for 51 percent of its global hash rate, meaning just two large groups control the majority of new Bitcoin created. Additionally, just because we don’t know who came up with Bitcoin originally doesn’t mean no one did. Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is, it’s a real person or real people. Once again, code does not fall from the sky. One day we may well find out who started this whole nonsense. If so, break out the popcorn, law nerds. Regardless, by the summer of 2022, two things were clear on the otherwise murky regulatory front: (1) The law considers Bitcoin a commodity—cat’s out of the bag on that sadly—and (2) there was a massive battle between the CFTC and the SEC for jurisdiction over the 20,000 or so cryptocurrencies out there.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Bitcoin came about both as a result of declining trust in the traditional financial system during the financial crisis and because of its technological advance in creating a trustable mechanism for monetary exchange online. On October 31, 2008, a research paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” was published on a cryptography listserv by a mysterious author identified as “Satoshi Nakamoto” who has kept his/her (their?) identity unknown. It called for the creation of the world’s “first decentralized digital currency.” Satoshi Nakamoto condemned state-based currencies: 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.

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It would never be accepted by the system, since the millions of copies of the ledger that reside throughout the rest of the Bitcoin network would not have any record of this counterfeit coin or its invented history. A widely distributed ledger lets everyone know who has what and prevents any individual from barging in with counterfeited property. The major headache that Satoshi Nakamoto conquered, and that every previous cryptocurrency had failed to manage, was the question of how to update that decentralized ledger: How could you make sure that the millions of copies of the master ledger, which are located far and wide throughout the Bitcoin network, are all the same, all accurate, all up to date, without anyone cheating?

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Charlie Lee, a former Google software engineer, designed Litecoin in his spare time and launched it in 2011 to complement Bitcoin. Lee said, “People like choices. You want to diversify your cryptocurrency investments.” He has described Litecoin as “silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” and he designed the Litecoin software to produce 84 million litecoins in comparison to Satoshi Nakamoto’s design for 21 million bitcoins. Lee also decided to use scrypt cryptography to reduce mining rates per unit down to 2.5 minutes in comparison to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. Lee also chose this type of cryptography, which relies on computer memory rather than processing power, to avoid the kind of high-carbon arms race he sees among miners in the Bitcoin community.

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Bitcoin is a digital currency that came into existence in 2008 as an invention by a person called Satoshi Nakamoto. He published a paper where he posited that he had found the way to create a decentralized network that could achieve consensus, agreement, without any central controlling authority. Now, if you have studied computer science or distributed systems, this is known as the Byzantine Generals’ Problem. It was first described in 1982. Until 2008, it was an unsolved problem. Then, Satoshi Nakamoto said, "I have solved it." Guess what happened next? Everybody laughed, ignored him, and dismissed him.

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Bitcoin is not a company. It is not an organization. It is a standard or a protocol just like TCP/IP, or the internet. It’s not owned by anyone. It operates by simple mathematical rules that everyone who participates in the network agrees on. Through this simple mechanism, through this invention of Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin is able to allow a completely decentralized network of computers to agree on what transactions have occurred on a network, essentially agreeing on who currently has the money. So, if I send money from my account to somebody else’s account in this peer-to-peer, completely decentralized network, it’s just like sending an email.

Stake Hodler Capitalism: Blockchain and DeFi by Amr Hazem Wahba Metwaly

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, congestion charging, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, information security, Internet of things, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Skype, smart contracts, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin

A big part of what shaped me as the person I am now is when my dad passed away in 2018, which left me wondering about life's real purpose. At that point, I realized that the joy comes from the journey and the most rewarding feeling comes from helping other people. Blockchain has had its fair share of disruption in our lives since Oct. 31st , 2008, which is the date Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of bitcoin, published his paper titled "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Nevertheless, bitcoin has had its direct effect on my life. I started delving into blockchain in 2017 when I got the idea of researching a blockchain-related ecosystem project; that was when I fell in love with blockchain and DeFi.

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Scott Stornetta; two researchers wanted to install a system where document timestamps are tamper-proof. However, it was not until two decades later that blockchain experienced its first real-world application' Bitcoin' was launched in January. The Bitcoin policy was designed on a blockchain. In a research paper announcing the digital currency, Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, referred to it as "a new electronic cash system that's entirely user-to-user," with no intermediaries trusted or not. The crucial factor to comprehend here is that Blockchain's sole purpose isn't Bitcoin, to record a ledger of payments; however, in theory, blockchain can be used to make records of any number of data points rigidly.

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

This concept can also be visualized with the help of the following diagram: The various ideas that supported the invention of Bitcoin and blockchain Blockchain In 2008, a groundbreaking paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was written on the topic of peer-to-peer electronic cash under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It introduced the term chain of blocks. No one knows the actual identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. After introducing Bitcoin in 2009, he remained active in the Bitcoin developer community until 2011. He then handed over Bitcoin development to its core developers and simply disappeared. Since then, there has been no communication from him whatsoever, and his existence and identity are shrouded in mystery.

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Bitcoin has started a revolution with the introduction of the very first fully decentralized digital currency, and the one that has proven to be extremely secure and stable from a network and protocol point of view. As a currency bitcoin is quite unstable and highly volatile, albeit valuable. We will explain this later in the chapter. This has also sparked a great interest in academic and industrial research and introduced many new research areas. Since its introduction in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin has gained massive popularity, and it is currently the most successful digital currency in the world with billions of dollars invested in it. The current market cap, at the time of writing, for this currency is $149, 984, 293, 122. Its popularity is also evident from the high number of users and investors, increasing bitcoin price, everyday news related to Bitcoin, and the number of start-ups and companies that are offering bitcoin-based online exchanges, and it's now also traded as Bitcoin Futures on Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

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Its popularity is also evident from the high number of users and investors, increasing bitcoin price, everyday news related to Bitcoin, and the number of start-ups and companies that are offering bitcoin-based online exchanges, and it's now also traded as Bitcoin Futures on Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). Interested readers can read more about Bitcoin Futures at http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/bitcoin-futures.html. The name of the Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is believed to be a pseudonym, as the true identity of Bitcoin inventor is unknown. It is built on decades of research in the field of cryptography, digital cash, and distributed computing. In the following section, a brief history is presented in order to provide the background required to understand the foundations behind the invention of Bitcoin.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Vigna and Casey 2015) have made claims like this at the same time that Bitcoin has been experiencing not just inflation but hyperinflation of exactly the sort Federal Reserve “critics” claim to fear most. The Bitcoin software has a distinct origin point, in a 2008 paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” by a pseudonymous author who called himself “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Yet we need to reach back deeper into history to grasp Bitcoin’s complete political and intellectual contexts. Most of those involved in the development and early adoption of Bitcoin were and are part of several intersecting communities who have long put a huge amount of faith into very specific technological–political orientations toward the world, ones grounded in overtly right-wing thought, typically coupled with myopic technological utopianism.

