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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

Chapter 2: Bitcoin Basics Chapter 3: Storing Your Bitcoins Safely, Securely, and Conveniently Chapter 4: Buying Bitcoins Chapter 5: Lost at Sea: A Cryptographic Adventure Chapter 6: Why Bitcoin Is a Big Deal Chapter 7: The Cryptography Behind Bitcoin Chapter 8: Bitcoin Mining Chapter 8.5: The Strange World of Altcoins Chapter 9: Understanding the Different Types of Bitcoin Wallets Chapter 10: Bitcoin 2030 Appendix A: Hello Money! A Simple JavaScript Program Appendix B: Bitcoin Programming with BitcoinJ Index CONTENTS IN DETAIL PREFACE Acknowledgments Chapter 1: WHAT IS BITCOIN? Why Bitcoin Now? The Benefits of Using Bitcoin The Complexity and Confusion of Bitcoin What’s in This Book? Chapter 2: BITCOIN BASICS How Bitcoin Works in Simple Terms Bitcoin Units The Bitcoin Address The Private Key The Bitcoin Wallet Creating Your First Bitcoin Wallet with Electrum Acquiring Bitcoins in Your Wallet Spending Bitcoins with Your Wallet Bitcoin Addresses Generated by Your Bitcoin Wallet Program The Blockchain The Blockchain Lottery Blockchain Forking Transaction Confirmations, Double Spending, and Irreversibility Mining Bitcoins The Complexity of the Bitcoin System Chapter 3: STORING YOUR BITCOINS SAFELY, SECURELY, AND CONVENIENTLY Storing Your Private Key(s) Hot Storage vs.

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On Mac, download homebrew, a command-line tool that will handle the entire process for you: # Get homebrew and if you haven't already ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)" brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask brew install brew-cask # Get node.js and bitcoin stuff brew cask install bitcoin brew install nodejs npm npm install bitcoin # Run bitcoin-qt in server mode ~/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/./Bitcoin-Qt -server For Linux Folks If you’re using flavors of Debian Linux, such as Ubuntu, you’ll just use the PPA feature to install the libraries: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nodejs npm bitcoin-qt npm install bitcoin bitcoin-qt -server With a working Bitcoin Core server, we’re now ready to start programming.

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Hosted Wallets Safety, Security, and Convenience Storing Small Amounts of Bitcoins Online Hosted Wallet Services Online Personal Wallet Services Personal Hot Wallet Storing Large Amounts of Bitcoins Paper Wallets Encrypted Paper Wallets Offline Transaction Signing Fragmented Private Keys and Multi-Signature Addresses Special Mention: The Bitcoin Hardware Wallet Special Mention: The Bitcoin Brain Wallet Choosing the Storage Method That’s Right for You Chapter 4: BUYING BITCOINS Why Not Just Mine Bitcoins? Ways to Buy Bitcoins Buying Bitcoins the Easy Way Authentication Factors The Hassle of Converting Dollars (or Other Currencies) into Bitcoins Buying Bitcoins with Coinbase Buying Bitcoins the Efficient Way Buying Bitcoins from a Currency Exchange Buying Bitcoins the Fun and Futuristic Way Step 1: Finding Someone to Buy From Step 2: Deciding on a Meeting Place Step 3: Handing Over the Money and Getting Your Bitcoins Satoshi Square Still Don’t See a Buying Option That Works for You?

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

CONTENTS Foreword Keywords Who’s Who SECTION I: WHAT IS BITCOIN? Chapter 1: Bitcoin 101: Blockchain Technology Chapter 2: A Practical Guide on How to Buy, Save, and Spend Bitcoins Chapter 3: Precursors, History and Creation, Satoshi’s White Paper Chapter 4: Who Runs Bitcoin? Chapter 5: What Gives Bitcoin Its Value? Chapter 6: Bitcoin: Anonymous or Pseudonymous? Chapter 7: Bitcoin and the Criminal Element Chapter 8: Mt. Gox: Bitcoin’s Defining Moment? Chapter 9: Other Bitcoin Scams and Common Tactics SECTION II: HOW TO INVEST IN BITCOIN Chapter 10: How to Buy Bitcoin with a Bank Account, Cash, or PayPal Chapter 11: Working for Bitcoin Chapter 12: Mining Chapter 13: HODL!

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Bitcoin/bitcoin: Bitcoin with a capital B refers to Bitcoin the system, the network or the currency as a whole; bitcoin with a lowercase b refers to individual bitcoins, as in, “I have five bitcoins.” Bitcoin-Qt: Also called Bitcoin Core, it is the primary implementation of Bitcoin and what all other wallets and services are based on. Bitcoin XT: An alternative implementation of the Bitcoin code, compatible with the current main implementation of Bitcoin, that was pushed primarily by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn. It is used to test new features and entered the public consciousness as a possible replacement for Bitcoin-Qt if the various factions in the block size debate could not reach a compromise. It offered 20MB-sized blocks as a primary feature.

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Who’s Who Gavin Andresen: The core developer to whom Satoshi Nakamoto handed the keys to Bitcoin. Andreas Antonopoulos: Author, Bitcoin advocate, and security expert. The Bitcoin Foundation: A trade organization that once was the primary funder of core developments. Chamber of Digital Commerce: A pro-Bitcoin lobbying group. Hal Finney: Early cryptographer who helped create PGP. An early Bitcoin supporter, he received the first Bitcoin transaction. Mike Hearn: Bitcoin developer and Google employee; he created Lighthouse and is an advocate for Bitcoin XT. Olivier Janssens: An early adopter of Bitcoin who has become an angel investor in the space.

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

Abed, Gabriel Abridello, Mike accelerators Accel Partners Adams, Douglas Afghan Citadel Afghanistan Africa A-Grade Investments Ahmadi, Parisa AIG Airbnb Akimbo Alamgir, Nadia Alcoholics Anonymous Aleph Alibaba Alipay Alisie, Mihai Allaire, Jeremy al-Qaeda altcoins dogecoin litecoin Realcoin Alyattes, King Alydian Amazon Amazon Cloud American Express AME Ventures Amidi, Saeed Andolfatto, David Andreessen, Marc Andreessen Horowitz Andresen, Gavin Android angel investors anonymity anonymous remailers AntMinter Antonopoulos, Andreas ANX Apache tribe APIs (application programming interfaces) Apple Argentina exchange houses in trust problem in Aristotle Armstrong, Brian ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) chips Assange, Julian assassination AstroPay AT&T Atlas ATS Australia Austrian school of economics automobile loan payments Avalon Average Is Over (Cowen) Babylonians Back, Adam Bacon, Francis Bagehot, Walter Banco Popular Banga, Ajay Bank of America Bank of England (BOE) bankruptcy banks, banking central fees of fractional reserve Glass-Steagall Act and ledger and Medici modern payment system centered around people excluded from system of shadow system of tellers in too-big-to-fail Baran, Paul Barbados Barbie, Johann Barclays Barrett, John barter Beckstrom, Rod Bel Bruno, Joe Bell, Jim Bernanke, Ben Betamax BitAngels BitCarbon bitcoin(s): addresses in artwork and songs about balance in blockchain ledger in boom in brand of carbon footprint of as commodity community around creation of; see also Nakamoto, Satoshi crime and cryptography mailing list and culture of as currency defined as deflationary currency dollar and double-spending of early adopters of encryption in evangelists of exchange rate of fraud and future of Genesis Block in imitators of, see altcoins issuance of meetups for mining, see bitcoin mining and miners merchants accepting as movement as payments protocol as property regulation of, see regulation release of reward program in security and software for symbols of as technology thefts of traceability of transaction confirmation in transaction fees and transaction malleability bug and transaction volumes of trust and value of volatility of wallets for wealth concentration and Wild West phase of work in Bitcoin 2.0 (Blockchain 2.0) bitcoin barons bitcoin.com Bitcoin Decentral Bitcoin Faucet Bitcoin Forum Bitcoin Foundation Bitcoinica Bitcoin Magazine Bitcoin Market bitcoin mining and miners ASICs in cloud at data centers Dr. Evil attack scenario and energy used by 51 percent attack threat and forks in the blockchain and pools rigs for satellites for selfish bitcoinrichlist.com Bitcoin Suisse Bitcointalk.org Bitex.la Bitfinex BitFury BitGo bit-gold BitInstant BitLanders BitLicense Bitmain BitPagos BitPay BitPesa Bitreserve bitsats BitShares Bits of Coin Bitstamp Bitt BitTorrent BlackNet Bliley, Thomas blockchain forks in Blockchain Blockchain 2.0 (Bitcoin 2.0) BlockCypher blockexplorer.com blocks Bloomberg Businessweek b-money Boost Boring, Perianne Braendgaard, Pelle Brafman, Ori Braintree brand Branson, Richard Brazil Bretton Woods system Breyer, Jim Brightcove Brikman, Yevgeniy Britain Britcoin British West Indies Britto, Arthur Brown & Williamson Bry, Charles BTC China BTC-e Bush, George H.

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By mid-2012, SatoshiDice: Megan Geuss, “Firm Says Online Gambling Accounts for Almost Half of All Bitcoin Transactions,” ArsTechnica, August 24, 2013, http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/08/firm-says-online-gambling-accounts-for-almost-half-of-all-bitcoin-transactions/. One of the first was Peter Vessenes: Blog post, “Bitcoin Startup Incubator, CoinLab, Launches in WA,” Bitcoin News Network, September 25, 2011, http://www.btcnn.com/2011/09/bitcoin-startup-incubator-coinlab.html. Bitcoin Magazine, founded by Mihai Alisie: According to Bitcoin Magazine “About Us” page, http://bitcoinmagazine.com/about-us/. In September 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was founded: Jon Matonis, “Bitcoin Foundation Launches to Drive Bitcoin’s Advancement,” September 9, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/09/27/bitcoin-foundation-launches-to-drive-bitcoins-advancement/.

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Luria is imagining a similar trajectory for bitcoin. He says bitcoiners should be “embracing volatility,” since it will help “create the payment network infrastructure and monetary base” that bitcoin will need in the future. Then there’s the argument that for bitcoin to fulfill its real potential—and here we’re talking about bitcoin the technology, not bitcoin the currency—the exchange rate itself doesn’t matter. The idea is that someday consumers and businesses won’t hold bitcoins for their account but will unknowingly access the bitcoin network whenever payments are made. Already, bitcoin payment processors such as BitPay and Coinbase shield merchants from exchange-rate risk by immediately converting the incoming bitcoins into dollars.

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

At the same time that he was buying, Roger announced on the Bitcoin forums that his computer hardware company, Memory Dealers, would immediately begin accepting payment in Bitcoin. Not long after that, he turned a regular Memory Dealers’ advertisement that he paid for on Free Talk Live into an advertisement for Bitcoin and crowdsourced the copy for the ad from the Bitcoin forums. Soon enough, he had put up a gold-and-black billboard, on the side of an expressway in Silicon Valley, with an enormous Bitcoin emblem and the phrase “We Accept Bitcoin,” over the Memory Dealers web address. The crowd on the forums went wild. “God I love Bitcoin!” one user wrote.

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The Chinese Wal-Mart executive, for instance, had grown up with grandparents who escaped the communist revolution with only the wealth they had stored in gold. Bitcoin seemed to him like a much more easily transportable alternative in an uncertain world. It was these people, in different places with different motivations, who had built Bitcoin and were continuing to do so, and who are the subject of this story. The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi, disappeared back in 2011, leaving behind open source software that the users of Bitcoin could update and improve. Five years later, it was estimated that only 15 percent of the basic Bitcoin computer code was the same as what Satoshi had written. Beyond the work on the software, Bitcoin, like all money, was always only as useful and powerful as the number of people using it.

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They were also downloading and running the Bitcoin software. The number of downloads would jump from around three thousand in June to over twenty thousand in July. The day after the Slashdot piece appeared, Gavin Andresen’s Bitcoin faucet gave away 5,000 Bitcoins and was running empty. As he begged for donations, he marveled at the strength of the network: Over the last two days of Bitcoin being “slashdotted” I haven’t heard of ANY problems with Bitcoin transactions getting lost, or of the network crashing due to the load, or any problem at all with the core functionality. But while the Bitcoin software itself was working well, new users quickly ran up against the limitations of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

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

Between international merchants needing 10 million bitcoin, and 5.5 million bitcoin held by the top 1,000 investors, there are only roughly 500,000 bitcoin free for people to use. A market naturally develops for these bitcoin because maybe another investor wants to buy-and-hold 5 bitcoin, or a merchant wants to send US$100,000 of bitcoin to Mexico. Since these people must buy that bitcoin from someone else, that someone else needs to be convinced to let that bitcoin go, and so a negotiation begins. On a broader scale, all these negotiations occur on exchanges around the world, and a market to value bitcoin is made. If demand continues to go up for bitcoin, then with a disinflationary supply schedule, so too will its price (or velocity).

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Because bitcoin can claim the title of being the oldest cryptoasset—giving us the most data to investigate its maturation—understanding its longitudinal market behavior will give us a window into how other cryptoassets may evolve over time. BITCOIN’S EARLIEST PRICING Let’s go back to the first time a price was established for bitcoin, October 5, 2009, when it was priced at 1,309 bitcoin to the dollar, or 7/100 of a cent per bitcoin. A small website called the New Liberty Standard established the rate based on the amount of money it needed for electricity and rent to maintain the computer that mined bitcoin versus the amount of bitcoin that had been reaped from so doing. If at that time an investor had tracked down one of the few bitcoin miners in the world and offered $100 for the 130,900 bitcoin implied by that exchange rate, by now that investor would have amassed over $100 million.

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Since these words are used frequently when people talk about different applications of Bitcoin or blockchain technology, the space appears impenetrable—but it’s not. All that’s required is a concerted effort to nail down the key concepts, which then become the mental scaffolding that will support understanding of the many applications of blockchain technology. Bitcoin with an uppercase B refers to the software that facilitates the transfer and custody of bitcoin the currency, which starts with a lowercase b. • Bitcoin equals software. • bitcoin equals currency. Much of this book will use Bitcoin (with a capital B) as the starting point. Bitcoin is the genesis of the blockchain movement.

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

One member of the Wikimedia fundraising team noted in January 2014: “The bitcoin community should be aware that their persistent and often times aggressive, rude, and vulgar messaging towards me and my fellow coworkers is not appreciated; nor does it help their cause.”225) Overstock.com started accepting Bitcoin in early 2014 because CEO Patrick Byrne is a huge Bitcoin fan, and took in $1 million in the first month226 and another $2 million over the rest of 2014 – 0.2% of its total sales of $1.5 billion227 – though a loss of $117,000 on cryptocurrencies for 2015.228 WhollyHemp, a small manufacturer of hemp soap, started accepting Bitcoin out of interest in the technology, and founder Robert Lestak was for a time a moderator of Reddit /r/bitcoin. After the usual initial burst,229 WhollyHemp ended up making 0.2% of sales in Bitcoin, and an A/B test showed that prominent mention of Bitcoin acceptance reduced gross sales by 5.8%.230 They removed the Bitcoin option altogether in April 2015, and were harassed by Bitcoin advocates231 for the next several months.232 Lestak: “This is why you don’t hear about businesses publicly dropping Bitcoin as a payment option. Bitcoiners will make your life a living hell if you do.”

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Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Lending > Long-term offers, 17 August 2012. (archive) [68] Mageant. “Bitcoin Killer App: High Yield Investments”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Discussion, 22 July 2012. (archive) [69] Vitalik Buterin. “Ponzi schemes: The Danger of High Interest Savings Funds”. Bitcoin Magazine, 31 May 2012. (archive) [70] Adrianne Jeffries. “Suspected multi-million dollar Bitcoin pyramid scheme shuts down, investors revolt”. The Verge, 27 August 2012. [71] yochdog. “The pirate speaks”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Lending, 17 September 2012.

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[79] Wikipedia: Dunning-Kruger effect. From which another name for bitcoins, “Dunning-Krugerrands.” [80] “Risk of Bitcoin Hacks and Losses Is Very Real”. Reuters, 29 August 2016. [81] Kyt Dotson. “Third Largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitomat Lost Their Wallet, Over 17,000 Bitcoins Missing”. SiliconAngle, 1 August 2011. [82] Coinabul. “10 Questions with Zhou Tong”. Bitcoin Magazine, 30 May 2012. (archive) [83] genjix. Comment on “[Emergency ANN] Bitcoinica site is taken offline for security investigation”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Discussion, 25 May 2012. “root” is the administrator account for a Unix or Linux server.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

How do you get bitcoins? Using dollars or pounds is easy. You get paid in them. They’re in your bank account (hopefully). And you can pay for things with them via electronic banking, by cheque, credit card, or in cash. But where on earth do you get bitcoins? There are three ways. You can get paid in bitcoins. You can buy bitcoins. And last of all (the very unconventional bit), you can make bitcoins. Yes, you can, literally, create money. You earn bitcoins by doing or selling something in exchange for bitcoins – just as you would earn normal money. If I do this job for you, you pay me in bitcoins. You buy bitcoins just as you would buy and sell foreign currency – from the Bitcoin equivalent of a bureau de change, known as a Bitcoin exchange, or directly from an individual.

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Accessed June 16, 2014. http://on.mash.to/1tHF8y5. ‘Bitcoin Forum.’ Bitcoin Forum –Index. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KI. ‘Bitcoin? Here’s What Warren Buffett Is Saying.’ CNBC. March 14, 2013. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://cnb.cx/1tHF7KJ. ‘Bitcoin Project Milestones’. Bitcoin Project Milestones. Tiki Toki. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8y6. ‘Bitcoin Wiki.’ Bitcoin. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KK. ‘BitcoinTalk.’ BitcoinTalk.com. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8y8. Branwen, Gwern. ‘Bitcoin – worse is better.’ Gwern.net. July 20, 2010. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KL.

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Stock market saying It was probably the greatest trade in all of recorded history. In October 2009, a Bitcoin aficionado who went by the name of ‘Liberty Standard’ published the first bitcoin exchange rate. He arrived at the figure by dividing the cost of the electricity consumed by his computer over a 30-day period by the number of bitcoins it generated. 1,309 bitcoins to one dollar was the price.6 Liberty Standard was actually criticized for valuing bitcoins too high. Four years later, on November 29th 2013, one bitcoin was $1,242 – over 1.6 million times higher. A bitcoin was the same price as an ounce of gold. If anybody managed to buy the low (which actually came in December 2009 at 1,630 bitcoins to the dollar) and sell the high, they made over two million times their money.