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New York: Guilford Press. Berlin, Isaiah. 1958. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Liberty, 166–217. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Birchall, Clare. 2006. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford, UK: Berg. Boase, Richard. 2013. “Cypherpunks, Bitcoin, and the Myth of Satoshi Nakamoto.” Cybersalon (September 5). http://www.cybersalon.org/. Borchgrevink, Jonas. 2014. “Ron Paul Loves His Own Ron Paul Coin and Is Positive about Bitcoin.” CryptoCoinsNews (January 16). http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/. Brands, H. W. 2006. The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War over the American Dollar.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Bitcoin traded at only $900 at the beginning of 2017, but was quoted at $20,000 per coin in December of the same year. Since then, the trend has been downward, and by the fall of 2018, it stood at roughly $6,000, having shed more than two-thirds 198 c h a P te r 8 of its value in dollar terms—and other cryptocurrencies did not fare much better.39 Nobody knows exactly who invented Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto, the official creator, is an alias for one, or perhaps several, digital coders. Some have proposed that Nick Szabo, the brain behind smart contracts and digital property rights, is the man behind Bitcoin, but he has denied this. Another contender is Craig Wright, a professed gambler from Australia who outed himself as the person behind the pseudonym, but not everyone is convinced.40 Be this as it may, Bitcoin embodies the hope of crypto-anarchists of a state-less future, but also the fears of conventional law enforcers about losing control over the financial flows that fund illicit businesses.

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As it happened, it never did, but it might have; and indeed, most ships do at least most of the time. There is, however, one aspect in which Bitcoin departs from these other forms of private money. Bitcoin is designed as money without credit: nobody can spend Bitcoin without proof of ownership.43 The “Bitcoin Manifesto,” published by the ominous Satoshi Nakamoto, explains that a key motivation for creating Bitcoin was to solve the “double-spending problem.”44 Yet, the ability to spend money one does not have is—for better or worse—the very essence of capitalism. Other forms of private money, the notes, bills of exchange, asset-backed securities, etc., are IOUs that are all assigned and traded with the expectation that they are convertible into state money whenever needed, and hopefully at a profit; convertibility may not be guaranteed, but the promise of convertibility makes these assets attractive and finds them buyers.

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According to the materials collected by the FCIC, after not having had to pay collateral on a single CDS, AIGFP, the dominant player in the market, was 272 n ote s to c h a P te r 8 charged by Goldman Sachs to pay US$1.8 billion from one day to the next. See http://fcic-static.law.stanford.edu/cdn_media/fcic-docs/2007-07-27_Goldman _Sachs_Collateral_Invoice_to_AIG.pdf (last accessed June 21, 2017). 20. For details, see chapter 4. 21. Nick Szabo, Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority, 1998, publications of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, available online at https://nakamotoinstitute .org/secure-property-titles/. 22. See Coase, Problem of Social Cost, p. 15. 23. Szabo, Secure Property. 24. Ibid., p. 3. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 7. 27. De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, p. 179. 28. For a survey of the effects of formalizing property rights in the developing world in recent years, see Klaus Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, World Bank Policy Research Reports (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003). 29.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

The Hashcash and Digicash projects achieved breakthroughs but ultimately didn’t work. The two most difficult challenges were removing every single point of failure and preventing “double spends,” which could occur if the same money was sent to two different parties. In October 2008, a person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto sent an email to the cypherpunk email list, introducing Bitcoin. He said he’d solved the digital money problem. He attached a nine-page white paper explaining how he’d done it. “In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.”

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It was inconceivable to me that he hadn’t bought and held bitcoin when it was under twenty dollars. I had assumed he had the equivalent of at least twenty to thirty million by this time, considering how early he was to the game. He was one of the smartest people in crypto, a genius at communicating the enormity of Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention and what it meant for society. He flew all over the globe, spreading the word. But he wasn’t able to hold a stash due to other financial pressures, even though only a few thousand dollars invested and held at those low prices would have been worth at least a million dollars a few years later.

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Could solutions to problems like global warming that require broad consensus across the globe, which no single government can solve on its own, be enabled through blockchain? Yes, they could. Whether it takes years, decades, or a century for blockchain to enter its prime is not a question I’m prepared to answer. But I believe it is a good thing, an amazing thing, that Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention offers us a new tool to address some of the most important problems facing the planet. Who exactly will use blockchain, and in what way? The better question is: what is possible? If we don’t thoughtfully ask, we could end up sounding like President Rutherford Hayes in 1876, at the dawn of the telephone age, an invention that extended the reach of the modern corporation.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Scientists and inventors are often all too ready to claim credit for an important discovery. So it is one of our age’s more baffling mysteries that the man—or woman, or group of men and women—behind the biggest financial innovation since the ATM remains stubbornly, sincerely anonymous. It started on November 1, 2008, when someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to a cryptography mailing list.20 In his introduction, he wrote, “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.… The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.

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The dinosaurs don’t need to be worried about other dinosaurs. They need to start thinking like, acting like, the frogs. This attitude toward risk goes a long way toward explaining how Bitcoin could come into being at all. Until 2010, when he gave Gavin Andresen the keys to the Bitcoin SourceForge project, Satoshi Nakamoto—the pseudonymous creator of the software that enabled the creation of Bitcoin—himself made nearly all of the modifications to the software. According to Andresen, former chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, Satoshi’s original code still made up about 30 percent of Bitcoin Core in late 2015.11 In the same talk, Andresen noted that the core developers—the individuals with authority to accept changes to Bitcoin Core—were “cranky and risk-averse,” but not as cranky and risk-averse as Satoshi was.

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., “K-Pg Extinction: Reevaluation of the Heat-Fire Hypothesis,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 118, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 329–36, doi:10.1002/jgrg.20018. 10 Bjorn Carey, “The Perils of Being Huge: Why Large Creatures Go Extinct,” Live Science, July 18, 2006, http://www.livescience.com/4162-perils-huge-large-creatures-extinct.html. 11 “MLTalks: Bitcoin Developers Gavin Andresen, Cory Fields, and Wladimir van Der Laan” (MIT Media Lab, November 17, 2015), http://www.media.mit.edu/events/2015/11/17/mltalks-bitcoin-developers-gavin-andresen-cory-fields-and-wladimir-van-der-laan. 12 The immediate justification for revoking Andresen’s commit access was a blog post he wrote stating that he believed Australian programmer Craig Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and which other core developers took as evidence that Andresen had been hacked. For an overview of the controversy, see Maria Bustillos, “Craig Wright’s ‘Proof’ He Invented Bitcoin Is the ‘Canadian Girlfriend of Cryptographic Signatures’,” New York, May 3, 2016, http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/05/craig-wright-s-proof-he-invented-bitcoin-is-basically-a-canadian-girlfriend.html. 13 “2009 Exchange Rate—New Liberty Standard,” February 5, 2010, http://newlibertystandard.wikifoundry.com/page/2009+Exchange+Rate. 14 John Biggs, “Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day!

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Many organizations beyond central banks and commercial banks might then wish to create private money. This could be as a means of supplying credit, as envisaged by the Nobel-winning economist Friedrich Hayek in 1970s, or it could be a means of encouraging customer loyalty, as explored by lateral thinker Edward de Bono in the 1990s. There might also be idealistic reasons, as explored by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, the mysterious inventor of the cryptographic asset Bitcoin (Vigna and Casey 2015), and others since 2008. I will explore all these possibilities in my ‘5Cs’ of money creation (central banks, commercial banks, companies, communities and cryptography) in more detail later in this book, before settling on a narrative for the ‘next money’ that is likely to surprise you

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It is time for the debate on redesign that Christine Desan called for. Chapter 13 Counting on cryptography A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. — ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ (2008) Having said earlier that the iconic technology of money is the plastic card, right now the iconic money of the future seems to be cryptocurrency. Spurred on by the widespread interest in Bitcoin, there are many people looking at the concept and wondering whether cryptocurrency – money that depends on cryptography rather than the belief of a community – might be a feature in the emerging money landscape.

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Bitcoin is a decentralized, peer-to-peer means of exchange. If you have a Bitcoin, which is just a string of numbers, you can send that Bitcoin (or a subdivision of it) to anyone else. (If you want to understand how Bitcoin works, a good place to start is the original paper on the topic: ‘Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.) I’m no expert on cryptography but there’s no reason I know of to question the basic idea: use a computationally difficult challenge to create strings of bits that it’s hard to make but easy to copy, then use digital signatures for transactions. I get my Bitcoin (a string of bits) and then to transfer them to you I add a digital signature and send them to you.

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Consider the criticism of goldbugs, who have, for decades, pushed the idea that sound money must be backed by something real, hard, and independently valuable. Bitcoin doesn’t qualify as sound money, right? Maybe it does. Let’s take a closer look. Bitcoin first emerged as a possible competitor to national, government-managed money nearly six years ago. Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper was released October 31, 2008. The structure and language of this paper sent the message: This currency is for computer technicians, not economists nor political pundits. The paper's circulation was limited; novices who read it were mystified. But the lack of interest didn’t stop history from moving forward.

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Looking back at those days, it seems obvious now that this was a turning point in history, a time in which it became very clear to some very smart people in the world that the U.S. government’s system of financial and monetary management was broken. If an entire system could be brought down by declining house prices, is it really robust enough to support global economic growth too much further into the future? Enter the faceless programmer, Satoshi Nakamoto. Around the same time as the housing crash, he was putting the finishing touches on his newly proposed currency network, bitcoin. It would be created entirely out of code. It would have all the main features that we know good money has. It would be divisible, portable, durable, uniform in quality, and scarce.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Dick reference: “Hal” didn’t refer to the killing machine HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to the earliest implementation of the reusable proofs of work (RPOW) system, and the man who received the first Bitcoin transfer from Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet. The legendary Hal Finney had died in 2014 of ALS, having opted for liquid nitrogen cryopreservation in the hope of eventual resurrection. Wallet addresses linked to Satoshi Nakamoto had been discovered many times, but there had never been much cash in them. The big fish had never shown its face. Perhaps tonight, in this broken boat at the end of the world, the leviathan would finally surface

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“My conservative estimate is no less than two hundred and sixty billion U.S., maybe five hundred billion, depending on which trading strategy we go with.” “Don’t let the money fuck with your heads.” The stud in Robin’s lip quivered as she spoke. “Fortune and glory, bros, fortune and glory.” * * * — LORE IN THE HACKER underworld had it that Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious father of Bitcoin, had died in a Guantánamo cell two decades earlier. He’d left behind no less than a million bitcoins, mined in his early years. The currency was supposedly hidden in a digital wallet that relied on a script pattern known as a P2PK—or pay to public key. If the rumors were true, the treasure was a golden opportunity for prospectors.

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First, many of the wallet owners have lost their private key, because the keys were too long to be remembered, and people didn’t care as much when bitcoins were not that valuable a decade ago. Second, these bitcoin owners were unaware of this vulnerability. Third, about half of the two million belongs to the legendary Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, who seems to have vanished. Thus, this story is referring to “Satoshi’s treasure.” Why were all the transactions published on a public ledger? Because this was designed to keep bitcoins safe from any one company or individual. This public ledger is stored in a decentralized way on many computers, which makes it impossible for any one computer to modify or forge it.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Instead of a central bank issuing the currency, Bitcoins are issued by anyone with a computer or smartphone, and are issued using encryption algorithms. In other words, extremely difficult mathematical problems are incorporated into each coin and transactions are cryptographically authenticated. This makes Bitcoins a combination of a commodity and a fiat currency, with the creation of Bitcoin dating back to 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper about a peer-to-peer exchange of value for the internet age. [28] The coins are digital currency designed to be controlled through encryption, rather than a centralised authority, and potentially operate in exactly the same way as cash. Bitcoins are fully exchangeable as an anonymous form of currency in real-time across the internet and Point-of-Sale, with core features that they can be: Sent to anyone with a Bitcoin address; Accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection; Anybody can start buying, selling or accepting Bitcoins regardless of their location; Completely distributed with no bank or payment processor between users (this decentralization is the basis for Bitcoin’s security and freedom); and Transactions are free (for now, this will change).