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

It is rare, though not unheard of, for markets to exist that price their goods only in Bitcoin, and rarer still for those prices to exist in relation to nothing other than Bitcoin: that is to say, even the infamous deep web drug marketplaces like Silk Road and its various offshoots clearly set the Bitcoin prices for their goods according to their value in official world currencies, despite having prices nominally listed in Bitcoin (i.e., those prices rise and fall with changes not just in Bitcoin’s valuation, but in the price of drugs in national currencies). Exactly because Bitcoin lacks any relationship to bodies that need the currency to exist in relationship to mechanisms of international exchange, or of state-internal matters like taxes, Bitcoin on its own floats free of any anchor to ordinary valuing processes. If Bitcoin-only economies were to develop, in which labor were priced in raw relation to Bitcoin regardless of Bitcoin’s exchange value with world currencies (i.e., labor is priced at 1 BTC an hour regardless of whether 1 BTC is worth US$10 or US$1,000), this situation might change, but this presents the same chicken-and-egg problem we see throughout Bitcoin propaganda: if states were to go away and if entire economies existed in Bitcoin, then it could become money; but it is simultaneously said to be Bitcoin that will cause states to wither away and that will produce those economies.

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Mulloy, Darren. 2005. American Extremism: History, Politics, and the Militia Movement. New York: Routledge. Murray, Cameron (Rumpelstatskin). 2013. “Everything I Was Afraid to Ask about Bitcoin but Did.” Naked Capitalism (November). http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/. “Myths.” Bitcoin wiki. http://en.bitcoin.it/. Nakamoto, Satoshi. 2008. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Bitcoin.org. http://bitcoin.org/. —. 2009. “Bitcoin Open Source Implementation of P2P Currency.” P2P Foundation (February 11). http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/. Naughton, John. 2016. “Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age?”

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Here, my exclusive goal is to trace out this specific line of thought, both because of its urgency and because it has often been misunderstood by some in the media and is continually misrepresented by Bitcoin propagandists. The point is much less that Bitcoin is attractive to those on the right wing, than it is that Bitcoin and the blockchain themselves depend on right-wing assumptions, and help to spread those assumptions as if they could be separated from the context in which they were generated. Absent an awareness of that context, Bitcoin serves, like much right-wing rhetoric, to spread and firmly root a politics part of whose method is to obscure its material and social functions. 3. An Overview of Bitcoin MOST PEOPLE FIRST ENCOUNTER BITCOIN as a digital currency (this is shorthand; whether it is a “true” currency is a matter for debate).

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

If you want to learn more, I recommend exploring some of the resources below. Please note that this list is by no means exhaustive because the Bitcoin landscape is always changing, and no single person or organization has all the answers. The Bitcoin White Paper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Books The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous Inventing Bitcoin, by Yan Pritzker The Little Bitcoin Book, by multiple authors Programming Bitcoin, by Jimmy Song Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas Antonolopous Bitcoin Money, by Michael Caras (illustrated book for children) Full Node Solutions Casa Node: https://keys.casa Nodl: https://www.nodl.it myNode: https://mynodebtc.com Hardware Wallet Solutions ColdCard: https://coinkite.com Trezor: https://trezor.io Ledger: https://www.ledger.com Newsletters Marty’s Bent: https://tftc.io Bitcoin Optech: https://bitcoinops.org Podcasts Tales from the Crypt, hosted by Marty Bent What Bitcoin Did, hosted by Peter McCormack Stephan Livera Podcast, hosted by Stephan Livera References & Organizations Bitcoin Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page Nakomoto Institute: https://nakamotoinstitute.org Bitcoin Only: https://bitcoin-only.com Bitcoin.page: https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html Coin Center: https://www.coincenter.org Bitcoin Resources: https://bitcoin-resources.com Join the Conversation A great deal of discussion occurs on Twitter, and it’s currently the best place to engage with members of the Bitcoin community.

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The Bitcoin White Paper https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Books The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous Inventing Bitcoin, by Yan Pritzker The Little Bitcoin Book, by multiple authors Programming Bitcoin, by Jimmy Song Mastering Bitcoin, by Andreas Antonolopous Bitcoin Money, by Michael Caras (illustrated book for children) Full Node Solutions Casa Node: https://keys.casa Nodl: https://www.nodl.it myNode: https://mynodebtc.com Hardware Wallet Solutions ColdCard: https://coinkite.com Trezor: https://trezor.io Ledger: https://www.ledger.com Newsletters Marty’s Bent: https://tftc.io Bitcoin Optech: https://bitcoinops.org Podcasts Tales from the Crypt, hosted by Marty Bent What Bitcoin Did, hosted by Peter McCormack Stephan Livera Podcast, hosted by Stephan Livera References & Organizations Bitcoin Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page Nakomoto Institute: https://nakamotoinstitute.org Bitcoin Only: https://bitcoin-only.com Bitcoin.page: https://www.lopp.net/bitcoin-information.html Coin Center: https://www.coincenter.org Bitcoin Resources: https://bitcoin-resources.com Join the Conversation A great deal of discussion occurs on Twitter, and it’s currently the best place to engage with members of the Bitcoin community.

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The economic consequences of their actions will be explored further in Chapter 4. 3.6.1 Bitcoin on Point: Think Different “The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.” Thomas Love Peacock, English Novelist Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is not a promissory note. Bitcoin is its own foundational monetary system. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin cannot have its supply diluted. Network consensus ensures that its supply issuance is predictable and its limit is fixed. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin is not restricted by geographical or legal limitations, and it does not insist on its own use. Its use is entirely voluntary. Unlike fiat, Bitcoin has no central banking or governing authority, and no economic mandate.

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

Index Accenture, 140 addresses, blockchain, 19–20 Age of Cryptocurrency, The (Vigna and Casey), 23 Airbnb, 3, 5 Alford, Gary, 122 algorithms, in financial trading, 11–12 AlphaBay, 107–108 Alphabet, 64 altcoins, 138 crash in, 165, 202 value of, 146–148 Altman, Sam, 5–6, 7–8 American Kingpin (Bilton), 31 Andreessen, Marc, 11, 48 Andreessen Horowitz, 137, 177, 186–187, 225 Andresen, Gavin, 82 Antonopoulos, Andreas, 44 Apple, 7, 216 Coinbase app and, 40, 63 gift cards, money laundering with, 45 iPhone, 94–95 April Fools’ Day rally, 201 Arca, 105–106 Armstrong, Brian, 155, 206 in Beijing, 81–83 blog posts by, 109–111, 161 Coinbase culture and, 49–51 Covid-19 and, 222 on the crypto winter, 173 Dimon and, 211–213 first meeting with Fred, 13–14 in funding rounds, 33–37 on the future of Coinbase, 219–220 Gemini and, 116–117 Hirji and, 190, 192–200 IRS and, 125–126 leadership development of, 66, 68, 111–113, 117, 199–200 media coverage and, 159 origins of Coinbase and, 3–15 personal life of, 175 at Satoshi Roundtable, 80–81 social media scams using, 143 Srinivasan and, 186 super voting shares to, 112–113 targeted by bitcoin believers, 78–80 in Washington, DC, 129–131 workplace morale and, 67–68 authentication, two-factor, 143 Bain & Company, 191 Bain Capital, 204 Bakkt, 223 Bancor, 135–136 Berlin, Leslie, 99 Bezos, Jeff, 111 Big Pump, 144 Billions (TV show), 168, 224 Binance Coin, 179–182, 187, 196, 209 bitcoin academic attention to, 107 acceptance of by merchants, 29–30, 55, 64 anonymity of, 20 blocks, 19–20, 152–153 bull run in, 201–203 in China, 81–83 code oversight, 94 Covid-19 and, 221–223 crashes, 40, 160–161, 165–175 creation of, 4–5 criminal activity with, 17–18, 30–31, 58–60, 79, 107–108 in the crypto winter, 172–175 decentralization and, 8–9, 12, 104–105 Ethereum compared with, 88–93 federal efforts to prosecute, 17–18, 20 future of, 224–225 IRS on, 121–126 lifestyle and, 105–106 network problems with, 152–154 origin story of, 23–24 Pizza Day, 22 problems with using, 61–62 as property versus currency, 122–126 reputation of, 58, 69–70 resilience of, 208–210 as rival to gold, 83–84 scaling and, 88 traditional finance and, 65, 99–108 true believers in, 23, 25 user growth and network problems in, 75–84 US government ownership of, 126–127 value fluctuation in, 21–23, 47, 57–60, 61–62, 65–66, 121, 139, 146–148, 151–155 Wall Street and, 99 warring factions in, 75–84 Bitcoin Cash, 147, 173 on Coinbase, 159–160 collapse of, 202–203 Bitcoin Core, 75–76, 78, 82–83 bitcoin exchanges. See Coinbase; Mt. Gox Bitcoin Foundation, 54, 55, 56, 58–59 Bitcoin Magazine, 87 bitcoin maximalists, 203 bitcoin meetups, 30 bitcoin Sign Guy, 139 Bitconnect, 141–142 Bitfinex, 108, 114 BitInstant, 54–55, 97, 115–116 Bit License, 127 Bitmain, 171–172 Blankfein, Lloyd, 212 Blockchain, 179 “blockchain not bitcoin” faction, 104–105 Blockchain Revolution (Tapscott and Tapscott), 214, 217 blockchains, 19–21, 24 academic research on, 218–219 block size issues, 152–153 enterprise, 73 future of, 214–220 processing time backlogs in, 83 smart contracts and, 89–95 social engineering for, 21 2.0, 88 block rewards, 21 blocks, 19–20 infrastructure problems with, 75–84 size issues with, 152–153 Bloomberg, 179 Bloomberg Businessweek, 49, 112 Brave, 136 Bridges, Shaun, 59–60 Brooks, Brian, 224 Buffett, Warren, 171 Burges, Kolin, 56 Burnham, Brad, 36 Burning Man, 55 Business Insider, 195–196 Buterin, Vitalik, 48, 87–88, 90, 92, 182 cult of personality around, 202 profile of, 167–168 social media scams using, 143 Byrne, Preston, 206 Cantor Fitzgerald, 101–103 capital gains rules, 122–126 cap tables, 215 Carlson-Wee, Olaf, 24–30 on bitcoin valuation, 62 on Coinbase’s complacency, 177–178 on the crypto bubble, 148 in the crypto winter, 172 on dApps, 188 departure from Coinbase, 95–96, 157 hedge fund of, 223 on hiring, 38–39 legacy of, 220 on Mt.

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For their trouble, winners gets a stash of bitcoin associated with each block. Some people call this stash the block reward. Some call it the coinbase. Bitcoin’s blockchain and reward system is clever—brilliant, even. But that doesn’t explain why bitcoin are worth anything in the first place. After all, bitcoin aren’t even coins. They amount to no more than wisps of computer code you can’t see or touch. But that doesn’t matter. Bitcoin is currency, and currency is trust. What matters is that enough people agree bitcoin are worth something and will give up something of value to get them. In this sense, bitcoin is no different than any other currency people have used over the course of history: shells, chunks of yellow metal, pieces of paper printed by a bank or government.

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In San Francisco, Olaf found a growing community of other bitcoin believers, merchants who had started to accept bitcoin as payment. He was far from Holden Village now. To his delight, he discovered he could pay for meals, drinks, and other day-to-day essentials with his magic money. And whatever he couldn’t buy with bitcoin in the city of San Francisco, he could obtain online from crypto-friendly websites. Soon, Olaf decided that not only could he live on bitcoin, he would live on bitcoin. For the next three years, that’s what he did. • • • It wasn’t just in San Francisco that bitcoin was breaking through. In cities across the United States—and in places like Prague, Tokyo, and Adelaide, Australia—people were coming together for “bitcoin meetups” where they talked about a world beyond the control of governments while buying, selling, or sometimes just giving away bitcoin.

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

If you don’t control the bitcoin keys, it’s not your bitcoin. You’re back to a master-slave relationship. "In bitcoin, possession is ten-tenths of the law. If you control the bitcoin keys, it’s your bitcoin. If you don’t control the bitcoin keys, it’s not your bitcoin." 2.4. Bitcoin, a Fundamental Transformation of Money Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls.

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Those are the kinds of people that come to Maker Faire. And so it’s a great place to start talking about bitcoin. Bitcoin is unexpected. Bitcoin is not money as we know it. Bitcoin should not have happened. Bitcoin really has no possibility of success. It can’t possibly work. It’s one of those things that does not work in theory, but it works in practice. Like Wikipedia. Like Linux. Like the internet. Weird ideas made by people with ponytails and neckbeards. Weirdos nobody really trusts. "Bitcoin is unexpected. Bitcoin is not money as we know it. Bitcoin should not have happened. Bitcoin really has no possibility of success. It can’t possibly work.

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In fact, this has now become an amazing recruitment opportunity because all you have to do is wait for people to hear that bitcoin died, the CEO of Bitcoin was arrested, or bitcoin was shut down by Putin, and then, four months later, someone says, "You know there are some interesting new applications on bitcoin." And they go, “Bitcoin is still there?" “Bitcoin is still there” is the marketing slogan of this community. If we can just keep doing “bitcoin is still there,” people are surprised, they’re confounded. It doesn’t match their expectations. It’s not possible that bitcoin is still there because very serious people with very serious titles, working for very rich companies, told them that bitcoin was not going to be there.

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

Broader Perspective blog, March 2, 2014. http://futurememes.blogspot.fr/2014/03/illiberty-in-biohacking-personal-data.html. 108 Prisco, G. “Bitcoin Governance 2.0: Let’s Block-chain Them.” CryptoCoins News, updated October 13, 2014. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-governance-2-0-lets-block-chain/. 109 Hofman, A. “Couple to Get Married on the Bitcoin Blockchain at Disney Bitcoin Conference.” Bitcoin Magazine, September 23, 2014. http://bitcoinmagazine.com/16771/couple-get-married-bitcoin-blockchain-disney-bitcoin-conference/. 110 Marty, B. “Couple Make History with World’s First Bitcoin Wedding.” PanAm Post, October 7, 2014. http://panampost.com/belen-marty/2014/10/07/couple-make-history-with-worlds-first-bitcoin-wedding/. 111 Ploshay, E.

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The concept is similar for cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin neutrality means the ability for all persons everywhere to be able to easily adopt Bitcoin. This means that anyone can start using Bitcoin, in any and every culture, language, religion, and geography, political system, and economic regime.91 Bitcoin is just a currency; it can be used within any kind of existing political, economic, or religious system. For example, the Islamic Bank of Bitcoin is investigating ways to conduct Sharia-compliant banking with Bitcoin.92 A key point of Bitcoin neutrality is that the real target market for whom Bitcoin could be most useful is the “unbanked,” individuals who do not have access to traditional banking services for any number of reasons, estimated at 53 percent of the worldwide population.93 Even in the United States, 7.7 percent of households are forecast to be unbanked or underbanked.94 Bitcoin neutrality means access for the unbanked and underbanked, which requires Bitcoin solutions that apply in all low-tech environments, with features like SMS payment, paper wallets, and batched blockchain transactions.

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The account is necessarily incomplete, prone to technical errors (though it has been reviewed for technical accuracy by experts), and, again, could likely soon be out-of-date as different projects described here fail or succeed. Or, the entire Bitcoin and blockchain technology industry as currently conceived could become outmoded or superseded by other models. The underlying sources of this work are a variety of information resources related to Bitcoin and its development. The principal sources are developer forums, Reddit subgroups, GitHub white papers, podcasts, news media, YouTube, blogs, and Twitter. Specific online resources include Bitcoin industry conference proceedings on YouTube and Slideshare, podcasts (Let’s Talk Bitcoin, Consider This!, Epicenter Bitcoin), EtherCasts (Ethereum), Bitcoin-related news outlets (CoinDesk, Bitcoin Magazine, Cryptocoins News, Coin Telegraph), and forums (Bitcoin StackExchange, Quora).

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

Finally, in August 2017, a group of programmers proposed a new fork of Bitcoin under the name of “Bitcoin Cash,” which included many of the earlier advocates of increasing the block size. The fate of Bitcoin Cash is a vivid illustration of the problems with a Bitcoin fork that does not have consensus support. Because a majority chose to stay with the original chain, and the economic infrastructure of exchanges and businesses supporting Bitcoin is still largely focused on the original Bitcoin, this has kept the value of Bitcoin's coins much higher than that of Bitcoin Cash, and the price of Bitcoin Cash continued to drop until it hit a low of 5% of Bitcoin's value in November 2017.

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Unsound Money and Perpetual War Limited versus Omnipotent Government The Bezzle Notes Chapter 8: Digital Money Bitcoin as Digital Cash Supply, Value, and Transactions Appendix to Chapter 8 Notes Chapter 9: What Is Bitcoin Good For? Store of Value Individual Sovereignty International and Online Settlement Global Unit of Account Notes Chapter 10: Bitcoin Questions Is Bitcoin Mining a Waste? Out of Control: Why Nobody Can Change Bitcoin Antifragility Can Bitcoin Scale? Is Bitcoin for Criminals? How to Kill Bitcoin: A Beginners' Guide Altcoins Blockchain Technology Notes Acknowledgements Bibliography Online Resources List of Figures List of Tables Index End User License Agreement List of Tables Chapter 3 Table 1 Major European Economies' Periods Under the Gold Standard Chapter 4 Table 2 Depreciation of National Currency Against the Swiss Franc During World War I Table 3 The Ten Countries with Highest Average Annual Broad Money Supply Growth, 1960–2015 Table 4 Average Annual Percent Increase in Broad Money Supply for the Ten Largest Global Currencies Chapter 7 Table 5 Conflict Deaths in the Last Five Centuries Chapter 8 Table 6 Bitcoin Supply and Growth Rate Table 7 Bitcoin Supply and Growth Rate (Projected) Table 8 Annual Transactions and Average Daily Transactions Table 9 Total Annual US Dollar Value of All Bitcoin Network Transactions Table 10 Average Daily Percentage Change and Standard Deviation in the Market Price of Currencies per USD over the Period of September 1, 2011, to September 1, 2016 List of Illustrations Chapter 3 Figure 1 Global gold stockpiles and annual stockpile growth rate.

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Only with such an understanding, and only after extensive and thorough research into the practical operational aspects of owning and storing bitcoins, should anyone consider holding value in Bitcoin. While bitcoin's rise in market value may make it appear like a no‐brainer as an investment, a closer look at the myriad hacks, attacks, scams, and security failures that have cost people their bitcoins provides a sobering warning to anyone who thinks that owning bitcoins provides a guaranteed profit. Should you come out of reading this book thinking that the bitcoin currency is something worth owning, your first investment should not be in buying bitcoins, but in time spent understanding how to buy, store, and own bitcoins securely.

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

In Figure 3-2, Address A has a balance of 100 BTC before the fork on the main Bitcoin blockchain. After the fork, two new chains split off of the main chain: Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Address A maintains a balance of 100 on both of the new blockchains, so it has 100 BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain (worth about $270,000 at the time of the fork) and 100 BCH on Bitcoin Cash (worth about $24,000). The previous Bitcoin chain (BTC) still exists as it did prior to the forking code being presented. Once the Bitcoin Cash nodes start accepting > 1 MB (megabyte) blocks, the Bitcoin Cash chain forks itself away from Bitcoin, creating the new chain. Miners Miners are the ones who contribute hash power to keep the network running.

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Bitcoin Cash’s 8 MB block size, which was increased to 32 MB in May 2018, was designed to accommodate more transactions and features. While it has not garnered the traction many proponents expected, despite the controversy, Bitcoin Cash remains the most successful Bitcoin software fork. A Fork of a Fork: Bitcoin SV Bitcoin Cash itself faced another scaling debate before long. In November 2018, the Bitcoin Cash network split in two, forking into separate chains called Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (SV). The argument this time was a bit different. On one side was a group called Bitcoin ABC, which stood for adjustable blocksize cap—they wanted the ability to change the block size to whatever number they wanted and implement smart contracts, a programming functionality that exists in Ethereum and other “2.0” altchains (see the next section).

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By building a second-layer protocol on top of Bitcoin, Omni benefited from the large network effect Bitcoin already had. Adding custom logic Bitcoin performs logical operations—rules that maintain the blockchain, proving that the fundamental concept of achieving consensus works. Omni adds custom logical operations to the Bitcoin blockchain. After March 2014, Bitcoin added the OP_RETURN field, which enables the attachment of additional data to a bitcoin transaction. Once the OP_RETURN field was added to Bitcoin, every Omni transaction began storing a record within the OP_RETURN field of a bitcoin transaction. Figure 4-2 shows an example Tether transaction recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain.

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

Bitcoin is also a protocol, but to send and receive value instead of data. Blockchain and Bitcoin Mining What makes Bitcoin tantamount to gold, human civilization’s most proven monetary asset? The answer lies in the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. The Bitcoin blockchain most fundamentally describes a record of transactions simultaneously kept by all peers in the network. In order to properly define blocks and chains, let’s first dive a little deeper into the word peer. In Bitcoin terms, anybody can be a peer by operating a Bitcoin node, which is a computing device running the Bitcoin software. Only those that operate a Bitcoin node are using it in a wholly trustless way, meaning they are only relying on their own software to verify the settlement of BTC transactions (trustless can be thought of as the opposite of “having counterparty risk”).

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Over the years, they graduated Bitcoin from a project to a legitimate global monetary network. The most crucial updates that transitioned Bitcoin to a smart contract platform occurred from 2015 to 2017. These Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) turned one-dimensional Bitcoin transactions into wildly customizable financial contracts, without changing any of Bitcoin’s fundamental rules.27 In 2016, a paper from software engineers Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja called “The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments” built upon all the smart contract innovation happening on the Bitcoin software. The paper was a proposal for a new type of Bitcoin smart contract (HTLCs) that enabled instantly settling payments without having to wait for the next block to be mined.

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The CME would add practically every commodity imaginable to its range of futures products over the years, from live cattle futures in 1964, to silver futures in 1969, to Bitcoin futures in 2017. In 2016, when the CME announced plans to publish Bitcoin price data in preparation for a launch of Bitcoin futures the following year, the weight of Chicago as the worldwide authority on commodities was thrown behind Bitcoin and significantly added to its legitimacy. CME Bitcoin futures help financial market participants translate between BTC and USD, which will directly contribute to Bitcoin’s adoption. Businesses can engage in BTC-denominated activity knowing that they can actively manage away unwanted exchange rate risk. Additionally, Bitcoin futures offer a second-layer BTC to participants that operate only within the dollar pyramid and simply want exposure to changes in the price of BTC, not possession of Bitcoin private keys.

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

“Exactly,” Voorhees responded, “and bitcoin has all of those properties too—” “But Bitcoin is better at being gold than gold,” Charlie interrupted. “Correct. Bitcoin is not just scarce like gold, but its supply is also fixed,” Voorhees said. “By the design laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper, there will never be more than twenty-one million bitcoins created, whereas the supply of gold increases as new deposits are discovered. And bitcoin is more divisible than gold. Each bitcoin can be subdivided into one hundred million pieces, and you can own as little as .00000001 bitcoin. And you can send it to someone instantly, like sending an email.

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Cameron and Tyler also knew that government regulation would come; and unlike many in the room, they believed that it was important to embrace and help shape that eventuality. Because over the past year, through their experience of buying bitcoin, pitching Bitcoin, and investing in one of the rising stars of Bitcoin, they had come to the following realization: the biggest danger the Bitcoin community faced was itself. Mt. Gox, failing again and again, caused tremendous instability in the market. Silk Road stained everything it touched. The radical philosophers, who were important in Bitcoin’s beginnings, were now so at odds with the campaign to bring Bitcoin mainstream. All of it was the Bitcoin community getting in its own way. Not because of some external threat or fight, which would arrive soon enough.

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Tyler and Cameron continue to be Bitcoin’s biggest advocates. They believe that though Bitcoin has come a long way since its infancy, there is still a long way to go. If, as they believe, Bitcoin is truly gold 2.0, it is still radically undervalued. Gold is a seven-trillion-dollar market; Bitcoin, currently, is valued at only a fraction of that amount. Whatever happens next, there is no doubt that the Bitcoin story is far from over. Moreover, the technology behind Bitcoin has only barely begun to infiltrate the financial, technological, and online worlds. The technology that makes Bitcoin work—the blockchain and crypto private keys—has the potential to decentralize not just money but also data in a way that could “give the internet back to the people”—freeing user information from the siloed monopolies of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.

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

After all, just months after the company’s founding, the start-up had caused a brief, very public blowup in the Bitcoin community with a technique capable of identifying Bitcoin users’ IP addresses—exactly as their secret technique would years later. Gronager and Møller had created a collection of their own Bitcoin node servers, capitalizing on the way Bitcoin users broadcast their IP addresses in transaction messages, with the purpose of creating a global map of Bitcoin users’ geolocations. Could that technique somehow also have been updated and adapted to target—and locate—the Bitcoin wallets of very specific users? Even when the transactions were sent from a computer running on Tor’s anonymity network?

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In 2010, while still in the process of applying to join IRS-CI, he’d come across a post on one of those sites describing something called Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a new digital currency, and it used a clever system to track who owned which coins: The Bitcoin network stored thousands of copies of a distributed accounting ledger on computers around the world—a ledger known as the blockchain. Many of Bitcoin’s advocates seemed to believe that because no bank or government was necessary for Bitcoin’s operation, no institution could control its payments or identify its users. 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.

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* * * · · · Gronager began obsessively attending Bitcoin conferences from New York to London to Prague. He fiddled with every Bitcoin service he could find to understand how it worked, a doppelgänger of Sarah Meiklejohn’s hyperactive Bitcoin user carrying out test transactions, but driven entirely by a tinkerer’s curiosity. Soon he’d designed his own Bitcoin wallets for the iPhone and as a browser plug-in, coming up with a clever way of splitting the blockchain between a phone or PC and a server to optimize its performance. He began talking with a like-minded Bitcoin technologist from the United States he’d met at those conferences, Jesse Powell, about creating their own Bitcoin exchange—what would eventually become Kraken.

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

PacktPub.com Contributors About the author About the reviewer Packt is searching for authors like you Preface Who this book is for What this book covers To get the most out of this book Download the example code files Download the color images Conventions used Get in touch Reviews Blockchain 101 The growth of blockchain technology Distributed systems The history of blockchain and Bitcoin Electronic cash Blockchain Blockchain defined Peer-to-peer Distributed ledger Cryptographically-secure Append-only Updateable via consensus Generic elements of a blockchain How blockchain works How blockchain accumulates blocks Benefits and limitations of blockchain Tiers of blockchain technology Features of a blockchain Types of blockchain Distributed ledgers Distributed Ledger Technology Public blockchains Private blockchains Semiprivate blockchains Sidechains Permissioned ledger Shared ledger Fully private and proprietary blockchains Tokenized blockchains Tokenless blockchains Consensus Consensus mechanism Types of consensus mechanisms Consensus in blockchain CAP theorem and blockchain Summary Decentralization Decentralization using blockchain Methods of decentralization Disintermediation Contest-driven decentralization Routes to decentralization How to decentralize The decentralization framework example Blockchain and full ecosystem decentralization Storage Communication Computing power and decentralization Smart contracts Decentralized Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Decentralized Autonomous Corporations Decentralized Autonomous Societies Decentralized Applications (DApps) Requirements of a Decentralized Application Operations of a DApp DApp examples KYC-Chain OpenBazaar Lazooz Platforms for decentralization Ethereum MaidSafe Lisk Summary Symmetric Cryptography Working with the OpenSSL command line Introduction Mathematics Set Group Field A finite field Order An abelian group Prime fields Ring A cyclic group Modular arithmetic Cryptography Confidentiality Integrity Authentication Entity authentication Data origin authentication Non-repudiation Accountability Cryptographic primitives Symmetric cryptography Stream ciphers Block ciphers Block encryption mode Electronic Code Book Cipher Block Chaining Counter mode Keystream generation mode Message authentication mode Cryptographic hash mode Data Encryption Standard Advanced Encryption Standard How AES works Summary Public Key Cryptography Asymmetric cryptography Integer factorization Discrete logarithm Elliptic curves Public and private keys RSA Encryption and decryption using RSA Elliptic Curve Cryptography Mathematics behind ECC Point addition Point doubling Discrete logarithm problem in ECC RSA using OpenSSL RSA public and private key pair Private key Public key Exploring the public key Encryption and decryption Encryption Decryption ECC using OpenSSL ECC private and public key pair Private key Private key generation Hash functions Compression of arbitrary messages into fixed-length digest Easy to compute Preimage resistance Second preimage resistance Collision resistance Message Digest Secure Hash Algorithms Design of Secure Hash Algorithms Design of SHA-256 Design of SHA-3 (Keccak) OpenSSL example of hash functions Message Authentication Codes MACs using block ciphers Hash-based MACs Merkle trees Patricia trees Distributed Hash Tables Digital signatures RSA digital signature algorithm Sign then encrypt Encrypt then sign Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm How to generate a digital signature using OpenSSL ECDSA using OpenSSL Homomorphic encryption Signcryption Zero-Knowledge Proofs Blind signatures Encoding schemes Financial markets and trading Trading Exchanges Orders and order properties Order management and routing systems Components of a trade The underlying instrument General attributes Economics Sales Counterparty Trade life cycle Order anticipators Market manipulation Summary Introducing Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin definition Bitcoin – a bird's-eye view Sending a payment to someone Digital keys and addresses Private keys in Bitcoin Public keys in Bitcoin Addresses in Bitcoin Base58Check encoding Vanity addresses Multisignature addresses Transactions The transaction life cycle Transaction fee Transaction pools The transaction data structure Metadata Inputs Outputs Verification The script language Commonly used opcodes Types of transactions Coinbase transactions Contracts Transaction verification Transaction malleability Blockchain The structure of a block The structure of a block header The genesis block Mining Tasks of the miners Mining rewards Proof of Work (PoW) The mining algorithm The hash rate Mining systems CPU GPU FPGA ASICs Mining pools Summary Bitcoin Network and Payments The Bitcoin network Wallets Non-deterministic wallets Deterministic wallets Hierarchical Deterministic wallets Brain wallets Paper wallets Hardware wallets Online wallets Mobile wallets Bitcoin payments Innovation in Bitcoin Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) Advanced protocols Segregated Witness (SegWit) Bitcoin Cash Bitcoin Unlimited Bitcoin Gold Bitcoin investment and buying and selling bitcoins Summary Bitcoin Clients and APIs Bitcoin installation Types of Bitcoin Core clients Bitcoind Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin-qt Setting up a Bitcoin node Setting up the source code Setting up bitcoin.conf Starting up a node in testnet Starting up a node in regtest Experimenting with Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin programming and the command-line interface Summary Alternative Coins Theoretical foundations Alternatives to Proof of Work Proof of Storage Proof of Stake (PoS) Various stake types Proof of coinage Proof of Deposit (PoD) Proof of Burn Proof of Activity (PoA) Nonoutsourceable puzzles Difficulty adjustment and retargeting algorithms Kimoto Gravity Well Dark Gravity Wave DigiShield MIDAS Bitcoin limitations Privacy and anonymity Mixing protocols Third-party mixing protocols Inherent anonymity Extended protocols on top of Bitcoin Colored coins Counterparty Development of altcoins Consensus algorithms Hashing algorithms Difficulty adjustment algorithms Inter-block time Block rewards Reward halving rate Block size and transaction size Interest rate Coinage Total supply of coins Namecoin Trading Namecoins Obtaining Namecoins Generating Namecoin records Litecoin Primecoin Trading Primecoin Mining guide Zcash Trading Zcash Mining guide Address generation GPU mining Downloading and compiling nheqminer Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) ERC20 tokens Summary Smart Contracts History Definition Ricardian contracts Smart contract templates Oracles Smart Oracles Deploying smart contracts on a blockchain The DAO Summary Ethereum 101 Introduction The yellow paper Useful mathematical symbols Ethereum blockchain Ethereum – bird's eye view The Ethereum network Mainnet Testnet Private net Components of the Ethereum ecosystem Keys and addresses Accounts Types of accounts Transactions and messages Contract creation transaction Message call transaction Messages Calls Transaction validation and execution The transaction substate State storage in the Ethereum blockchain The world state The account state Transaction receipts Ether cryptocurrency / tokens (ETC and ETH) The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Execution environment Machine state The iterator function Smart contracts Native contracts Summary Further Ethereum Programming languages Runtime bytecode Opcodes and their meaning Arithmetic operations Logical operations Cryptographic operations Environmental information Block information Stack, memory, storage, and flow operations Push operations Duplication operations Exchange operations Logging operations System operations Blocks and blockchain The genesis block The block validation mechanism Block finalization Block difficulty Gas Fee schedule Forks in the blockchain Nodes and miners The consensus mechanism Ethash CPU mining GPU mining Benchmarking Mining rigs Mining pools Wallets and client software Geth Eth Pyethapp Parity Light clients Installation Eth installation Mist browser Geth The geth console Funding the account with bitcoin Parity installation Creating accounts using the parity command line APIs, tools, and DApps Applications (DApps and DAOs) developed on Ethereum Tools Supporting protocols Whisper Swarm Scalability, security, and other challenges Trading and investment Summary Ethereum Development Environment Test networks Setting up a private net Network ID The genesis file Data directory Flags and their meaning Static nodes Starting up the private network Running Mist on private net Deploying contracts using Mist Block explorer for private net / local Ethereum block explorer Summary Development Tools and Frameworks Languages Compilers Solidity compiler (solc) Installation on Linux Installation on macOS Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) Remix Tools and libraries Node version 7 EthereumJS Ganache MetaMask Truffle Installation Contract development and deployment Writing Testing Solidity language Types Value types Boolean Integers Address Literals Integer literals String literals Hexadecimal literals Enums Function types Internal functions External functions Reference types Arrays Structs Data location Mappings Global variables Control structures Events  Inheritance Libraries Functions Layout of a Solidity source code file Version pragma Import Comments Summary Introducing Web3 Web3 Contract deployment POST requests The HTML and JavaScript frontend Installing web3.js Example Creating a web3 object Checking availability by calling any web3 method Contract functions Development frameworks Truffle Initializing Truffle Interaction with the contract Another example An example project – Proof of Idea Oracles Deployment on decentralized storage using IPFS Installing IPFS Distributed ledgers Summary Hyperledger Projects under Hyperledger Fabric Sawtooth Lake Iroha Burrow Indy Explorer Cello Composer Quilt Hyperledger as a protocol The reference architecture Requirements and design goals of Hyperledger Fabric The modular approach Privacy and confidentiality Scalability Deterministic transactions Identity Auditability Interoperability Portability Rich data queries Fabric Hyperledger Fabric Membership services Blockchain services Consensus services Distributed ledger The peer to peer protocol Ledger storage Chaincode services Components of the fabric Peers Orderer nodes Clients Channels World state database Transactions Membership Service Provider (MSP) Smart contracts Crypto service provider Applications on blockchain Chaincode implementation The application model Consensus in Hyperledger Fabric The transaction life cycle in Hyperledger Fabric Sawtooth Lake PoET Transaction families Consensus in Sawtooth The development environment – Sawtooth Lake Corda Architecture State objects Transactions Consensus Flows Components Nodes The permissioning service Network map service Notary service Oracle service Transactions Vaults CorDapp The development environment – Corda Summary Alternative Blockchains Blockchains Kadena Ripple Transactions Payments related Order related Account and security-related Interledger Application layer Transport layer Interledger layer Ledger layer Stellar Rootstock Sidechain Drivechain Quorum Transaction manager Crypto Enclave QuorumChain Network manager Tezos Storj MaidSafe BigchainDB MultiChain Tendermint Tendermint Core Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP) Platforms and frameworks Eris Summary Blockchain – Outside of Currencies Internet of Things Physical object layer Device layer Network layer Management layer Application layer IoT blockchain experiment First node setup Raspberry Pi node setup Installing Node.js Circuit Government Border control Voting Citizen identification (ID cards) Miscellaneous Health Finance Insurance Post-trade settlement Financial crime prevention Media Summary Scalability and Other Challenges Scalability Network plane Consensus plane Storage plane View plane Block size increase Block interval reduction Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables Sharding State channels Private blockchain Proof of Stake Sidechains Subchains Tree chains (trees) Block propagation Bitcoin-NG Plasma Privacy Indistinguishability Obfuscation Homomorphic encryption Zero-Knowledge Proofs State channels Secure multiparty computation Usage of hardware to provide confidentiality CoinJoin Confidential transactions MimbleWimble Security Smart contract security Formal verification and analysis Oyente tool Summary Current Landscape and What's Next Emerging trends Application-specific blockchains (ASBCs) Enterprise-grade blockchains Private blockchains Start-ups Strong research interest Standardization Enhancements Real-world implementations Consortia Answers to technical challenges Convergence Education of blockchain technology Employment Cryptoeconomics Research in cryptography New programming languages Hardware research and development Research in formal methods and security Alternatives to blockchains Interoperability efforts Blockchain as a Service Efforts to reduce electricity consumption Other challenges Regulation Dark side Blockchain research Smart contracts Centralization issues Limitations in cryptographic functions Consensus algorithms Scalability Code obfuscation Notable projects Zcash on Ethereum CollCo Cello Qtum Bitcoin-NG Solidus Hawk Town-Crier SETLCoin TEEChan Falcon Bletchley Casper Miscellaneous tools Solidity extension for Microsoft Visual Studio MetaMask Stratis Embark DAPPLE Meteor uPort INFURA Convergence with other industries Future Summary Another Book You May Enjoy Leave a review – let other readers know what you think Preface This book has one goal, to introduce theoretical and practical aspects of the blockchain technology.