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The reason why Bitcoins are viewed as dangerous by governments is for exactly the reasons cited earlier – they cannot be controlled – and there will be a long and arduous battle between controllers and the uncontrolled. This is the nature of the Wikiconomy. Nevertheless, I have invested in Bitcoins and suggest you do too, as it is very likely that they will be a major store of value for years to come in the near term. Bitcoin’s timeline[29] 2008–2009 In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper describing the Bitcoin protocol on the internet. In 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source Bitcoin client and the issuance of the first Bitcoins. 2010 The prices for the first Bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the Bitcointalk forums.

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They may be shipping under $35 goods or services, or shipping a digital service rather than physical goods, and these firms may find that Bitcoin, relying solely on code and mathematics, is the only currency they could use. It’s a bit technical however, isn’t it? That’s the biggest barrier to Bitcoin. It’s not end-user friendly. Every client is working off the first codebase. Satoshi Nakamoto solved the last logic problem to create a decentralized currency. He’s an academic, incredibly smart, but not a computer engineer. The code was not written in the most efficient way therefore, but every client today has built off this code. Now, for the first time, we are rewriting the code from the ground up to be more efficient and effective.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

David Pogue, “6 Billion Degrees of Separation,” Pogue’s Posts, New York Times, January 22, 2007, https://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/6-billion-degrees-of-separation/; “Find Satoshi,” Find Satoshi, accessed November 28, 2021, https://findsatoshi.com. 26. “Satoshi Nakamoto,” Wikipedia, updated November 28, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto. 27. u/th0may, “Found someone similar looking on a Japanese webpage,” r/FindSatoshi, Reddit, December 26, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_someone_similar_looking_on_japanese_webpage. 28. “Cicada 3301,” Wikipedia, updated November 8, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301. 29.

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Every so often, the internet rediscovered the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I could tell whenever this happened because people started messaging me on Twitter and Instagram demanding clues. One obvious clue in the puzzle was the man’s name: Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be the same as that of the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.26 So, of course, some people thought Perplex City’s Satoshi created Bitcoin. Not many, but enough that I received messages about it every week—until December 2020, when Tom-Lucas Säger from Hamburg used the PimEyes AI facial recognition search engine to discover a 2018 photo of Satoshi holding a large mug of beer.27 All in all, it was quite sweet and innocent.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

For more background on Brett Hagler’s company, New Story, see: Adele Peters, “There Will Soon Be a Whole Community of Ultra-Low-Cost 3-D-Printed Homes,” Fast Company, March 11, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90317441/there-will-soon-be-a-whole-community-made-of-these-ultra-low-cost-3-D-printed-homes. In the fall of 2019, in Mexico: Ibid. Blockchain were first proposed in 1983: David Chaum, “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments,” Advances in Cryptography (Springer 1998), pp. 199–203 See: http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF. Satoshi Nakamoto: Satoshi Nakamotoe, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” See: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz solved that problem: Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Betting on a Coin with no Realm,” New York Times, December 22, 2013. By 2019, they were just shy of $15,000: Data retreived from: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/

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When you send an email, your computer stores the original and sends a copy. This is fine for exchanging letters, but it’s lousy for trading money. This is the double-spending problem and it’s exactly what bitcoin was designed to solve. Bitcoin appeared in 2008, when an online paper authored by a still-anonymous person (or persons) calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a digital peer-to-peer payment system that allows cash to be exchanged without the need for a financial institution. The following year, the first bitcoin software was made public, yet because the coins had only been mined but not traded, there was no way to assign them monetary value.

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short by Jamie Bartlett

augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, eternal september, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Free Software Foundation, John Perry Barlow, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Laura Poitras, Mondo 2000, Satoshi Nakamoto, technoutopianism, Zimmermann PGP

An alternative way of organising the internet is being built as we speak, an internet where no one is in control, where no one can find you or shut you down, where no one can manipulate your content. A decentralised world that is both private and impossible to censor. Back in 2009, in an obscure cryptography chat forum, a mysterious man called Satoshi Nakamoto invented the crypto-currency Bitcoin.fn3 It turns out the real genius of Bitcoin was not the currency at all, but the way that it works. Bitcoin creates an immutable, unchangeable public copy of every transaction ever made by its users, which is hosted and verified by every computer that downloads the software.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Its most famous application is Bitcoin, the world’s first completely decentralized digital currency.[cccxlix] In just a few years, the Bitcoin “economy” has grown larger than the economies of some countries. The value of a Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly, hitting a peak of $1,216 in November 2013. The insights which made Bitcoin possible were published in 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, and the blockchain is at the heart of it. The blockchain is a public ledger which records transactions. The clever bit is that the ledger is completely trustworthy despite having no central authority, like a bank, to validate it. It is trustworthy in that you can have full confidence that if someone gives you a Bitcoin, then you do own that Bitcoin: the person who gave it to you will not be nipping off to spend the same piece of currency elsewhere, even though it is entirely digital.

…

The new block is added to the chain, and incorporates the transactions made since the last block was added to the chain. Your transaction is published on the blockchain’s network as soon as it is agreed, but it is only confirmed, and hence reliable, when a miner has incorporated it into a block. Satoshi Nakamoto’s innovation solved a previously intractable challenge in computer science known as the Byzantine General’s Problem. Imagine a mediaeval city surrounded by a dozen armies, each led by a powerful general. If the armies mount a co-ordinated attack, their victory is assured, but they can only communicate by messengers on horseback who visit the generals one by one, and some of the generals are untrustworthy.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

The most notable was the cryptography mailing list hosted by Perry Metzger, where many of the original cypherpunks migrated. But it also attracted a new generation who were just as keen to post papers and ideas about how to evade government surveillance and improve individual privacy online. In early 2008 a mysterious contributor to the cryptography mailing list called Satoshi Nakamoto posted a message that would change everything. To Calafou Six weeks after Amir’s talk, I find myself walking down a dusty hill and over a concrete bridge towards an enormous nineteenth-century textile factory complex. The words ‘Calafou: còlonia ecoindustrial postcapitalista’ are painted in large black and green letters on a wall outside.