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Chapter 5, Introducing Bitcoin, covers Bitcoin, the first and largest blockchain. It introduces technical concepts related to bitcoin cryptocurrency in detail. Chapter 6, Bitcoin Network and Payments, covers Bitcoin network, relevant protocols and various Bitcoin wallets. Moreover, advanced protocols, Bitcoin trading and payments is also introduced. Chapter 7, Bitcoin Clients and APIs, introduces various Bitcoin clients and programming APIs that can be used to build Bitcoin applications. Chapter 8, Alternative Coins, introduces alternative cryptocurrencies that were introduced after the invention of Bitcoin. It also presents examples of different altcoins, their properties, and how they have been developed and implemented.

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The following commands can be used to start up a node in the regtest mode: $ bitcoind -regtest -daemon Bitcoin server starting Blocks can be generated using the following command: $ bitcoin-cli -regtest generate 200 Relevant log messages can be viewed in the .bitcoin/regtest directory on a Linux system under debug.log: Messages in Bitcoin debug log After block generation, the balance can be viewed as follows: $ bitcoin-cli -regtest getbalance 8750.00000000 The node can be stopped using this: $ bitcoin-cli -regtest stop Bitcoin server stopping Experimenting with Bitcoin-cli Bitcoin-cli is the command-line interface available with the Bitcoin Core client and can be used to perform various functions using the RPC interface provided by the Bitcoin Core client: A sample run of bitcoin-cli getinfo; the same format can be used to invoke other commands A list of all commands can be shown via the command shown in the following screenshot: Testnet bitcoin-cli' this is just the first few lines of the output, actual output has many commands The preceding screenshot shows a list of various command-line options available in Bitcoin-cli, the Bitcoin command-line interface.

Bitcoin Internals: A Technical Guide to Bitcoin by Chris Clark

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

Bitcoin definitely has the first-mover advantage, but if a competitor manages to become noticeably superior, there could be an exodus from Bitcoin. Commentators have criticized Bitcoin in various ways, most notably on its inability to scale to larger transaction volumes. However, Bitcoin developers are actively improving the system and these criticisms could be addressed before competitors get off the ground. How safe is it to hold bitcoins? The value of a bitcoin has been quite volatile. The first purchase made in bitcoins was for two pizzas at a price of 10,000 BTC (BTC is the currency code for bitcoins). At bitcoin’s current price level, those pizzas would have cost about a million dollars.

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Mining, the means by which bitcoins are initially put into circulation, provides another way of obtaining bitcoins. When mining, you get paid bitcoins to run a computer that processes transactions for the bitcoin network. Mining will be discussed more in Chapter 9. * * * Figure 2.2: The "Receive coins" tab of the Bitcoin-Qt client where you can manage your addresses. * * * 2.3 Sending Payments Once you have bitcoins in your wallet, you will be able to see the balance in your wallet on the Overview tab of the Bitcoin client. You can then use the Bitcoin client to send funds to any other Bitcoin user.

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Bitcoin Stack Exchange, March 7, 2013. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8439/why-was-21-million-picked-as-the-number-of-bitcoins-to-be-created [22] "Technical background of Bitcoin addresses," Bitcoin Wiki, March 14, 2013. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_Bitcoin_addresses [23] "Why are Bitcoin addresses hashes of public keys?" Bitcoin Stack Exchange, May 8, 2012. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3600/why-are-bitcoin-addresses-hashes-of-public-keys [24] Raulo, "Optimal pool abuse strategy," February 4, 2011. http://bitcoin.atspace.com/poolcheating.pdf Notes 1Monetary inflation is a sustained increase in the supply of money, which typically results in price inflation. It is a serious risk factor for fiat currencies because governments often produce money excessively, causing perpetual price inflation. 2The creator of Bitcoin defines a bitcoin as a "chain of digital signatures" in the public ledger known as the block chain.[1] 3The Bitcoin source code can be found at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin 4According to the Bitcoin Wiki, the second biggest bitcoin based company is the underground drug website known as the Silk Road.[3] The sales figures were estimated by Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin.[4] Six of the other businesses in the top 20 largest are gambling related.[3] 5The chart is from bitcoincharts.com 6See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tor 7These are foreign exchange fees, not Bitcoin transaction fees (which are much smaller). 8There is a 1 in 4.29 billion chance that a mistyped address passes the checksum test.

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

That’s when Vitalik invited him to join the rest of the team in Miami. It was the week before the North American Bitcoin Conference in late January 2014. Aside from his brief meeting with London’s Bitcoin squatters and his recent foray writing code for Ethereum, Gavin hadn’t had any contact with the crypto community. He didn’t own any Bitcoin, a fact he was slightly ashamed of as he greeted the men (and maybe one or two women) at the Miami house. He assumed they all knew each other from Bitcoin parties and Bitcoin startups and had all become Bitcoin rich. Bitcoin was running on its biggest high to date, surging from around $100 at the beginning of 2013 to over $1,000 in November.

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He was also focused on research to reduce what he saw as another kind of waste: the amount of energy spent in keeping proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum secure. There have been different estimates to quantify exactly how much energy the Bitcoin network consumes, but one often-cited report, a 2018 paper by PwC senior consultant Alex de Vries, compared Bitcoin’s energy consumption to that of Austria and Ireland. It’s also been debated how clean that energy is. China, which gets about 60 percent of its energy from coal, accounts for about half of the power used to mine Bitcoin, according to a 2017 University of Cambridge report. Bitcoin company Coinshares disputed that with a study that showed most Chinese Bitcoin mines were in Sichuan and use hydropower.

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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?topic=4916.msg72174#msg72174. 3: The Magazine 1.

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

That’s what happened to bitcoin. The structure of the ledger is also important for keeping Bitcoin secure. Nakamoto conceived of his as an ever-growing, unbroken chain of blocks, each representing a batch of transactions strung together and validated within a ten-minute bitcoin reward period. Hence the word that’s now on every CIO’s lips: “blockchain.” (Notably, the term “blockchain” never appeared in the original Bitcoin white paper—a good argument for why Bitcoin should have no exclusive claim to the term.) Within each block period, every miner that’s engaged in the proof-of-work race for the next bitcoin reward is simultaneously gathering new incoming transactions and arranging them into their own new block.

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First Edition: February 2018 * Throughout this book you will see a distinction between “bitcoin” written with a lowercase “b” and “Bitcoin” with an uppercase “B.” The former refers to bitcoin’s status as a currency, the latter is a reference to the overarching system and protocol that underpins that currency and other uses for the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. * Addressing an inconsistency in popular parlance, we generally employ three distinct usages of the word “blockchain”: “The blockchain,” which refers to Bitcoin’s original distributed ledger; “a blockchain”—or, pluralized, “blockchains”—to cover a variety of more recent distributed ledgers that share Bitcoin’s chain-of-blocks structure; and “blockchain technology,” referring to the overall field.

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Among other considerations, a successful attack would significantly undermine the value of all the bitcoins the attacking miner owns. Either way, no one has managed to attack Bitcoin’s ledger in nine years. That unbroken record continues to reinforce belief in Bitcoin’s cost-and-incentive security system. If we view the bitcoin currency from this angle—and not merely as it is popularly portrayed, as a strange new digital unit of value that some geeky guys think is a good alternative to dollars, euros, or yen—we can build a conceptual framework for understanding the wider implications of Satoshi’s invention. The currency, bitcoin (lowercase “b”), is first and foremost a store of value that rewards people for securing Bitcoin (uppercase “B”), the system.

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang, Amir Taaki

bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, cashless society, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, Free Software Foundation, global reserve currency, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money market fund, Network effects, peer-to-peer, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, seigniorage, smart contracts, social graph, time value of money, Turing test, zero day, zero-sum game

gold.org Dollar has been preferred to Gold despite having similar weight, significantly larger size, and seigniorage. The Gold-Bitcoin relation assumes no distinction in volatility and liquidity, though Gold objectively outperforms [174] Bitcoin in both areas. Given that Gold and Bitcoin are both stable monies [175] , no speculative return is assumed for either. Other Gold, Bitcoin and Dollar monetary properties are assumed to be either equivalent or not relevant to state reserve currency. Private Key Fallacy Private keys do not secure Bitcoin, they secure units of Bitcoin. Private key control applies to individual security, not system security. Whoever controls keys is the owner , and Bitcoin provides security for that owner, even if the keys are stolen.

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White market trade , by definition, requires permission, and black market does not. As a simple matter of definition, Bitcoin operations cannot be both white market and permissionless. Any person operating in the white market requires permission to do so. Bitcoin is therefore inherently a black market money. Its security architecture necessarily assumes it is operating without state permission [162] . The security of Bitcoin does not extend to white market systems. Any system dependent upon the value proposition of Bitcoin must also be black market. Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy There is a theory that in a choice to join a ban on Bitcoin, individual states face a prisoner’s dilemma [163] .

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STATISM Fedcoin Objectives As implied by Value Proposition [224] there are two aspects of Bitcoin that make it a target of state controls, both threats to tax revenue. In combating [225] Bitcoin the state may attempt to introduce a cosmetically similar money [226] , which can be referred to as Fedcoin. This could be introduced as a split or alternative coin . The objective would be to preserve the superficial aspects of Bitcoin while eliminating its value proposition. This would protect tax revenues while allowing proponents to propagandize Fedcoin as a “safer” alternative to Bitcoin. Fedcoin is not itself relevant to Bitcoin except to the extent that the act of compelling its use requires resistance [227] .

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

Halving of Mining Rewards Changes in the pool of mining power imply that the Bitcoin algorithm’s difficulty target actually adjusts in both directions—the difficulty target falls when the pool of mining power declines. A graph of the difficulty over time is available at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-difficulty.html. The calculation that yields the Bitcoin number at the May 2020 halving is as follows: 210,000 blocks × (50 bitcoins + 25 bitcoins + 12.5 bitcoins) equals 18.375 million bitcoin. For a more detailed explanation, see “Bitcoin Halving, Explained,” Coindesk, March 24, 2020, https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-halving-explainer. 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/.

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Halving of Mining Rewards Moreover, the rewards for validating a block are hardwired to fall over time as more bitcoins get mined. In this process, referred to as Bitcoin halving, the number of generated rewards per block is periodically divided by two to keep the total supply of bitcoins, which will never exceed twenty-one million, from growing too fast. This process of controlling supply is also seen as essential to preserving Bitcoin’s value. Bitcoin halving happens every 210,000 blocks and reduces the reward by 50 percent each time in a geometric progression. The latest Bitcoin halving took place in May 2020, when the reward fell to 6.25 bitcoins for each block mined. The initial block reward was 50, so this means that about 18.4 million bitcoins had been mined by the time this halving took place.

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There are technical constraints, however, on how finely a bitcoin can be sliced. Each bitcoin is equal to one hundred million Satoshis, making a Satoshi the smallest unit of Bitcoin currently recorded on the blockchain. One Satoshi represents 0.00000001 BTC—or Bitcoin to its eighth decimal. If the value of one bitcoin was $10,000, one Satoshi would be the equivalent of one-hundredth of a penny. A Marvel A brief review of what Bitcoin has wrought is in order here. To understand the ingenuity of its underlying blockchain technology, let us consider the problems Bitcoin was intended to solve. Two key issues related to financial market transactions are trust and verifiability.

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

Sometimes, the term is used to refer to just miners… The blockchain is a public list of all transactions that have ever been sent, ensuring that everyone knows which bitcoins belong to whom… A miner is someone who tries to create blocks to add to the blockchain (the term also refers to a piece of software that does this). Miners are rewarded for their work by the Bitcoin protocol, which automatically assigns 50 new bitcoins to the miner who creates a valid block. This is how all bitcoins come into existence.12 He also wrote an article, for journalists, on misconceptions about Bitcoin, explaining, “Bitcoin does not have a central organization or authority… Rather than thinking of Bitcoin as a product released by a traditional corporation, it is more appropriate to think of it as a self-sustaining digital commodity, similar to gold.

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Timeline 2011 Late winter Vitalik starts learning about Bitcoin, writing for Bitcoin Weekly June 1 Gawker article, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” is published Bitcoin price shoots up from less than $9 to almost $32 within a week August Vitalik becomes a writer for Bitcoin Magazine 2012 May Bitcoin Magazine publishes its inaugural issue Vitalik graduates from high school September Vitalik begins at University of Waterloo 2013 May Vitalik decides to take time off from school August Vitalik decides to extend his break from school September Vitalik spends a week in a squat with Amir Taaki in Milan September Vitalik spends four to six weeks in Israel; has revelation about “layer 2” functionalities on Bitcoin Early October Bitcoin price in low $100s Early November Bitcoin price in the low $200s November 4–8 Vitalik in Los Angeles November 8–December 10 Vitalik in San Francisco Mid-November Bitcoin price in the $400s, breaks through $800 Vitalik takes walk in the Presidio, where he has a technical breakthrough on Ethereum’s structure November 27 Vitalik sends Ethereum white paper to friends Bitcoin price crosses $1,000 for the first time December 10–11 Vitalik and Anthony Di Iorio attend the Inside Bitcoins conference December 19 Gavin Wood writes Vitalik December 25 Jeff Wilcke and Gavin start writing implementations of the Ethereum white paper 2014 January 1 Anthony’s Decentral opens in Toronto January 20–21 Ethereum group arrives in Miami January 25–26 BTC Miami conference Mid- to late February Jeff, Gavin, and Joe added as cofounders (announced on blog March 5) March 1 Zug crew moves into Spaceship March 5 Ethereum GmbH established in Switzerland Early April Gavin publishes the Ethereum yellow paper April 11–13 Bitcoin Expo in Toronto May 26 Skype call between Stephan Tual and Mathias Grønnebæk in Twickenham and Mihai Alisie, Taylor Gerring, Roxana Sureanu, and Richard Stott in Zug May 31–June 1 Vitalik and Gavin in Vienna; receive call from Stephan and Mathias June 3 Ethereum’s Game of Thrones Day July 9 Stiftung Ethereum created July 22 Crowdsale begins September 2 Crowdsale ends November 24–28 DevCon 0 at ETH Dev in Berlin 2015 Late February to early March Foundation meeting; decision to remove current board members and recruit “professional board” February–March Kelley Becker begins as COO of ETH Dev UG June 12 Anthony Di Iorio accused of holding one of the footballs “hostage” Mid-June Wayne Hennessy-Barrett, Lars Klawitter, and Vadim Levitin are brought on as board members Ming Chan is hired as executive director July 30 Ethereum launches ~August 1–2 Ming makes accusation against Vadim Week of August 9 Stephan tries to get Vitalik to change early contributor allocations August 10 First version of MyEtherWallet created August 15 Ethereum Foundation pays early contributors August 16 Stephan and Vitalik argue on Reddit about early contributor distributions August 18 MyEtherWallet domain name registered Mid- to late August Stephan fired August 22–23 First Ethereum Foundation board meeting ~September 2–7 Vitalik, Ming, and Casey stay at a cabin in Toronto September 11 Casey, Ming, Vitalik, Joe Lubin, Andrew Keys, and others meet at ConsenSys about DevCon 1 September 28 Vitalik publishes blog post about how Ethereum is close to running out of money Board directors send official resignation letter November 9–13 DevCon 1 in London Christoph Jentzsch demonstrates the Slock; announces the DAO Late November/early December Gavin fired 2016 January 24 ETH closes above $2 February 2 Ethcore publishes a blog post about how Parity is the fastest Ethereum client February 11 ETH closes above $6 for the first time March 2 The DAO is added to GitHub March 13 ETH hits a new high of $15.26; Vitalik feels comfortable about the Ethereum Foundation’s multiyear runway Mid-April Ming reams Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf in phone call April 25 Vitalik, Gavin, and others from the Ethereum Foundation announced as DAO curators April 26 Announcement about establishment of DAO.link April 29 Slock.it makes first proposal to the DAO Taylor Van Orden’s fiancé, Kevin, flips a coin to choose the DAO contract April 30 The DAO sale (“creation period”) launches May 13 Gavin resigns as curator May 14 Miscalculation of when DAO token price rises May 24 “Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency” blog post by Coinbase cofounder May 25 Slock.it makes first DAO security proposal May 27 Emin Gün Sirer and paper coauthors call for a moratorium on the DAO May 28 DAO sale ends/DAO created June 5 Christian Reitwießner discovers the re-entrancy bug exploit, warns other devs about it June 9 Peter Vessenes publishes a blog post about the re-entrancy attack vector June 10 Christian also blogs about it June 11 Vitalik tweets he has been buying DAO tokens since the security news June 12 Stephan Tual publishes “No funds at risk” blog post June 14, 02:52 UTC Child DAO 59, which becomes the Dark DAO, emptied June 14, 11:42 UTC DAO attacker begins turning BTC into DAO tokens and ETH via ShapeShift in multiple transactions (until June 16) June 15, 4:26 UTC DAO attacker votes yes for proposal 59 June 17 DAO hits value of $250 million 03:34 UTC DAO attacker begins re-entrancy attack on the DAO 12:27 UTC Attacker stops draining funds Greg Maxwell emails Vitalik, “Don’t be a greedy idiot” That evening, developers later called the Robin Hood Group (RHG) consider attacking the DAO; Alex van de Sande’s internet goes down Highest day of ETH trading ever June 18, 10:21 UTC Someone purporting to be the DAO attacker publishes an open letter about how he or she “rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether” Christoph publishes blog post laying out options Robin Hood Group has phone call discussing attempting a rescue June 19 Lefteris Karapetsas publishes a blog post explaining the options June 21 Copycat attacks begin; Robin Hood Group rescues 7.2 million ETH June 22 Lefteris writes another blog post walking through how the hard and soft forks would work RHG realizes there is a “suspected malicious actor” in the White Hat DAO June 23 Bitcoin Suisse posts a letter from the suspected malicious actor to Reddit June 24 Péter Szilágyi posts soft fork versions of Geth and Parity clients Denial-of-service (DoS) attack on soft fork discovered Soft fork called off Early to mid-July RHG conducts “DAO Wars” (re-entrancy attacks/rescues) on various mini Dark DAOs in order to make sure neither the DAO attacker nor the copycats can cash out Polo employee investigating identity of DAO attacker thinks he may have good leads on culprits July 7 Christoph publishes blog post laying out the remaining issues regarding a hard fork, including how to handle the Extra Balance July 9 Stephan publishes “Why the DAO robber could very well return the ETH on or after July 14” blog post July 10 GitHub page for Ethereum Classic (ETHC) created July 11 RHG whitelists the Dark DAO address in the curator multisig, hoping the DAO attacker will send the siphoned funds there July 16 Carbonvote shows 87 percent of voters in favor of a hard fork July 17 Vitalik publishes blog post explaining how the hard fork will happen July 20 Ethereum hard-forks Fat Finger accidentally sends 38,383 ETH to the DAO after the hard fork July 21 On BitcoinTalk, people post bids to buy “ETHC” Kraken trader emails Christoph asking to purchase his “ETHC” Gregory Maxwell emails Vitalik offering Bitcoin for his “ETHC” July 23 DAO attacker sends out “ETHC” from the Dark DAO to a grandchild DAO Ethereum Foundation devs start bashing Ethereum Classic in internal Skype chat July 24 Poloniex lists ETC Ethereum Foundation devs continue trashing ETC in internal Skype chat; a conversation screenshot is posted to Reddit July 25 Barry Silbert tweets that he bought ETC Genesis begins offering over-the-counter trading of ETC July 26 Bittrex and Kraken list ETC ETC:ETH hashing power ratio goes from 6:94 in the morning to 17.5:82.5 by late afternoon Eastern Daylight Time July 27 BTC-e publishes a blog saying most of its ETC was sent to Polo by its users Greg Maxwell emails Vitalik again about purchasing his ETC July 28 White Hat Group (WHG) rescues every last Wei of Fat Finger’s money from the DAO August 1 ETC price rising; ETH dropping Vitalik’s “I am working 100% on ETH” tweet August 2 ETH falls to $8.20, while ETC jumps to new high of $3.53, 43 percent of ETH’s market cap Bitfinex is hacked; crypto markets slump 14 percent August 5 White Hat Group starts flying into Neuchatel to work on returning ETC August 6 Call with Bitcoin Suisse August 7–8 The WHG decides to return money as ETH, not ETC August 8 The WHG receives its first legal threat, from Berger Singerman “Fat Protocols” thesis blog post published August 9 WHG/Bity deposit ETC to exchanges; deposit blocked on Polo, eventually allowed, then trading on Polo blocked August 10 By phone, second whale demands ETC, not ETH August 11 The WHG receives a second legal threat, demanding immediate refund of ETC, from MME August 12 WHG announces decision to distribute the funds as ETC August 16 WhalePanda publishes blog post “Ethereum: Chain of liars & thieves” August 18 Stephan publishes an apology August 26 Bity posts a revised ETC Withdraw Contract and announces it will be deployed August 30 Bity/WHG deploy the ETC Withdraw Contract August 31 Polo and Kraken deposit the WHG ETC into the Withdraw Contract September 6 The final ETC for the White Hat Withdraw Contract is deposited The presumed DAO attacker moves money from the grandchild Dark DAO on ETC to his or her main account, 0x5e8f September 15 The Extra Balance Withdraw Contract on Ethereum is funded September 19 DevCon 2 begins in Shanghai DoS attacks on Ethereum begin October Poloniex employees realize that new owners have been added Sometime this fall, Jules Kim grudgingly gives bitcoin bonus to Johnny Garcia Sometime mid- to late 2016, Jules and Mike Demopoulos allegedly first oppose and then finally acquiesce to adding two-factor authentication to Polo October 18 Tangerine Whistle hard fork October 25 Ethereum Asia Pacific Ltd. incorporated in Singapore DAO attacker begins moving ETC to ShapeShift November 10 Golem ICO November 22 Spurious Dragon hard fork December Jules and Mike purportedly oppose adding a know-your-customer program to Poloniex so the exchange can comply with US sanctions against Iran; finally acquiesce in first half of 2017 2017 January Early Poloniex employees sign contracts for options for equity in the company, though they are not approved by the board until April January 25 EF files for trademark on “Enterprise Ethereum” and “Enterprise Ethereum Alliance” January 31 Nine ICOs in January raise almost $67 million MEW hits one hundred thousand visitors in January Global weekly crypto trade volume hits about $1 billion January/February Jeff Wilcke collapses February 27 Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announced ETH price breaks $15 for the first time since the DAO attack Taylor Gerring’s contract is not renewed by the EF February 28 Eight ICOs in February raise just over $73 million MEW hits 150,000 visits in February Spring Poloniex owners begin seeking buyers March 11 ETH closes above $20 for the first time March 24 ETH closes above $50 for the first time March 31 Six ICOs in March raise $22 million MEW hits three hundred thousand visits in March Global weekly crypto trade volume reaches over $3 billion April 24 Gnosis ICO ends April 27 Ming upset about “volunteer” project manager April 30 Thirteen ICOs in April raise $85.5 million MEW hits 386,000 visits in April May 4 ETH closes just shy of $97 In Skype chat, Ming expresses wish to buy domain names associated with Enterprise Ethereum Alliance on the Ethereum domain name system May 22 ETH closes above $174 Consensus 2017 conference begins May 23 SEC “crypto czar” Valerie Szczepanik makes her first comments on initial coin offerings May 25 Token Summit May 26–27 Ethereum Foundation delays payment to Ethereum DEV UG May 30 ETH twenty-four-hour volume exceeds that of BTC for the first time ETH price closes just shy of $232 May 31 Basic Attention Token raises nearly $36 million in twenty-four seconds from 210 buyers Twenty-two ICOs in May raise $229 million MEW hits one million visits in May June Security issues—scams, phishing attempts, hacks—pick up Poloniex sometimes sees trading volume of $5 billion a week June 10 ETH price closes just under $338 June 12 Bancor raises $153 million ETH price closes above $401 June 14 Kelley, Ming, and Patrick Storchenegger meet; Kelley quits Mid-June to mid-July Other ETH Dev office staff—CFO Frithjof Weinert and office manager Christian Vömel—also leave June 20 Status ICO June 25 4chan post claims Vitalik is dead ETH price falls, closes above $303 June 26 EOS launches its yearlong ICO June 30 Thirty-one ICOs in June raise nearly $619 million MEW hits 2.7 million visits in June July 1–13 Tezos ICO raises $232 million July 11 ETH falls to close below $198 July 13–19 Vitalik expresses to Hudson Jameson he would like to remove Ming July 16 ETH price closes above $157 July 18 CoinDash hack July 19 First Parity multisig hack July 25 SEC DAO report Thirty-five ICOs in July raise more than $555 million MEW sees 2.6 million visits in July Early August Ethereum transaction count begins to consistently exceed that of Bitcoin August 10 Anthony Di Iorio sends legal letter to Vitalik, Ming, and Herbert Sterchi Gavin tweets to Vitalik that he could have never built Ethereum without Vitalik August 31 Forty-one ICOs in August raise nearly $438 million MEW hits 3.1 million visits in August September Weekly trading volume peaks on Polo drop to $4 billion, down from $5 billion September 11 Trader from Fidelity and senior vice president from Santander hired at Polo September 30 Sixty-two ICOs in September raise almost $533 million MEW hits 3.5 million visits in September October 27 Polkadot raises over $140 million in ICO October 27–November 1 Account presumed to be controlled by devops199 appears to conduct penetration testing, as if looking for contract vulnerabilities October 31 Eighty ICOs in October raise over $3 billion MEW sees 3.5 million visits in October November 1–4 DevCon 3 in Cancun, Mexico November 4 ConsenSys “Ming must go” email chain begins November 5 Polychain portfolio company San Pedro ceremony November 6 Second Parity multisig attack; funds frozen by devops199 November 8 Bitcoin hard fork called off November 14 Vitalik fires Ming by phone November 15 My email inquiring whether Ming has been fired November 16 Ming posts in Skype channel to “disavow the rumors” November 23 CryptoKitties soft launch November 30 Eighty-four ICOs in November raise nearly $1 billion MEW sees 4.6 million visits Early December Ming, Vitalik, and Casey meet in Hong Kong December 17 Bitcoin hits new all-time high of $20,000 Late December–early January Vitalik, Aya Miyaguchi, and Vitalik’s friends have a retreat in Thailand December 31 Ninety ICOs in December raise $1.3 billion MEW hits 7.7 million visits 2018 January 1 Friends persuade Vitalik to accelerate Ming’s departure January 4 ETH breaks past $1,000 to a little over $1,045 January 7 ETH trades at $1,153 January 8 ETH hits just under $1,267 January 9 ETH nearly hits $1,321 Around now, Vitalik sells seventy thousand of the EF’s ETH January 10 ETH reaches $1,417 January 13 ETH hits an all-time high over $1,432 The New York Times publishes “Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not” January 20 Vitalik and board meet in San Francisco to finalize transition from Ming as executive director to Aya Late January Polo employees informed Circle will be acquiring Polo January 31 Seventy-nine ICOs raise $1.28 billion MEW hits ten million visits Ming publishes farewell post on Ethereum blog Aya introduced as new executive director Glossary 51% attack a type of attack on a blockchain in which an entity or multiple collaborative entities try to take over a network by obtaining more than half the mining power 2FA see two-factor authentication account (aka address) an entity that can receive, hold, and send ether; can be owned either by a person with the private keys or by a smart contract address see account alt-coins any cryptocurrency that is like Bitcoin with just a few parameters tweaked; also used pejoratively to refer to any coin that is not Bitcoin, aka “shitcoin,” often by Bitcoin maximalists asset anything that produces economic value Bitcoin (uppercase) the first blockchain; the peer-to-peer electronic cash network that runs the software enabling the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin (lowercase), to be transferred without an intermediary bitcoin (lowercase) the first cryptocurrency, the digital asset native to the Bitcoin network, with a supply of twenty-one million, giving it characteristics of digital gold Bity a crypto exchange, based in Neuchatel, Switzerland, that helped Slock.it form a Swiss legal entity so it could take payment from the DAO and helped the White Hat Group in its attempt to return the ETC from the DAO to DAO token holders block explorer a website giving data on the transactions in a blockchain blockchain a time-stamped, distributed, decentralized, historical ledger of all the transactions on a crypto network; copies of the ledger are held on a global network of computers; it acts as a golden copy of time-stamped transactions that can replace intermediaries normally tasked with executing the transactions BTC the ticker for bitcoin carbonvote a type of vote by blockchain that does not require the voter to send coins but instead records the number of coins inside the wallet from which the vote was sent; at the end, it tallies the number of coins in the wallets that sent to the yes address versus the number of coins in the wallets that sent to the no address chain split see hard fork child DAO a new instance of the DAO created from coins sent from a parent DAO client, software the piece of software, like a desktop app, that connects a user’s computer to a service; in the case of Ethereum, the software that helped individual users run or connect to the Ethereum network CME an exchange for trading futures and options coin another word for cryptocurrency or token CoinMarketCap a popular cryptocurrency data site ranking coins by their market capitalization cold storage the most secure way of storing one’s crypto, with the private keys held offline consensus (lowercase) the desired state of a blockchain in which all nodes agree on the state of the ledger and on what transactions should be included in what order Consensus (uppercase) the largest blockchain conference, held annually in New York City by crypto-focused publication CoinDesk ConsenSys the Brooklyn-based Ethereum venture production studio founded by Joe Lubin, which created Ethereum infrastructure tools and tried to foster decentralized applications on Ethereum cryptocurrency a digital asset produced by a blockchain that is highly fungible, divisible, and transportable and whose movements can be tracked, unless the chain has built-in privacy features cryptoeconomics (aka tokenomics) the game theory that gives different actors in a crypto network the incentive to offer services on it that will keep the decentralized network alive without any company in the middle hiring employees and tasking them with specific responsibilities curator, DAO the role that would determine whether or not an English-language proposal to the DAO matched the code submitted and, if the proposal were approved, check that the Ethereum address for receiving funds belonged to the contractor cypherpunk a person or ethos advocating strong encryption and privacy-preserving technologies, often to evade government detection or surveillance or to push for sociopolitical change DAO decentralized autonomous organization; an organization managed via votes on a blockchain DAO, the the decentralized venture fund built by Slock.it that aimed to have its token holders decide to which projects it would allocate its capital dapp (decentralized application) any application built on a blockchain without an intermediary, such as a company in the center hiring for all the roles to provide all the services; it instead has built-in incentives, usually involving its native coin, to entice individuals and entities to offer those services on the network Dark DAO (also see mini Dark DAOs) child DAO 59; the child DAO into which the DAO attacker siphoned 3.64 million ETH Decentral the blockchain/decentralized application community center and coworking space in Toronto founded by Anthony Di Iorio DevCon the annual Ethereum developer conference difficulty a way of keeping a cryptocurrency mining algorithm competitive for miners such that miners will find blocks at a targeted average interval, such as ten minutes on bitcoin or twelve to fifteen seconds on Ethereum DoS attack denial of service attack; a way of hobbling a company or blockchain by spamming it, or inundating it with more requests than it can handle early contributors people who worked on Ethereum before the crowdsale East Asia Pacific Ltd. a business entity Vitalik Buterin created in Switzerland to have freedom from Ming Chan; it was used to pay the researchers on his team EEA Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the industry organization promoting use of Ethereum in companies EF Ethereum Foundation EIP Ethereum Improvement Proposal, a technical suggestion for improving things related to the Ethereum network, such as the protocol, clients, or standards for specific types of contracts ERC-20 token a token created using a standard for new tokens on Ethereum, so called because it was the twentieth issue posted on a discussion board called Ethereum Request for Comments ETC the ticker for the ether classic price ETH the ticker for the ether price ETH Dev the German business entity (UG) created by Gavin Wood in Berlin; after the crowdsale, it hired the bulk of the developers building the protocol and C++ client Ethcore (also see Parity) the start-up Gavin Wood founded when he left the Ethereum Foundation, now called Parity Ethereum Foundation (aka EF or Stiftung Ethereum) the Swiss-based nonprofit organization tasked with stewarding the development of the Ethereum protocol Ethereum GmbH The Swiss business entity first set up for Ethereum; even after the founders decided to go with a nonprofit structure, the entity held the crowdsale and then was liquidated after the network launch Etherscan a popular “block explorer” or website offering data for the Ethereum blockchain exchange a business that enables its customers to trade one asset for another, such as BTC for ETH Extra Balance the extra people paid to the DAO for DAO tokens after the price increased from 1 ETH:100 DAO in the first half of the crowdsale to 1.05 to 1.5 ETH:100 DAO in the second half fiat currency a type of money issued by a government by decree and not backed by anything such as gold fiduciary members the group of Ethereum cofounders who would also be financially responsible FUD fear, uncertainty, doubt.

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Willett invented the initial coin offering: Laura Shin, “Here’s the Man Who Created ICOs and This Is the New Token He’s Backing,” Forbes, September 21, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/09/21/heres-the-man-who-created-icos-and-this-is-the-new-token-hes-backing/?sh=4a22cd0b1183. 18. Vitalik Buterin, “Bitcoin in Canada, Part I: Introducing the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada,” Bitcoin Magazine, October 11, 2013, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/exploring-the-bitcoin-alliance-of-canada-part-i-1381547131. 19. Anthony Di Iorio (@Anthony Di I.), “Meet at Pauper’s Pub in T.O. for a beer and wings and talk all things Bitcoin,” Meetup, November 3, 2012, https://www.meetup.com/decentral_ca/events/87122762. 20. Charles Hoskinson, “Charles Hoskinson of the Bitcoin Education Project,” Let’s Talk Bitcoin, audio posted to YouTube by The LTB Network, June 9, 2013, 0:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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

Kraken thrived, went on the Bloomberg Terminal, and formed a working bitcoin “bank.” Cointerra died in the bitcoin crash of 2014. Demeester told of the even grander self-funding exploits of Bitcoin Armory, now said to be among the best bitcoin digital “wallets.” Aiming to produce a secure bitcoin wallet, in software, it launched a $100,000 funding round in 2013. The dollars poured in, and in an upside surprise, they actually raised $500,000. They spent $100,000 on the business plan and stashed $400,000 in bitcoins. The $400,000 soared to a bitcoin value of $4 million. Filling their wallet without even writing code, they provided the model for close to 1,500 blockchain companies over the subsequent five years.

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By contrast, Rothbard’s monetary view has never been put in effect, but actually has an opportunity to prove its viability with bitcoin. Bitcoin with its absolutely limited supply defines the Rothbardian system. “However, there’s a reason why the world has not adopted a Rothbardian monetary system up until now. It won’t work, and bitcoin as designed will not last as a functional currency.” As Kendall drilled more deeply into bitcoin, he became increasingly alarmed at what he found. “While Satoshi was beyond brilliant in creating the blockchain as the basis for bitcoin, Satoshi had no understanding of currency as a unit of account. By limiting bitcoin’s supply to 21 million units over a 131-year period, Satoshi designed bitcoin as a deflationary currency. . . .

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By limiting bitcoin’s supply to 21 million units over a 131-year period, Satoshi designed bitcoin as a deflationary currency. . . . Because of its deflationary design, bitcoin is used more as a volatile investment bet” than as a measuring stick or unit of account. As Ammous points out: “The reason Satoshi chose 100 million units per Bitcoin was that the total global money supply at the time was around $21 trillion, and he wanted the smallest unit of Bitcoin to be equivalent to one cent in case the entire world economy were to switch to using Bitcoin. . . . [If that had happened in 2009], each Satoshi would be worth one U.S. dollar cent and each Bitcoin would have been worth around $1 million.”