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p.157 ‘However, researchers have found that . . .’ http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bitcoin-isnt-the-criminal-safe-haven-people-think-it-is; http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html. p.157 ‘CoinJoin, for example, works . . .’ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php? topic=139581.0. p.158 ‘The future of these markets . . .’ http://www.chaum.com/articles/Security_Wthout_Identification.htm. This was what David Chaum – the inventor of digital cash twenty years before Satoshi Nakamoto – had in mind all along. In his 1985 book, Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete, he set out systems that could combine anonymity with secure payment. p.159 ‘Dark net markets have introduced . . .’ Hirschman, A., Exit Voice and Loyalty. p.160 ‘When Professor Nicolas Christin analysed . . .’ http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU-CyLab-12-018.pdf.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Could a money system look and act less like iTunes and more like BitTorrent, where, instead of depending on a platform monopoly to negotiate everything, all the participants use protocols to interact with one another directly? Could a digital money system achieve with openness what traditional banks do with secrecy? The only way to find out is to start as openly as possible. That’s why Bitcoin first appeared as the subject of a 2008 white paper authored by someone (or multiple someones) going under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The paper outlined a concept for a virtual currency created and traded on a peer-to-peer, open-source platform. It would need no central authority to issue it, nor any central middleman to verify or administer its transactions. The network platform would be called Bitcoin, and its currency would be called bitcoins.27 This idea was not entirely new.

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David Wessel, “Lousy Economic Growth Is a Choice, Not an Inevitability,” brookings.edu, October 13, 2014. 24. Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne, Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013). 25. Joanna Glasner, “PayPal’s IPO Woes Continue,” Wired, February 12, 2002. 26. In most of the world, that would be SWIFT. 27. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” bitcoin.org, October 31, 2008. 28. Ibid. 29. Pedro Franco, Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014). 30. Ibid. 31. Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2014). 32.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Right now there is an explosion of ideas, innovation, invention, and excitement as a result of the Bitcoin experiment. People are applying the principles, code, and experience to arenas well beyond just currency, trying to solve many of the challenges raised in the second half of this book. Let’s start with a very brief background on Bitcoin. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a paper about a digital currency, called Bitcoin. “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a pseudonym, and no one knows whether it refers to a real person or a group of people. In 2009 their ideas were released as open-source software. (Note that this is yet another example where the concept and organizing principle of the platform were simply gifted out of thin air; that’s not a replicable strategy.)

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Like a used-up gold mine, the machine lent even the Bitcoin Center’s busiest evenings the sensation of a ghost town. Bitcoin was supposed to usher in a new global economy—gold for the internet age—and mining it was supposed to be an act of democracy. On February 11, 2009, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, announced his invention in an online forum by explaining, “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.”4 This was just as the financial giants were breaching the world’s trust. At the time, only a month after Bitcoin’s initial “genesis block” went online, users could mine with an ordinary computer, though doing so was technically difficult and barely lucrative.

…

See Nathan Schneider, “How a Worker-Owned Tech Startup Found Investors—and Kept Its Values,” YES! Magazine (April 26, 2016). 3. Credit Union National Association, “Credit Union Data and Statistics,” cuna.org/Research-And-Strategy/Credit-Union-Data-And-Statistics; CoBank, “About CoBank,” cobank.com/About-CoBank.aspx. 4. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency,” P2P Foundation Ning forum (February 11, 2009), p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source; see also the original Bitcoin white paper at bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf; for a fuller account of the rise of Bitcoin, see Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (Harper, 2015). 5.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Although the mechanics of various cryptocurrencies differ in important ways, the example of Bitcoin is instructive. It’s a global, decentralized currency with no recoverable intrinsic value, no central authority to issue the money or set exchange rates, and no other mechanism anchoring it to the physical world. Until the publication of a technical paper by a mysterious person going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto,7 such a juxtaposition of properties would seem nonsensical, and as such, it escaped any serious debate. But with his invention, Nakamoto apparently accomplished the unthinkable—and did so by employing several clever computer tricks. First, his design allowed anyone to create new (virtual) coins in the privacy of their homes, but only by solving computational puzzles that would get more difficult as time went by.

…

Lewis, “The Economic History of the Fur Trade: 1670 to 1870,” Economic History Association, March 16, 2008, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-the-fur-trade-1670-to-1870/. 6. Sandra E. Gleason, “Hustling: The ‘Inside’ Economy of a Prison,” Federal Probation 42, no. 2 (June 1978): 32–40, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/50862NCJRS.pdf. 7. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Bitcoin.org (2008), https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 8. “Failed Bank List,” Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/failed-bank-list/. 9. Drew Desilver, “Financial Crises Surprisingly Common, but Few Countries Close Their Banks,” Pew Research Center, July 9, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/09/financial-crises-surprisingly-common-but-few-countries-close-their-banks/. 10.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

“It didn’t turn out so well for the real Jesus,” Ver said as he sounded off against the “tyrants.” “He was murdered by his government. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.” Bitcoin is a decentralized digital payment system that is entirely independent of, and unregulated by, banks. Created in 2009 by someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoins are “mined” by computers that take records of previous transactions. The computers turn the records into code and add them to a “blockchain,” or a constantly evolving ledger that’s stored on every Bitcoin-holder’s computer. That means that goods can be bought anonymously, without the transactions ever getting traced back to either the buyer or the seller.

Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood Ph. D.

air gap, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, continuous integration, cryptocurrency, Debian, digital divide, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, functional programming, Google Chrome, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, litecoin, machine readable, move fast and break things, node package manager, non-fungible token, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, sealed-bid auction, sharing economy, side project, smart contracts, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vickrey auction, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket

Reward An amount of ether included in each new block as a reward by the network to the miner who found the proof-of-work solution. RLP Recursive Length Prefix. An encoding standard designed by the Ethereum developers to encode and serialize objects (data structures) of arbitrary complexity and length. Satoshi Nakamoto The name used by the person or people who designed Bitcoin, created its original reference implementation, and were the first to solve the double-spend problem for digital currency. Their real identity remains unknown. Secret key (aka private key) The secret number that allows Ethereum users to prove ownership of an account or contracts, by producing a digital signature (see “public key,” “address,” “ECDSA”).

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Remote Procedure Call (RPC) commands (see JSON-RPC API) request-response oracles, Oracle Design Patterns require function, Error Handling (assert, require, revert) resolver contracts, Resolvers revert function, Error Handling (assert, require, revert) reward, defined, Quick Glossary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix), Quick Glossary, The Structure of a Transaction root seeds, creating HD wallets from, Creating an HD Wallet from the Seed Ropsten Test Network, Getting Some Test Ether RPC (Remote Procedure Call) commands (see JSON-RPC API) Rubixi pyramid scheme, Real-World Example: Rubixi runtime bytecode, Contract Deployment Code Rust, Software Requirements for Building and Running a Client (Node) S SafeMath library, Preventative Techniques salts, From mnemonic to seed Satoshi Nakamoto, Quick Glossary SchellingCoin protocol, Decentralized Oracles Schneier, Bruce, Cryptographic Hash Functions SECG (Standards for Efficient Cryptography Group), Generating a Public Key secp256k1 elliptic curve, Elliptic Curve Cryptography Explained-Elliptic Curve Cryptography Explained, Generating a Public Key, Elliptic Curve Libraries secret keys, Quick Glossary(see also private keys) Secure Hash Algorithm (see SHA entries) security (smart contracts), Smart Contract Security-Conclusionsarithmetic over/underflow threat, Arithmetic Over/Underflows-Real-World Examples: PoWHC and Batch Transfer Overflow (CVE-2018–10299) best practices, Security Best Practices block timestamp manipulation threat, Block Timestamp Manipulation-Real-World Example: GovernMental constructors and contract name-change threat, Constructors with Care contract libraries for, Contract Libraries default visibility specifier threat, Default Visibilities-Real-World Example: Parity Multisig Wallet (First Hack) DELEGATECALL opcode threat, DELEGATECALL-Real-World Example: Parity Multisig Wallet (Second Hack) denial of service attacks, Denial of Service (DoS)-Real-World Examples: GovernMental entropy illusion threat, Entropy Illusion external contract referencing threat, External Contract Referencing-Real-World Example: Reentrancy Honey Pot floating-point problem, Floating Point and Precision-Real-World Example: Ethstick race conditions/front running threat, Race Conditions/Front Running-Real-World Examples: ERC20 and Bancor reentrancy attacks, Reentrancy-Real-World Example: The DAO risks and antipatterns, Security Risks and Antipatterns-Preventative Techniques short address/parameter attack, Short Address/Parameter Attack token standard implementation choices, Security by Maturity tx.origin authentication threat, Tx.Origin Authentication-Preventative Techniques unchecked CALL return value threat, Unchecked CALL Return Values-Real-World Example: Etherpot and King of the Ether unexpected ether threat, Unexpected Ether-Further Examples uninitialized storage pointer threat, Uninitialized Storage Pointers-Real-World Examples: OpenAddressLottery and CryptoRoulette Honey Pots seeded wallets (see deterministic wallets) seeds, Quick Glossary(see also root seeds) deriving from mnemonic code words, From mnemonic to seed mnemonic code words for, Wallet Technology Overview, Seeds and Mnemonic Codes (BIP-39)(see also mnemonic code words) optional passphrase with, Optional passphrase in BIP-39 selfdestruct function, Contract Constructor and selfdestruct, The Vulnerability SELFDESTRUCT opcode, Life Cycle of a Smart Contract, Contract Constructor and selfdestruct semantic versioning, Selecting a Version of Solidity Serenity, Quick Glossary, Ethereum’s Four Stages of Development Serpent, Quick Glossary, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages SGX (Software Guard eXtensions), Data Authentication SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm), Quick Glossary SHA-3 Hash Function, Ethereum’s Cryptographic Hash Function: Keccak-256 shell commands, Software Requirements for Building and Running a Client (Node) short address/parameter attack, Short Address/Parameter Attackpreventative techniques, Preventative Techniques vulnerability, The Vulnerability side effects, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages single-instance private blockchain, Local Blockchain Simulation Advantages and Disadvantages singleton, Quick Glossary smart contracts, Smart Contracts and Solidity-ConclusionsABI, The Ethereum Contract ABI-Selecting a Solidity Compiler and Language Version addressing an existing instance, Addressing an existing instance and Ethereum high-level languages, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages-Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages as DApp backend, Backend (Smart Contract), Auction DApp: Backend Smart Contracts-DApp governance basics, Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) and Contracts building with Solidity, Building a Smart Contract with Solidity-Conclusions call method, Raw call, delegatecall-Raw call, delegatecall calling other contracts from within a contract, Calling Other Contracts (send, call, callcode, delegatecall)-Raw call, delegatecall constructor function, Contract Constructor and selfdestruct creating new instance, Creating a new instance defined, Quick Glossary, Quick Glossary, What Is a Smart Contract?

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Among them are the rise of alternative currencies and of virtual or digital currencies such as bitcoin. Digital currencies exist within private peer-to-peer computer networks and are not issued by or supported by any government or central bank. The bitcoin phenomenon began in 2008 with the pseudonymous publication of a paper (by Satoshi Nakamoto) describing the protocols for the creation of a new electronic digital currency. In January 2009 the first bitcoins were created by Nakamoto’s software. He continued making technical contributions to the bitcoin project until 2010, at which point he withdrew from active participation. However, by that time a large community of developers, libertarians, and entrepreneurs had taken up the project.