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

If more merchants accept bitcoin as a medium of payment, then people who’ve been sitting on bitcoins may start to use their store for purchases, thereby freeing up more bitcoins. If merchants begin to issue bitcoin-denominated gift cards, then more people should be exposed to cryptocurrencies and become more comfortable transacting in bitcoin. And so, hypothetically, people will have fewer reasons to hoard bitcoin. Advocates of the bitcoin protocol argue that, because bitcoins are divisible to eight decimal places—the smallest unit is called a Satoshi, worth one hundredth of a millionth of a bitcoin—the smallest denominations will buy more if demand for bitcoin increases. There’s also the possibility of tweaking the protocols to allow for greater divisibility, say, picopayments (trillionths of a bitcoin) and to remine stranded bitcoin after a period of dormancy.

…

Early adopters have tended to hold on to bitcoin as they hold on to gold, hoping that its value will increase in the long run, and therefore treating bitcoin as an asset rather than as a medium of exchange. According to economic theorists, low or no inflation motivates holders to hoard rather than spend their bitcoin. Still, if more trusted bitcoin exchanges facilitate consumers’ movement in and out of bitcoin, then the frequency and volume of trading could increase. If more merchants accept bitcoin as a medium of payment, then people who’ve been sitting on bitcoins may start to use their store for purchases, thereby freeing up more bitcoins.

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Gox exchange or the conviction of Ross William Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road darknet market seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for trafficking illegal drugs, child pornography, and weapons using the bitcoin blockchain as a payment system. Bitcoin’s price has fluctuated drastically, and the ownership of bitcoins is still concentrated. A 2013 study showed that 937 people owned half of all bitcoin, although that is changing today.11 How do we get from porn and Ponzi schemes to prosperity? To begin, it’s not bitcoin, the still speculative asset, that should interest you, unless you’re a trader. This book is about something bigger than the asset. It’s about the power and potential of the underlying technological platform. This is not to say that bitcoin or cryptocurrencies per se are unimportant, as some people have suggested as they scramble to disassociate their projects from the scandalous ventures of the past.

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

What I’m trying to say is, even though I got ripped off, and my life seems to really be falling apart as I am dying, something really weird happened. A tiny little gift from the universe, a token, a bitcoin to say everything will be alright. I deposited .1 bitcoin into bitcoin fog [an online bitcoin wallet], all I could really afford at this time, as I wanted to buy before SR shut down now that i’m not getting my order from Incoming, and didn’t want to suffer over christmas/be sick. I withdrew them into my wallet, and what do you know, bitcoin fog fucked up. I was given .9328btc in return for the .1btc I deposited. While I feel bad for bitcoin fog, I can’t help but try and take this as a sign that even though my time is coming to an end, things will always be alright, and there is always a tiny light at the end of the tunnel.

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This is where bitcoin comes in. In a nutshell, bitcoin is a borderless digital currency that started out as a valueless computer code. Within a few years, it had a market value closing in on US$3 billion. Bitcoin exchanges (much like stock exchanges) allow users to buy and trade bitcoin online, but those who want to remain anonymous will use cash over the counter at a local bank or exchange cash for bitcoin credit person-to-person. Pages of financial tomes have been dedicated to whether bitcoin should be categorised as a currency or a commodity, how it is created and traded, and its implications for fiat currencies, all of which are well beyond the scope of this book.

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Something to think about . . .’ Finney later wrote that he had been the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Nakamoto sent him ten bitcoins. He left his PC running and mining until he turned it off because ‘it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me’. He then went on to other things until: The next I heard of bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet, and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they’ll be worth something to my heirs.

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

Question: Can’t anyone create an unlimited quantity of bitcoins? The number of bitcoins are strictly and severely limited by the protocol. It’s true that bitcoin is an open source protocol, meaning that anyone can copy it but, at the same time, everyone knows who copied it. So you can create bitcoin as an exact copy but it will have no value. The ledger on the canonical system is constantly monitored for its integrity. Maintaining that ledger is not the responsibility of a company. It is the responsibility of the whole community in which anyone can enter. Question: The estimated cap on bitcoin is 21 million. Is this enough bitcoin to go around?

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Now, to further understand how Mises’s theory fits with bitcoin, you have to understand one other point concerning the history of the cryptocurrency. On the day of its release (January 9, 2009), the value of bitcoin was exactly zero. And so it remained for 10 months after its release. All the while, transactions were taking place, but it had no posted value above zero for this entire time. The first posted price of bitcoin appeared on October 5, 2009. On this exchange, $1 equaled 1,309.03 bitcoin (which many considered overpriced at the time). In other words, the first valuation of bitcoin was little more than one-tenth of a penny. Yes, if you had bought $100 worth of bitcoin in those days, and not sold them in some panic, you would be a half-billionaire today.

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It lived as a payment system for 10 months before the currency obtained any market value, and that value was a response to the market’s experience that the payment system was working. Question: Very simply, how does bitcoin work? Answer: Bitcoin depends on a ledger system that exists on the Internet in millions of different copies that reside on any node. The ledger keeps up with property titles to bitcoin, recording public addresses and their movements through exchange using cryptography. Bitcoin has value because of this payment network called the blockchain. Everyone can see the blockchain in operation. There is perfect transparency, even if the identity of the owners are not known. New bitcoins are created through a process called mining, which really amounts to verifying transactions.

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

And while some games, most notably Second Life with its Linden dollars, produced thriving online economies that extended beyond the game itself, they had yet to catch on with the broader public. Bitcoin seemed like a solution, but at first no one outside the small Bit-coin network ascribed any worth to its tokens. In a story that has become memorialized in Bitcoin lore (and etched into the blockchain’s permanent record), on March 22, 2010, 10,000 Bitcoins were used to pay for two pizzas, worth forty dollars. For some, that now-absurd expenditure reflected an idyllic time: Sure, the stuff was nearly worthless, but it was open to all, as early adopters could mine Bitcoin with their home computers without racking up enormous hardware and electricity costs.

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The purported “future of money” is in fact the past of money, a failed experiment and one we revisit at our collective peril. ° ° ° I have to address one last false story that Bitcoin maxis—the people with the laser eyes who aren’t Tom Brady—have been spreading. You may have heard that Bitcoin is “digital gold,” which was a popular story when people were buying it for over $60,000 per coin but less so when its price fell dramatically. What hardcore Bitcoiners mean by this is that Bitcoin’s strictly limited supply—only twenty-one million Bitcoins can ever be mined, according to the code—make it scarce, impossible to manipulate, and therefore valuable, the same way gold functioned in the economy of the nineteenth century.

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But a tulip, no matter how pretty, is just a flower, and eventually the market for them crashed back down to earth. By now, more than 90 percent of the Bitcoins that can ever exist have already been mined. That makes Bitcoin’s supply almost perfectly inelastic, a fancy word meaning it can’t grow or shrink in response to changes in price. It’s basically fixed. This makes the price of Bitcoin even more susceptible to changes in demand. Let’s compare the supply and demand chart I mentioned before with Bitcoin’s: Notice anything? Look at the differences in price between the two models in response to the same change in demand. Because supply of Bitcoin is more or less fixed, a change in demand for it has severe consequences for its price.

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

As of the 2014 holiday season: Jillian Kumagai, “More Than 21,000 Retailers Accept Bitcoin Payments,” Mashable, November 15, 2014, http://mashable.com/2014/11/15/bitcoin-retailers-infographic/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link; Jon Matonis, “Top 10 Bitcoin Merchant Sites,” Forbes, May 24, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/05/24/top-10-bitcoin-merchant-sites/; Benzinga, “What Companies Accept Bitcoin?” Nasdaq, February 4, 2014, http://www.nasdaq.com/article/what-companies-accept-bitcoin-cm323438; Jonas Chokun, “Who Accepts Bitcoins?” Bitcoin Values, http://www.bitcoinvalues.net/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins.html. On October 31, 2008, a research paper: Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin,” Wired, November 23, 2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/.

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Prominent economist Nouriel Roubini sent out a string of tweets attacking the notion that Bitcoin is a currency. As Roubini tweeted: “Apart from a base 4 criminal activities, Bitcoin is not a currency as it is not a unit of account or a means of payments or store of value.” He went on to explain his rationale in further tweets: “Bitcoin is not a unit of account as no price of goods and services is set in Bitcoin unit nor it ever will. So it isn’t a currency.” “Bitcoin isn’t a store of value as little wealth is in Bitcoin and no assets in it. Also given price volatility it is a lousy store of value.” “Bitcoin isn’t means of payment as few transactions in Bitcoin. And given its volatility all who accept it convert it right back into $/€/¥.”

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On October 31, 2008, a research paper: Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin,” Wired, November 23, 2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/. It called for the creation: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Bitcoin, November 1, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Banks must be trusted: Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis. The goal is for 21 million: “How Does Bitcoin Work?” Economist, April 11, 2013, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/economist-explains-how-does-bitcoin-work. At that point, no more: Alice Truong, “Top 10 Bitcoin Myths Debunked,” CoinDesk, June 4, 2013, http://www.coindesk.com/top-10-bitcoin-myths-debunked/.

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

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. One notable transaction involved a 10,000 BTC pizza. On 6 August, a major vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or "block chain" which allowed for users to bypass Bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of Bitcoins On 15 August, the major vulnerability was exploited.

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The host of CNBC's Mad Money, Jim Cramer, played himself in a courtroom scene where he testifies that he doesn’t consider Bitcoin a true currency, saying “There’s no central bank to regulate it; it’s digital and functions completely peer to peer.” In October 2012, BitPay reported having over 1,000 merchants accepting Bitcoin under its payment processing service. 2013 In February 2013, the Bitcoin-based payment processor Coinbase reported selling $1 million in Bitcoins in a single month at over $22 per Bitcoin. In March, the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) established regulatory guidelines for "decentralized virtual currencies" such as Bitcoin, classifying American "Bitcoin miners" who sell their generated Bitcoins as Money Service Businesses (or MSBs), that may be subject to registration and other legal obligations.

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About Donald Norman Donald is the co-Founder of the Bitcoin Consultancy. The group works on software development for core bitcoin code. Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized digital currency. As such, it’s implications and uses are entirely unique. While bitcoin now is already a thriving 70 million dollar marketplace, in many respects it is only a wildly successful proof of concept. Imagine the internet before the web browser, Bitcoin Consultancy is building the road map and bringing the advantages of bitcoin to a scalable and enterprise level. Donald has appeared as an advocate of bitcoin in Reuters, Newsweek, WSJ(SmartMoney), The Independent, CNBC and others.

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

Yearn.finance is useful for farmers looking for a protocol that automatically selects the optimal strategy. Chapter 6: Ways to Mine Your Bitcoin on Your Own There are three ways to get Bitcoin; by purchasing on an exchange, collecting them for goods and services, and last one is by mining new ones. Bitcoin acts like cash, but it can be mined into gold. “Mining ‘is a language used for the discovery of new Bitcoins – just like discovering gold. It is the validation of Bitcoin transactions compiled into one block with a fixed size and added to the blockchain in real life. For instance, Cynthia purchases a TV from an online retailer with a Bitcoin. To make sure her Bitcoin is real, miners perform a computational operation that is specific to each blockchain to validate transactions and add new blocks of transactions.

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Here are some of these challenges: Technology cost Although blockchain existence saves users money on transaction fees, the technology is not entirely free. The “proof of work” algorithm and system that Bitcoin uses to verify transactions digest huge amounts of computational power. In the physical world, the millions of computers on the Bitcoin network are almost equal to what Denmark consumes every year. Regardless of the costs of mining Bitcoin, users still increase their electricity bills to approve transactions on the blockchain. When miners include a block to the Bitcoin blockchain, they are gifted with enough Bitcoin to make their time and energy count. For blockchains that do not use cryptocurrency, miners would like to be paid or otherwise encouraged to verify transactions.

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Although experts are trying to correct them and make them perfect, these important issues discourage some likely users from hopping. Blockchains where smart contracts processes can go through: Bitcoin Bitcoin is the perfect place for performing Bitcoin transactions; however, it has limited ability to process smart contracts. Side Chains This is another name for blockchains that run adjoining to Bitcoin, and they have a broader range to offer for processing contracts than that of Bitcoin. NXT NXT is a common blockchain forum that has a limited choice of templates for smart contracts. You have to use whatever resource you are given because you cannot code independently of these resources.

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

Millions of dollars in venture capital started flowing into start-ups that were making bitcoin wallets and bitcoin exchanges and “Buy with Bitcoin” buttons for online merchants. It was anarcho-capitalism, but without the anarchy. Bitcoin, weirdly, had become sort of normal. As it became clear bitcoin was legit, and wasn’t about to get shut down or disappear, more people began exchanging dollars for bitcoin. The exchange rate between dollars and bitcoin shot up to over $500 around the time of the Senate hearing. People started building special computers optimized to mine bitcoin—to attack the problems that the bitcoin software used to award new bitcoins. Then they started filling giant warehouses full of racks of those mining computers.

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Take a relatively normal year like 2016, before bitcoin’s bananas rise in 2017. That year, the exchange rate more than doubled, to $952 per bitcoin. If we lived in a world where bitcoin was really money—where we got paid in bitcoin, and got mortgages in bitcoin, and bought groceries in bitcoin—this rise in the value of bitcoin would have caused a deflation far worse than the one in the Great Depression. It would have suddenly taken twice as much work to pay off a student loan or a mortgage. It would have destroyed the economy. Or take 2018, when the value of bitcoin fell from around $13,000 per bitcoin to around $4,000. In a world where people used bitcoin as money, this would have meant prices tripled in a single year—an inflation rate far worse than anything the United States has seen since the Revolutionary War.

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Andresen—the first person Satoshi handed the code to, who gave away thousands of bitcoins because he believed so much in the process—eventually got so tired of the bitcoin civil war that he left the bitcoin world altogether. (For the record, in the bitcoin civil war, Andresen believed in bigger blocks.) The Price of Bitcoin As the nerds were fighting over the future of bitcoin, the exchange rate between bitcoins and dollars rose, then it rose some more, then it got completely ridiculous. A little later, it fell but remained much higher than it had been. Even after the crash, you could exchange a single bitcoin for thousands of dollars. This was generally seen as a good thing by people who were excited about bitcoin, not least because they had already exchanged dollars for bitcoins and—their belief in the inevitable failure of the dollar notwithstanding—they were excited by the future prospect of exchanging their bitcoins for many, many, many more dollars.

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

This brings us, of course, to Bitcoin. 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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For some observers (e.g. me), the invention of what we might call smart money – that is, money which has its own apps – is actually much more interesting than the peer-to-peer payment system. The value of Bitcoin, as shown in figure 3, has changed quite unpredictably in its decade of existence, which is why people have begun to talk about creating a different kind of cryptocurrency – a ‘stablecoin’ – that might be more suited to the mainstream. I do not think this is the cause of Bitcoin’s lack of adoption, however. For this, I refer back to the examples of DigiCash, Mondex and the others. Most people simply do not have the problem that Bitcoin solves (which is censorship resistance), and Bitcoin does not solve the problem they do have (which is, broadly speaking, the need for simplicity and reliability).

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I imagine it must have been rather inconvenient to step over flipping great wodges of cash to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so it makes me wonder why he did not either deposit the money in a bank or convert it to something with less volume. Perhaps this is a mass-market use case for Bitcoin after all! A quick look at the figures coming from the Bitcoin world indicates that while the use of this technology has peaked for ‘legit’ payments, it continues to climb for ‘dodgy’ ones. As shown in figure 7, Bitcoin use by criminals grew by two-thirds in the final quarter of 2019 (Popper 2020). Figure 7. The use of Bitcoin. The use of an immutable public ledger to store criminal transactions does not seem like much of a use case to me, but, as the figures show, the underbelly are indeed using it.

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

(It’s worth noting that Andresen himself had his commit access—his ability to make changes to the Bitcoin Core source code—revoked in May 2016.)12 Even as Satoshi’s presence began to fade, other members of the Bitcoin community were building an infrastructure around the cryptocurrency. New Liberty Standard established an exchange rate in October 2009 (1,309.03 bitcoins to the dollar, based on the cost of the electricity needed to mine bitcoins at the time).13 In February 2010, the Bitcoin Market became the first Bitcoin currency exchange—a place where bitcoins could be purchased with fiat currencies, or converted into more traditional forms of money.

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New Jersey (Tidbit),” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), https://www.eff.org/cases/rubin-v-new-jersey-tidbit. 20 Now available as a PDF from the Bitcoin Foundation, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 21 Erik Franco. “Inside the Chinese Bitcoin Mine That’s Grossing $1.5M a Month,” Motherboard, February 6, 2015, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/chinas-biggest-secret-bitcoin-mine?utm_source=motherboardyoutube. 22 Quoted in Maria Bustillos, “The Bitcoin Boom,” New Yorker, April 1, 2013. 23 Joshua Davis. “The Crypto-Currency: Bitcoin and Its Mysterious Inventor.” The New Yorker, October 10, 2011. 24 Ethan Zuckerman, “The Death of Tidbit and Why It Matters,” … My Heart’s in Accra, May 28, 2015, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/05/28/the-death-of-tidbit-and-why-it-matters/. 25 John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, (New York: Basic Books, 2012) 26 Mark S.

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As a result, while the earliest bitcoin miners could use their personal computers to validate the blockchain, today’s miners use specialized, high-end server farms. In late 2014, one of those operations comprised six sites in China that collectively produce eight petahashes of computation per second, creating 4,050 bitcoins per month. It’s an indicator of how large the bitcoin market has grown that this massive effort claimed only 3 percent of global bitcoin mining operations.21 In fact, as this book went to press, Bitcoin underwent its second halving—meaning that the number of bitcoins generated per second decreased by one-half.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He also brought together about 40 companies over two sessions, or “tribes,” all dedicated to working with, innovating around, mining and trading Bitcoin. Joel Yarmon first introduced me to Bitcoin when he brought in Peter Vincennes and his company Coinlab to pitch us. Coinlab would become a Bitcoin-focused innovator and miner. It seemed a little out there, but I liked it and we made a small investment in the company. Then I asked Peter if I could buy $250,000 worth of Bitcoin. The price was around $6 per Bitcoin. He bought some and stored them in Mt. Gox, the largest (at that time) Bitcoin exchange. He said he would take some money and buy an ASIC, a high-speed mining chip from Butterfly Labs to get us even cheaper Bitcoin. Then two things happened that made what should have been about 40,000 Bitcoins disappear.

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While I was lamenting the fact that I had lost all that Bitcoin, something happened that gave me another shot at getting involved in the Bitcoin opportunity. The US Marshall’s office confiscated the Bitcoins owned by the Silk Road, and more than 30,000 Bitcoins were put up for auction. I looked at this as an opportunity to rebuy the Bitcoins I lost. There were 31 bidders that came to the table, and the auction was a silent bid for nine blocks of approximately 4000 Bitcoins each. Most of the discussions among the bidders were about how much of a discount from market prices the large blocks of Bitcoins would sell for. The market price then was $618 per Bitcoin.

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There was a decreasing number of Bitcoins made available to be mined over time (the so-called halving), so it was likely that the price of a Bitcoin would increase in value as fewer Bitcoins were mined and its usage increased. The system was set up so that only 21 million Bitcoins would ever be created, so people would not have to worry about their Bitcoin losing value due to “overprinting,” a practice that many governments have engaged in that lowers their currencies’ values and causes inflation. In fact, as Bitcoins spread, and its usage increased, it was likely that the currency would become more valuable. It felt like it was funny money for a while. But people started accepting Bitcoin instead of dollars. Legend has it that one of the key Bitcoin programmers ordered a pizza and didn’t have cash to pay the delivery guy.

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

“Some things you need to know,” undated, bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know. 12.My account here is deeply indebted to Chris Pacia’s tutorial, which despite the rather patronizing title is the only one of many Bitcoin explainers I’ve come across that explores this stage of the process in such detail, chrispacia.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/bitcoin-mining-explained-like-youre-five-part-1-incentives/. 13.Among the Bitcoin community, the collapse of the Mt Gox exchange is legendary. See Yessi Bello Perez, “Mt Gox: History of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange,” CoinDesk, August 4, 2015. 14.Jose Pagliery, “The Tipping Point of Bitcoin Micropayments,” CoinDesk, November 15, 2014. 15.Gulliver, “Booking flights with Bitcoin: Taking off,” Economist, February 26, 2015. 16.http://usebitcoins.info/. 17.Pete Rizzo, “Is Bitcoin’s Merchant Appeal Fading?,” CoinDesk, March 13, 2015. 18.I actually consider this more an indictment of Visa than of Bitcoin, by the way.

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,” CoinDesk, March 13, 2015. 18.I actually consider this more an indictment of Visa than of Bitcoin, by the way. Visa has been around, in one form or another, since 1958; if besting a completely unknown competitor by a mere factor of 3,000 is all that it has to show for its half-century head start, that doesn’t strike me as saying a great deal. 19.Zack Whittaker, “Hackers can remotely steal fingerprints from Android phones,” ZDNet, August 5, 2015. 20.Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan, “Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous,” An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System (blog), September 30, 2011, anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html. 21.Bitcoin Project.

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London: Penguin, 2008. p. 82 et seq. 5Cryptocurrency 1.It’s important to note that blockchain operations aren’t really distributed in the sense generally meant by “distributed computation,” in which different chunks of a large problem are farmed out to a network of independent processors, and later annealed. The Bitcoin blockchain, by contrast, is replicated identically across all of the network’s nodes. The trade-off is that all of these copies are verifiably identical with one another, at the cost of other advantages of true distributed processing, chiefly speed. 2.As is customary among Bitcoin enthusiasts, in what follows I’ll simply refer to this party—whatever their actual number, gender or nationality—as a presumptively Japanese, presumptively male individual named Satoshi. 3.Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, Bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 4.Very carefully.

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

A growing number of people started to exchange Bitcoin for dollars, which pushed its exchange rate from under $0.001 in October 2009 to $100 in April 2013. In October that year, a US Federal Reserve spokesman hinted that Bitcoin might one day become a ‘viable currency’, and the following month the value of a single Bitcoin jumped to over $1,000. Millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin are now traded every day. In some parts of the world you can live almost entirely on Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s dramatic rise to prominence resulted in an explosion of investment, exchange companies, and even ATM machines. Many members of the Bitcoin community have entered into complex negotiations with governments and regulators about how to make the new digital currency work alongside the traditional.

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Although Amir’s technical know-how and experience are admired, his ideals and motivations have put him on the fringes of what has become an increasingly respectable Bitcoin community. Dark Wallet has pitted itself directly against organisations seeking to capitalise and control Bitcoin and its market. ‘Many prominent Bitcoin developers are actively in collusion with members of law enforcement and seeking approval from government legislators,’ reads the Dark Wallet blurb. ‘We believe this is not in Bitcoin users’ self-interest, and instead serves wealthy business interests that make up the self-titled Bitcoin Foundation.’ In a 2014 interview with Newsweek, the chief Bitcoin Foundation scientist, Gavin Andresen, said that he thinks of Bitcoin as ‘a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money.

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To keep governments and central banks out of it, Satoshi placed a cap on the total number of Bitcoins that could ever be produced: 21 million. Although Bitcoins can be bought and sold with real-world currencies, new Bitcoins are not minted by any central authority. Instead anyone who dedicates his computing power to verifying the transactions in the blockchain competes to earn a very small amount of new Bitcoins each time they do so (this is called ‘mining’). As more Bitcoins are created (approximately 13 million have been created so far), the remaining Bitcoins require more computing power to mine.fn3 The last Bitcoin is expected to be mined in around 2140.

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

Legendary investor Warren Buffett said, “It’s a gambling device.”1 Critics find its story similar to the famous tulip mania narrative in the Netherlands in the 1630s, when speculators drove up the price of tulip bulbs to such heights that one bulb was worth about as much as a house. That is, Bitcoins have value today because of public excitement. For Bitcoin to achieve its spectacular success, people had to become excited enough by the Bitcoin phenomenon to take action to seek out unusual exchanges to buy them. For Bitcoin’s advocates, labeling Bitcoin as a speculative bubble is the ultimate insult. Bitcoin’s supporters often point out that public support for Bitcoin is not fundamentally different from public support for many other things. For example, gold has held tremendous value in the public mind for thousands of years, but the public could just as well have accorded it little value if people had started using something else for money.

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The Bitcoin epidemic has progressed as a cascading sequence of surprises for most people. Bitcoin surprised when it was first announced, and then it surprised again and again as the world’s attention continued to grow by leaps and bounds. 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.

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To some extent, tulip mania continues even today, in a diminished form. The same might happen to Bitcoin. Nonetheless, the value of Bitcoin is very unstable. At one point, according to a headline in the Wall Street Journal, the US dollar price of Bitcoin rose 40% in forty hours2 on no clear news. Such volatility is evidence of the epidemic quality of economic narratives that may lead to an erratic jostling of prices. I will make no attempt here to explain the technology of Bitcoin, except to note that it is the result of decades of research. Few people who trade Bitcoins understand this technology. When I encounter Bitcoin enthusiasts, I often ask them to explain some of its underlying concepts and theories, such as the Merkle tree or the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, or to describe Bitcoin as an equilibrium of a congestion-queuing game with limited throughput.3 Typically the response is a blank stare.

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

Chapter 12 THE DREAM OF DECENTRALIZING ALL THE THINGS 278 “practical men, who believe themselves”: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1936), 383–84. 278 “Indeed,” Keynes wrote: Ibid. 279 On October 31, 2008: Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 41. 279 a short paper titled “Bitcoin”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 283 “the steady addition of a constant amount”: Ibid. 285 Laszlo Hanyecz: Bitcoinwhoswho, “A Living Currency: An Interview with ‘Jercos,’ Party to First Bitcoin Pizza Transaction,” Bitcoin Who’s Who (blog), January 30, 2016, http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2016/01/30/a-living-currency-an-interview-with-jercos-party-to-first-bitcoin-pizza-transaction. 286 Mt.

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Martin’s Press, 2015), 41. 279 a short paper titled “Bitcoin”: Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” October 31, 2008, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 283 “the steady addition of a constant amount”: Ibid. 285 Laszlo Hanyecz: Bitcoinwhoswho, “A Living Currency: An Interview with ‘Jercos,’ Party to First Bitcoin Pizza Transaction,” Bitcoin Who’s Who (blog), January 30, 2016, http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/blog/2016/01/30/a-living-currency-an-interview-with-jercos-party-to-first-bitcoin-pizza-transaction. 286 Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based firm: Yessi Bello Perez, “Mt Gox: The History of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange,” CoinDesk, August 4, 2015, http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-the-history-of-a-failed-bitcoin-exchange. 286 that the exchange “had weaknesses” in its system and that “bitcoins vanished”: Robert McMillan, “The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster,” Wired, March 3, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bitcoin-exchange. 286 approximately $470 million in Bitcoins: Robin Sidel, Eleanor Warnock, and Takashi Mochizuki, “Almost Half a Billion Worth of Bitcoins Vanish,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303801304579410010379087576. 286 $27 million in cash: Jake Adelstein and Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky, “Behind the Biggest Bitcoin Heist in History: Inside the Implosion of Mt.

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Spode, “The Great Cryptocurrency Heist,” Aeon, February 14, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum. 305 “In [minority members’] view”: Ibid. 305 “Ethereum Classic”: Ibid. 306 “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment”: Mike Hearn, “The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment,” Mike’s blog, January 14, 2016, https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.rvh0ditgj. 306 “It has failed because the community has failed”: Ibid. 306 the performance of the Bitcoin system suffered: Daniel Palmer, “Scalability Debate Continues as Bitcoin XT Proposal Stalls,” CoinDesk, January 11, 2016, http://www.coindesk.com/scalability-debate-bitcoin-xt-proposal-stalls. 306 Chinese exchanges accounted for 42%: Nathaniel Popper, “How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War,” New York Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/business/dealbook/bitcoin-china.html. 306 an estimated 70% of all Bitcoin-mining gear: Danny Vincent, “We Looked inside a Secret Chinese Bitcoin Mine,” BBC News, May 4, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160504-we-looked-inside-a-secret-chinese-bitcoin-mine. 308 “a kid in Africa with a smartphone”: Brandon Griggs, “Futurist: We’ll Someday Accept Computers as Human,” CNN, March 12, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/12/tech/innovation/ray-kurzweil-sxsw. 309 “The Nature of the Firm”: R.

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

The blockchain will redefine the role of existing intermediaries (if they accept to change), while creating new intermediaries, therefore it will disrupt the traditional boundaries of value. The blockchain has ten characteristics, and they all need to be understood in a holistic manner. NOTES 1. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper. 2. Bitcoin “maximalism” refers to the opinion that solely supports Bitcoin at the expense of all other blockchain or cryptocurrency related projects, because maximalists believe we only a need a single blockchain, and single currency in order to achieve desired network effects benefits. 3. The Untapped Potential of Corporate Narratives. http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2013/10/the-untapped-potential-of-corporate-narratives.html. 4.

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It is very much about finding new opportunities that can grow their top line. WHY CAN'T THERE BE A GLOBAL BANK? To a skeptic, it sounds like a rhetorical question, given that Bitcoin was destined to become the underpinning nerve for a new type of global financial system that is borderless. Bitcoin’s vision is a globally decentralized money network with users at the edges of it. We should ask the question—since Bitcoin is global and universal, why is not there a truly global Bitcoin bank? This is a tricky question, because Bitcoin’s philosophy is about decentralization, whereas a bank is everything about centrally managed relationships. However, a global bank with no restrictions on borders or transactions would be interesting to users that want to conduct global transactions wherever they are in the world with the same ease as using a credit card.

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Those indicated by asterik (*) were kind enough to review portions of the final manuscript A PERSONAL PREFACE I HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN SO LUCKY IN MANY things, but one thing I lucked out on was my initial encounter with Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's principal inventor who happened to be living in the same city as I did: Toronto. On a cold early January 2014 evening, Vitalik came down the stairs at Bitcoin Decentral in an old narrow building on Spadina Avenue, an hour prior to the start of one of the weekly Toronto Bitcoin Meetups, organized by Anthony Di lorio. I spoke to him for the first time, trying to understand something that was described to me, as “beyond Bitcoin.” For six months prior to that, I had been trying to understand Bitcoin, and this Ethereum technology was news to me. Soon after my conversation started, the room was filling with people entering the building, ready for the Meetup to start.

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

While the public debate around Bitcoin has, from the earliest time, focused on the supposed anonymity of the payment system and therefore its use for black market purchases (Greenberg 2011), detailed analysis of data from the Bitcoin system by the Federal Reserve has shown that it has barely been used at all for payments for goods and services (let alone for guns and drugs), and further that the pattern of circulation of Bitcoins and the dynamics of the exchange rate are consistent with low usage of Bitcoin for retail transactions (Badev and Chen 2014). Despite the widespread interest, Bitcoins do not seem to be gaining much traction in the ‘real world’ of payments. Wait? Bitcoin? 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.

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To return to Mervyn King’s point about money being a ‘particular historical institution’ (King 2016b), there is no reason why money should continue to work the way it does in response to continuing technological change, and no reasonable person would expect it to. Is Bitcoin the future of money? If Bitcoin is not money now, might it be the future of money? I think not: Bitcoin is not the future of money, and the future of money is not Bitcoin. Why the interest then? A reasonable conjecture is that the interest in Bitcoin points to a latent demand for change and, usefully, generates and focuses debate about current monetary structures (Jansen 2013). Much of the interest isn’t, therefore, specifically in Bitcoin, to my mind, but rather in the feasibility of an alternative to the state-issued, interest-bearing fiat currency money system that has been in place for the last forty years.

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Whether this is true or not, there is no clear evidence that Bitcoin (despite the media attention) is being used at all. While the public debate around Bitcoin has, from the earliest time, focused on the supposed anonymity of the payment system and therefore its use for black market purchases (Greenberg 2011), detailed analysis of data from the Bitcoin system by the Federal Reserve has shown that it has barely been used at all for payments for goods and services (let alone for guns and drugs), and further that the pattern of circulation of Bitcoins and the dynamics of the exchange rate are consistent with low usage of Bitcoin for retail transactions (Badev and Chen 2014).

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The bitcoinstore.com sells a wide range of consumer goods.27 There are Bitcoin gift cards, dedicated payment system and debit cards, and a series of exchanges (such as Bitcoin-Central and Bitcoin-24.com) in which Bitcoins can be traded for major currencies in real time. In December 2012, a French bank, Crédit Mutuel, together with the payment service company Aqoba, entered into an agreement with Bitcoin-Central to provide banking and payment services denominated in Bitcoin. In early 2013, a Bitcoin-specific HTML5 scheme was whitelisted, meaning that the currency was on its way toward becoming standard on all web browsers.28 Silk Road, an online marketplace for buying and selling drugs,29 took full advantage of the untraceability of Bitcoins, in combination with the anonymizing tool, Tor.

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See Forbes’s “An illustrated history of Bitcoin crashes,” http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/an-illustrated-history-of-bitcoin-crashes/. 35 The total value of all Bitcoins in the world exceeded $1 billion for the first time in March 2013. 36 See Slate, “Fool’s Gold,” http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2013/04/bitcoin_is_a_ponzi_scheme_the_internet_currency_will_collapse.html. 37 “Bitcoin Is No Great Mystery,” see http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.ie/2013/04/bitcoin-is-no-great-mystery.html, accessed April 15, 2013. 38 Sociologically, on the other hand, the image we have of the “average” Bitcoin user is rather predictable. According to a Bitcoin users’ survey that ran between February and April 2013 (with 1,087 responses), the “average” Bitcoin user is overwhelmingly male (95.2 percent) (for a discussion of Bitcoin and gender, see Scott 2014), 32.1 years old, libertarian or anarchocapitalist (44.3 percent), nonreligious (61.8 percent), with a full time job (44.7 percent), and is in a relationship (55.6 percent).

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Security breaches, including various malware attacks aiming to steal Bitcoins,33 are among the major reasons most often cited for these periodic crashes:34 for example, in 2011 a user claimed that he had half a million U.S. dollars worth of Bitcoins stolen from his computer by malware. Another cause was that the very feature that was meant to ensure that Bitcoins were sound money (just like gold) in the first place—their finite supply—became a source of speculation, and a Bitcoin bubble.35 Arguably, Bitcoins were being mined primarily not in order to be used but rather to be hoarded. This phenomenon prompted some critics to liken the currency to a Ponzi scheme. The comparison seems flawed: unlike entrants to a Ponzi scheme, holders of Bitcoins are not—per se—victims of fraud. But according to Eric Posner, Bitcoin “investors” are likely to suffer the same fate: “Bitcoin will collapse when people realize that it can’t survive as a currency because of its built-in deflationary features, or because of the emergence of bytecoins, or both.

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

Other nodes in the network then accept this newly minted tail for the blockchain and turn to assembling new transactions into a new block. The Bitcoin software is carefully calibrated so that the community generates a new block approximately every ten minutes (just like Nakamoto’s paper suggests), and the overall production of Bitcoin is itself carefully orchestrated. The system will gradually taper the reward for completing new blocks to zero, thereby ceasing the creation of new Bitcoins entirely, once 21 million Bitcoins have been created.26 At that point, transaction fees alone will provide the incentive for Bitcoin users to dedicate their computers to endlessly updating the blockchain.

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The transactions annotate the movement of some quantity of Bitcoin from one identity to another. Through the blockchain, which is constantly updated and authenticated by the Bitcoin community (as I’ll discuss below), it’s possible to trace each unit of currency back to an origination point, through every single transaction it’s ever been part of. The entire Bitcoin marketplace is an open book, from the darkest recesses of terrorism financing to booking hotel rooms, purchasing virtual goods from Zynga, and ordering marijuana from the infamous digital marketplace Silk Road.25 But how does this actually work? Since the Bitcoin network has no central authority, anyone completing a transaction announces it through a peer-to-peer network.

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The system will gradually taper the reward for completing new blocks to zero, thereby ceasing the creation of new Bitcoins entirely, once 21 million Bitcoins have been created.26 At that point, transaction fees alone will provide the incentive for Bitcoin users to dedicate their computers to endlessly updating the blockchain. Figure 5.1 The blockchain, a system for transparent, public accounting of Bitcoin transactions. I am dwelling on the details of this elaborate process for delivering financial consensus because Bitcoin is not simply a decentralized currency but a revaluation of commerce in algorithmic terms. Bitcoin’s true radicalism stems from the fact that the blockchain grounds its authority on collective computation as an intrinsic form of value. To understand this shift we need to consider Bitcoin in the context of the historical value propositions of capitalism. As Karl Marx famously argued, industrial capitalism is based on a powerful mode of abstraction, one that separates individuals from the profits of their labor, creating a form of alienation that abstracts the work of individuals into fungible goods and services.

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

Before long, several hundred computers pointed their power at the Bitcoin blockchain. And it worked. Before long, the network had more computing power than all of Google’s servers combined. But more importantly, Bitcoin had opened Pandora’s box. It had proved decentralization was an organizing principle that worked. Hypothetically, other things could be decentralized. From the moment the price of bitcoin started rising, the world focused almost exclusively on the price and very little on the underlying philosophy of decentralization. And who could blame them? In its first two years, despite high volatility, bitcoin was up 10,000 percent, making its early adopters filthy rich.

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I was looking for something that could give us financial security and ultimately enough money for deliverance, whatever that was. One day, in late 2015, while searching for a widget article, I came across something about Bitcoin. I remembered that the price of bitcoin had been high a couple of years before. Back then I had thought it was a joke. But now that the price had fallen, a question entered my mind: What if it goes up again? For the next few nights, I read about Bitcoin. “Bitcoin is dead,” the Weekly Standard, among many others, announced. But most stories included quotes from people who still believed in it. They said it wasn’t dead. They said it could never die.

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Many others, including a good number of crypto veterans, had not done so, even though they’d been a part of the movement way before me, when bitcoin and ETH prices were dirt cheap and it was possible to pick up a thousand bitcoin for a thousand dollars. One person in this boat was particularly shocking. In late 2017, Bitcoin evangelist and icon Andreas Antonopoulos announced that he was struggling financially. 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.

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

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. Franco, Understanding Bitcoin. 33. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin. 34. Rob Wile, “The Chinese Are in Love with Bitcoin and It’s Driving the Digital Currency’s Prices into the Stratosphere,” businessinsider.com, October 29, 2013. 35.

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Rebecca Grant, “A Single Bitcoin Was Worth $10 a Year Ago—Today It’s Worth $1,000,” venturebeat.com, November 27, 2013. 36. Robert McMillan, “The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin’s $460 Million Disaster,” wired.com, March 3, 2014. 37. Ryan Lawler, “Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 a Day in Power Consumption Alone,” techcrunch.com, April 13, 2013. 38. Mark Gimein, “Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster,” bloomberg.com, April 12, 2013. 39. Michael Carney, “Bitcoin Has a Dark Side: Its Carbon Footprint,” pando.com, December 16, 2013. 40. Lawler, “Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 a Day.” 41.

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I’ll explain it here briefly, but the main takeaway is that there’s no one in charge—which means the biases of Bitcoin are very different from those of a traditional interest-generating money system. This is a money system that works through protocols—digital handshakes between peers—instead of establishing security through central authorities. Bitcoin is based on a database known as the “blockchain.” The blockchain is a public ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever. It doesn’t sit on a server at a bank or in the basement of a credit-card company’s headquarters; it lives on the computers of everyone in the Bitcoin network. When bitcoins are transacted, an algorithm corresponding to that transaction is “published” to the blockchain.

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

In reaching for commodities in which to anchor his system of value, Ametrano should have ended with gold, with its intimate links to the irreversibility of time. In the end, a test of bitcoin or any other blockchain will be the price of gold. If in a mature bitcoin system the gold chain massively bifurcates from the blockchain, it will signify a disorientation of values. As in bitcoin itself, the majority of users will decide which branch bears economic truth.11 Since its creation in 2009, bitcoin’s price movements have been 80.4 percent correlated with the gold price.12 Bitcoin’s relatively tiny float has imparted much greater volatility. But its following gold down in 2014 should not have been alarming. If and when bitcoin matures into a meaningful currency, its kinship with gold, rooted in time, should become increasingly manifest.

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The eminent Austrian offered similar objections to a proposal for private money backed by gold: “It would turn out to be a very good investment, for the reason that because of the increased demand for gold the value of gold would go up; but that very fact would make it very unsuitable as money.”4 Ametrano adds, “The unfeasibility of a bitcoin [or gold] loan is similar to that of a bitcoin or [gold] salary: neither a borrower nor an employer would want to face the risk of seeing her debt or salary liabilities growing a hundredfold in a few years.”5 He concludes, “This is the cryptocurrency paradox: In the successful attempt to get rid of any centralized monetary authority using the Bitcoin protocol, the bitcoin currency has inadvertently thrown away the flexibility of an elastic monetary policy.” In a presentation to the Bank of Italy, Ametrano rejected the idea that bitcoin will lose its instability with wider adoption: “This is indeed true, but not at all sufficient for stable prices, as demonstrated by the need of monetary actions to stabilize even globally accepted currencies such as the Euro and US dollar.”6 One can imagine the eminent men of Banca d’Italia nodding solemnly at this observation.

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But to fully understand money, we should consider the philosophy behind the most radical experiment in digital money. Chapter 7 What Bitcoin Can Teach Bitcoin . . . is the perfect form of money for the Internet because it is fast, secure, and borderless. . . . Essentially, bitcoin mining decentralizes the currency-issuance and clearing functions of a central bank. . . . [It] has ushered in a wave of innovation in currencies, financial services, economics, distributed systems, voting systems, corporate governance, and contracts. —Andreas Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin (2015) Today the established theories of top-down money face serious challenges from digital alternatives on the Internet and from the perennial appeal of the case for gold.

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

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. Daniela Hernandez, “Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins,” Wired (September 13, 2013); Kim Lachance Shandrow, “Bill Gates: Bitcoin Is ‘Better Than Currency,’” Entrepreneur (October 3, 2014); for an eloquent critique of bitcoin, see Brett Scott’s “Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain,” E-International Relations (June 1, 2014) and “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance?”

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Although Bitcoin’s open ledger is a statistician’s dream, it’s not easy to associate accounts to actual human beings. For demographic data, see Lui Smyth, “Bitcoin Community Survey 2014” (February 1, 2014), http://simulacrum.cc/2014/02/01/bitcoin-community-survey-2014; Neil Sardesai, “Who Owns All the Bitcoins—An Infographic of Wealth Distribution,” CryptoCoinsNews (March 31, 2014); CoinDesk, Who Really Uses Bitcoin? (June 10, 2015), coindesk.com/research/who-really-uses-bitcoin; Olga Kharif, “The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market,” Bloomberg Businessweek (December 8, 2017); Coin Dance, “Bitcoin Community Engagement by Gender Summary,” coin.dance/stats/gender (94.73 percent male in March 2018). 7.

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In times of flux like this, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics—those nagging questions of ownership and governance that the cooperative tradition continually insists on posing. The Bitcoin Center NYC, the self-described “center of the Bitcoin revolution,” used to inhabit a retail storefront on Manhattan’s Broad Street, a block from the New York Stock Exchange. The staff of an Asian-infused kosher steak house next door shooed loitering Bitcoiners from the sidewalk, indifferent to the revolution allegedly underway. Inside the Bitcoin Center, two small tables off to one side housed a menagerie of internet-age extraction equipment: Bitcoin mining machines. They resembled boxy desktop computers, only larger and without screens or keyboards attached.

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

The initial cryptocurrency model is the Bitcoin blockchain, which functions almost exclusively as a payment network, with the capabilities of storing and transacting bitcoins across the globe in real time with no intermediaries or censorship. This is powerful value proposition gives bitcoin its value. Even though its network effects are strong, some competitors in the cryptocurrency space offer enhanced functionality. THE SMART CONTRACT PLATFORM A crucial ingredient of DeFi is a smart contract platform, which goes beyond a simple payments network such as Bitcoin and enhances the chain's capabilities.

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In January 2021, the New York Times ran a story about a programmer who used a hardware wallet but forgot the password.22 The wallet contains $220 million of bitcoin and allows 10 password attempts before all data are destroyed. The programmer has only two tries to go. Delegated custody also involves risks. For example, if an exchange holds the private keys, it could be hacked and the keys lost. Most exchanges keep the bulk of private keys in “cold storage” (on a drive not connected to the Internet). Nevertheless, there is a long history of exchange attacks, including Mt Gox (2011–2014) 850,000 bitcoin; Bitfloor (2012) 24,000 bitcoin; Bitfinex (2016) 120,000 bitcoin; Coincheck (2018) 523 million NEM worth $500 million at the time; and Binance (2019) 7,000 bitcoin.23 The attacks have become less frequent.

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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. The key innovation of Bitcoin was to combine the idea of blockchain (time stamping) with a consensus mechanism called proof of work (introduced by Back8 in 2002).

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Once you have that fake e-mail address, use Tor to set up a Bitcoin wallet, find a Bitcoin ATM to fund the wallet, and then use a tumbler to essentially launder the Bitcoin so it cannot be traced back to you on the blockchain. This laundering process requires setting up two Bitcoin wallets using different Tor circuits. The first wallet is used to send the Bitcoin to the laundering service, and the second is set up to receive the laundered Bitcoin. Once you have achieved true anonymity by using open Wi-Fi out of camera view plus Tor, find a VPN service that accepts Bitcoin for payment. Pay with the laundered Bitcoin. Some VPN providers, including WiTopia, block Tor, so you need to find one that doesn’t—preferably with a VPN provider that doesn’t log connections.

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To maintain this anonymity, we need to convert our anonymously purchased prepaid gift cards to Bitcoin. In chapter 6 I talked about Bitcoin, virtual currency. By itself Bitcoin is not anonymous. They can be traced through what’s called a blockchain back to the source of the purchase; similarly, all subsequent purchases can be traced as well. So Bitcoin by itself is not going to hide your identity. We will have to run the funds through an anonymity mechanism: converting prepaid gift cards into Bitcoin, then running the Bitcoin through a laundering service. This process will result in anonymized Bitcoin to be used for future payments. We will need the laundered Bitcoin, for example, to pay for our VPN service and any future purchases of data usage on our portable hotspot or burner phone.

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You keep the value of the coins minus the tumbling fee—it’s just that the cryptographic signature of each coin may be different after it’s mixed with others. That anonymizes the system somewhat. Once you have them, how do you store Bitcoins? Because there are no Bitcoin banks, and because Bitcoin is not physical currency, you will need to use a Bitcoin wallet set up anonymously using the detailed instructions described later in this book. Now that you’ve bought and stored it, how do you use Bitcoin? Exchanges allow you to invest in Bitcoin and change it into other currencies, such as US dollars, or purchase goods on sites such as Amazon. Say you have one Bitcoin, valued at $618. If you only need around $80 for a purchase, then you will retain a certain percentage of the original value, depending on the exchange rate, after the transaction.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

I use my private key to sign transactions, thus proving that I actually own the Bitcoin I am transferring. Bitcoin, like other cryptocurrencies, takes the form of electronic tokens that can be transferred online. If you want to pay me 0.02 Bitcoin (worth about $600), I will (happily, thank you) give you my public key. This public key serves as the ‘address’ to which you then send the Bitcoin. You can think of it as my account number. Since I have the corresponding private key, I can then later prove to others that I do actually own the Bitcoin you just sent me. Importantly, your transfer to me does not consist of a token for each Bitcoin or fractions thereof.

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The investor decides to short subprime mortgages right then and there.2 But while he experienced this epiphany well before the 2008 crisis, the crypto-crash was already underway when I was wandering around Davos’ CryptoHQ: Bitcoin had peaked at $20,000 several weeks earlier, on 17 December 2017, and was now on its way back down to $3,000. Bitcoin did not, however, go down to zero. Instead, it recovered somewhat and has been trading between $4,000 and $30,0003 over the last few years – a wide range by any definition, but an especially wide one for a currency. Bitcoin first appeared in 2009, right after the financial crisis, and was conceived as a technological utopia – an alternative to banks and money, whose failings had just become all too apparent. Bitcoin does away with the need for intermediaries like banks, and authorities such as central banks and governments.

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Since there are some 2,500 transactions in a block, the mining reward of BTC 6.25 per block represents some $75 per transaction, in addition to the actual transaction fees, which are estimated to be $3–5 per transaction. Interestingly, this (significant) mining cost/reward is not borne by the payer, but by all Bitcoin holders, who see their stock of Bitcoin diluted the more it is ‘mined’. All this takes time, meaning that Bitcoin is not a convenient way to pay for peak-time tube travel or grocery shopping. Bitcoin transactions become ‘final’ only after they have been verified by miners, which takes about ten minutes. In addition, payees are advised to wait another sixty minutes before considering the transaction as irreversible.

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

The most popular crypto-anarchy technology at the moment is probably bitcoin. In case you are not familiar with it, bitcoin is a digital currency. I won’t describe in detail how it works here – there are plenty of other good guides available – but here’s the short version: a quantity of bitcoin is stored at a bitcoin address, the key to which is a unique string of letters and numbers that can be kept on a website, desktop, mobile phone or even a piece of paper. Anyone can download a bitcoin wallet on to their computer, buy bitcoin with traditional currency from a currency exchange, and use them to buy or sell a growing number of products or services as easily as sending an email.

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But my Czech currency, koruna, which I had exchanged at the airport at an extortionate rate, were not accepted. ‘We only take bitcoin,’ said the assistant. (I later learned that this was the one place in the world that accepted only bitcoin.) Ever since we abandoned the gold standard, all national currencies have run on trust. We accept sterling or dollars because we believe others will. And people trust bitcoin and the maths that underpins it. At the institute’s cafe the staff were paid in bitcoin; rent collected for their co-working space was paid in bitcoin, too. I was given a little plastic card with a QR code, and transferred bitcoin on to it using one of three yellow ATM machines.

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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. He placed a cap on the number of bitcoins that could ever be produced (21 million) and a timetable for how quickly they could be created. This was to make sure that no central governments or central banks could print more to inflate the economy for political purposes. Although bitcoins can be bought and sold with real-world currency, new ones are not minted.

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

Bitcoin, Ethereum’s Development Culture balance, world state and, Ethereum State Bamboo, Introduction to Ethereum High-Level Languages Bancor, Real-World Examples: ERC20 and Bancor batching, The JSON-RPC Interface batchTransfer function, Real-World Examples: PoWHC and Batch Transfer Overflow (CVE-2018–10299) big-endian, defined, Quick Glossary BIP-32 standardextended public and private keys, Extended public and private keys HD wallets and, HD Wallets (BIP-32) and Paths (BIP-43/44)-Index numbers for normal and hardened derivation BIP-39 standard, Seeds and Mnemonic Codes (BIP-39), Mnemonic Code Words (BIP-39)-Working with mnemonic codesderiving seed from mnemonic words, From mnemonic to seed generating code words with, Generating mnemonic words libraries, Working with mnemonic codes optional passphrase with, Optional passphrase in BIP-39 working with mnemonic codes, Working with mnemonic codes BIP-43 standard, Navigating the HD wallet tree structure BIP-44 standard, Navigating the HD wallet tree structure BIPs (see Bitcoin improvement proposals) Bitcoinas token, Tokens on Ethereum development culture, Ethereum’s Development Culture Ethereum blockchain compared to Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum: A General-Purpose Blockchain Ethereum compared to, Compared to Bitcoin Ethereum definition compared to, Ethereum Clients limitations of, The Birth of Ethereum Bitcoin Core, Components of a Blockchain Bitcoin improvement proposals (BIPs), Quick GlossaryHierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP-32/BIP-44), Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP-32/BIP-44) Mnemonic Code Words (BIP-39), Seeds and Mnemonic Codes (BIP-39), Mnemonic Code Words (BIP-39)-Working with mnemonic codes Multipurpose HD Wallet Structure (BIP-43), HD Wallets (BIP-32) and Paths (BIP-43/44)-Navigating the HD wallet tree structure bitcoind client, Components of a Blockchain blind calls, Raw call, delegatecall block gas limit, Block Gas Limit block object, Block context block timestamp manipulation security threat, Block Timestamp Manipulation-Real-World Example: GovernMentalpreventative techniques, Preventative Techniques real-world example: GovernMental, Real-World Example: GovernMental vulnerability, The Vulnerability block, defined, Quick Glossary blockchaincomponents of, Components of a Blockchain, Ethereum’s Components creating contract on, Creating the Contract on the Blockchain-Withdrawing from Our Contract defined, Quick Glossary Ethereum as developer's blockchain, Why Learn Ethereum?

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You should use assert() to avoid conditions that should never, ever occur. Big-endian A positional number representation where the most significant digit is first. The opposite of little-endian, where the least significant digit is first. BIPs Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. A set of proposals that members of the Bitcoin community have submitted to improve Bitcoin. For example, BIP-21 is a proposal to improve the Bitcoin uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme. Block A collection of required information (a block header) about the comprised transactions, and a set of other block headers known as ommers. Blocks are added to the Ethereum network by miners.

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The Birth of Ethereum All great innovations solve real problems, and Ethereum is no exception. Ethereum was conceived at a time when people recognized the power of the Bitcoin model, and were trying to move beyond cryptocurrency applications. But developers faced a conundrum: they either needed to build on top of Bitcoin or start a new blockchain. Building upon Bitcoin meant living within the intentional constraints of the network and trying to find workarounds. The limited set of transaction types, data types, and sizes of data storage seemed to limit the sorts of applications that could run directly on Bitcoin; anything else needed additional off-chain layers, and that immediately negated many of the advantages of using a public blockchain.

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

And there, for sale on the Silk Road, were the magic mushrooms Ross had grown a few months earlier, listed for sale as if he were hawking a used bicycle or a box of Girl Scout cookies on Craigslist. He then explained how to buy Bitcoins, the currency needed to buy drugs on the site. It was like buying coins at a video arcade. You exchanged your cash for tokens, and then you got to play. Just as at an arcade, at the end of the day, no one knew who had used those tokens because they all looked the same. (Bitcoin wasn’t just meant for illegal purchases, either; you could use the digital cash to buy things on dozens of legitimate Web sites around the world.) “Give me your credit card,” Ross said as he navigated to an online Bitcoin exchange, where Julia could interchange her real dollars for digital gold.

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It took several layers of approval, numerous meetings, and copious paperwork before Jared was finally allowed to commence his binge-shopping on the Amazon