…

. : “The Rolling Student Loan Bailout,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323968704578652291680883634.html. “the test of a first-rate intelligence . . .”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1936; reprint New York: New Directions, 2009). The bitcoin phenomenon began in 2008 . . . : Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” November 1, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. the history of barter is mostly a myth: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), pp. 21–41. “Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination . . .”: Thomas L.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Before bitcoin, crypto-anarchists had for years been dreaming of decentralised anonymous payment systems. The cypherpunk email list discussed it frequently. When the list wound down at around the turn of the millennium, one of the members, Perry Metzger, set up a new cryptography forum to carry on these discussions. In late 2008, someone called Satoshi Nakamoto (in keeping with the crypto-anarchists’ love of anonymity, to date no one knows who he is) first posted his idea for bitcoin. Nakamoto distrusted the global banking system, and imagined bitcoin as a way to undermine it. He hated that bankers and governments held the key to the money supply and could manipulate it to their own ends.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

The breakthrough search algorithm that led to Google was a product of two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; YouTube was a trio of coworkers; Snapchat a trio (or, the level of the code, one person, Bobby Murphy). BitTorrent was entirely a creation of Bram Cohen, and Bitcoin was reputedly the work of a lone coder, the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto.” John Carmack created the 3-D-graphics engines that helped usher in the multi-billion-dollar industry of first-person shooter video games. The reason so few people can have such an outsize impact, Andreessen argues, is that when you’re creating a weird new prototype of an app, the mental castle building is most efficiently done inside one or two isolated brains.

…

one person, Bobby Murphy: Alex Hern, “Snapchat Boss Evan Spiegel on the App That Made Him One of the World’s Youngest Billionaires,” Guardian, December 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/05/snapchat-boss-evan-spiegel-on-the-app-that-made-him-one-of-the-worlds-youngest-billionaires. the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto”: Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/the-crypto-currency. first-person shooter video games: Chris Kohler, “Q&A: Doom’s Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem,” Wired, December 10, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2013/12/john-carmack-doom.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

Since the blocks are all mathematically chained together, to falsify a record would mean having to redo all the work for subsequent blocks on the chain, requiring so much electricity and resources that falsification is disincentivized. Bitcoin arrived in 2008, at the beginning of a global financial crisis. At the time, a paper was circulated online, written by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto, proposing a peer-to-peer currency. The paper outlined this peer-to-peer currency, or Bitcoin, as Nakamoto called it. Instead of a central bank verifying transactions and preventing double spending, Nakamoto proposed the system of blockchain to verify and keep records of transactions. Bitcoin would be the incentive for people with computers to verify and put blocks on the blockchain.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

They will offer us the minimum required to keep us satisfied while pocketing the excess profits, just as any smart businessperson does. The first glimmers of this are already visible. Bitcoins, for instance. It’s a new currency that exists solely in cyberspace and isn’t controlled by anyone. It was invented by an anonymous person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto. No one may know who—or what—he is, but it’s clear that he doesn’t control the production, management, or value of his creation. Despite halfhearted attempts to regulate or legitimize bitcoins, neither do governments. Or anyone else, for that matter. As long as they can be converted to and from other assets of value—whether legally or illegally anywhere in the world—bitcoins will continue to exist and find adherents.

Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction in 25 Steps by Daniel Drescher

bitcoin, blockchain, business process, central bank independence, collaborative editing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, job automation, linked data, machine readable, peer-to-peer, place-making, Satoshi Nakamoto, smart contracts, transaction costs

The Usage of the Term in This Book Throughout the rest of this book, blockchain refers to the shortcut for the umbrella term for purely distributed peer-to-peer systems of ledgers that utilize the blockchain-technology-suite. If any other meaning is intended, I will indicate this by explicitly using the term blockchain-data-structure, blockchain-algorithm, or blockchain-technology-suite. ■ Note The technology that is nowadays regarded as blockchain was proposed in 2008 under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto,1 whose true identity has not yet been revealed. Provisional Definition The following definition is not complete. It still lacks important details that have not yet been presented. However, this definition serves as an intermedi- ate step toward a more complete understanding of the term: The blockchain is a purely distributed peer-to-peer system of ledgers that utilizes a software unit that consist of an algorithm, which negotiates the informational content of ordered and connected blocks of data together with cryptographic and security technologies in order to achieve and maintain its integrity.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

The solution was to use the internet to create ‘a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer’. Once the distributed ledger, or blockchain, was in place financial trust would be restored and monetary crises come to an end.22 Things didn’t turn out quite as Bitcoin’s mystery creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, envisaged. What he had unleashed was not so much a new type of money, but rather the most perfect object of speculation the world had ever seen. In one of the first recorded Bitcoin transactions in 2010, a hungry computer geek in Florida spent 10,000 of the cryptocurrency on a couple of takeaway pizzas.

…

Canadian cannabis producer Tilray’s total sales in 2017 were less than $21 million, compared with American Airlines’ revenue of $42.6 billion and profits of $1.3 billion. 22. Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (New York, 2015), pp. 20–21. Email from ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ to fellow cypherpunk Adam Back. 23. Alison Sider and Stephanie Yang, ‘Good News! You are a Bitcoin Millionaire. Bad News! You Forgot Your Password’, Wall Street Journal, 19 December 2017. 24. Daniel Shane, ‘A Crypto Exchange May Have Lost $145 Million after its CEO Suddenly Died’, CNN Business, 5 February 2019. 25.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Answer: Norway and Venezuela are the most expensive, and India and South Africa the least—though the Indian Big Mac is called the Maharaja Mac, and is made of chicken. If you’re wondering what Norway and Venuezuela have in common, the answer is nothing, except lots of oil. bitcoin An unregulated currency, created by someone or someones calling him, her, or themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008. It has no inherent value, so its worth depends entirely on the trust people have in it: in my view, that’s the most interesting thing about bitcoin, the fact it is a built-in lesson on the arbitrary nature of money values. Bitcoins are created by “mining,” i.e., by long slow computer calculations, and are stored and exchanged via digital “wallets.”

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

The very success of this arbitrage sea change has accentuated the objections of those who see the digital transactions we all participate in not as matters of convenience—free services provided in exchange for viewing a few targeted ads, for example—but as the radical evisceration of individual privacy and autonomy for the sake of new collective, algorithmically engineered systems of value. Perhaps the single greatest example of this ideological reaction is the rapid popularization of a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. Bitcoin first emerged as a paper published in November 2008 by the apparently fictional mathematician Satoshi Nakamoto (about ten years after Schwartz predicted e-cash would become mainstream). In the paper Nakamoto argued for a new financial model that would eliminate the key vulnerability of traditional financial systems: “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”24 The straightforward paper describes a system for exchanging currency based purely on computing power and mathematics (which I describe in more detail below), with no dependence on a central bank, a formal issuing authority, or other “faith and credit” standards of traditional currencies.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

Originally, bitcoins were produced by ‘miners’ – a figurative term for computer owners who donated their processor time to the project and were rewarded with coins for their efforts. The currency, or rather, the system that creates the currency, was released to the web on 1 November 2008, as the world economic system teetered on the brink of systemic collapse. Anonymous software coder Satoshi Nakamoto issued the open source application, and included a sly reference to the latest banking bailout by Britain’s then-chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, buried in code for the so-called Genesis Block – the first coins ever ‘mined’, in January 2009.4 The main reason no purely digital currency has ever gained traction is because data-as-cash has a central flaw.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Blockchain technology, a database system shared across a large number of servers, makes it possible to define the ownership of any single element of the data (for example, a unit of a digital currency) without a single institution to validate that ownership, by using cryptographic techniques. This technology has caused a burst of so-called cryptocurrencies with no allegiance to any government or central bank. A system designed for transparency has an ironically cloudy genesis—in a 2008 paper attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, a man who may or may not exist (or who may represent a collective of people). The paper’s author or authors proposed Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer “electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust.” Chains of digital signatures create electronic coins and validate transactions with them.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Buncombe, “Pakistani court declares US drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt illegal,” Independent, 9 May 2013. 12 http://www.nest.com Chapter 9 Smart Banking, Payments and Money “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.” Satoshi Nakamoto, pseudonym of the anonymous creator of Bitcoin The evolution of banking and payments has often been correlated with technological advancement. Today, the primary method of transferring money between banks globally is a transaction called a wire transfer or telegraphic transfer, so named because the instructions for these transfers were sent via telegraph or “wire” initially, then later by Telex and now via interbank electronic networks like SWIFT.1 The first mainframe computer ever built was for a bank, too.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Before arriving, Gary had done his homework, scouring news articles, forum posts by the Dread Pirate Roberts, and research about the Dark Web, all to get acquainted with the case he was about to join. While reading these pieces, Gary had come across the first white paper that had been published about Bitcoin, written by the creator of the digital currency, an anonymous man who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Gary read the paper once and nothing stood out. He read it a second time, and still nothing. But the third time he noticed something, in a section of the paper that referenced the “Gambler’s Ruin problem,” a theory that no matter how much money you have in a betting scenario, the casino (or house) has an infinite amount of money, and therefore, if you keep making bets, the house will eventually win.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

A month later, he disappeared.1 Kumbhani was the founder of BitConnect, an organization that offered a way for people to participate in the market for cryptocurrencies, or “crypto”—digital assets whose values are not tied to any particular government’s policies or actions. Bitcoin, the original and most famous cryptocurrency, was invented in 2008 by one or more people using the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Bitcoin has a finite supply, and its value is connected to that scarcity. In that way, it is less like a regular currency than like gold or oil; you can “mine” more Bitcoin, metaphorically, by spending computational resources (literally, computer processing time and the energy required to power it) to solve complicated mathematical problems.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

There is, at the time of writing, a major divide in the bitcoin community between those who want to make the system more efficient by executing more transactions per block, which requires a major redesign, and those who reject the idea as being too centralised. The blocks of transactions would need to get very large indeed, otherwise they will start queuing up. Because the designer and creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, decided to cap the size of a block at one megabyte, or about 1,400 transactions, it can handle only around seven transactions per second, compared to the 1,736 a second Visa handles in America. Blocks could be made bigger, but bigger blocks would take longer to propagate through the network, worsening the risks of forking.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Now that you have selected a technology, dissect it completely and trace back the origin of every piece of technology that it embeds. You will find that in every case, the technology you are analyzing could not have existed had it not been for a government grant. This is true even of the Blockchain. While the Blockchain was first created by a single person/group (Satoshi Nakamoto), what it represents is decades’ worth of research and development in cryptography, encryption, economics, and game theory—all subjects that have been funded massively by governments. Had it not been for the ARPANet, Vint Cerf and Bob Khan would have never received the necessary funding to develop packet-switching data and you would not be reading this book had that happened.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

To solve this problem, competing exchanges, such as the alternative trading system IEX, are using their own supercomputers to precisely time the order of bids, thereby eliminating the advantages of a Goldman Sachs.36 Architecture can level the playing field, making markets more competitive and fair for all. One of the most innovative forms of architectural control ever invented made its appearance in 2008, when an anonymous coding genius known as Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on the Cryptography mailing list defining the Bitcoin digital currency and the so-called blockchain protocol governing it. Although Bitcoin is notable as the world’s first unforgeable digital currency that cannot be controlled by a government, bank, or individual, the blockchain is truly revolutionary.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

In the beginning, when transaction chains were short, they were easy to process, and people could mine thousands of coins on their PCs. Today, as chains are long, it takes more effort to mine coins. Every year, the number of coins that can be mined falls, so at some point there will be no new BitCoins. The BitCoin design and open source software was written by a prudently anonymous team calling themselves "Satoshi Nakamoto." They took some existing concepts from the cryptographic community, and invented some new ones. The technology had one major vulnerability, which was fixed in 2010. Since then, it appears robust. BitCoin satisfies most of the criteria for use as a medium of digital trade. It is free from coercion by authorities.

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

The issue that most clearly makes material political economy applicable is how to motivate at least a subset of the users of a cryptocurrency to check the validity of each transaction (including checking the validity of each other’s checking) and take part in adding it irreversibly to the blockchain, the record of every transaction that has taken place. The solution adopted for bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous inventor, is known as proof-of-work. Roughly every ten minutes, all day, every day, bitcoin miners, as they are called (and I like the moniker’s materiality) compete to be the first to find a hash of a block of transactions that is smaller than a certain target binary number (a hash is a cryptographic transformation by a predetermined algorithm).

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks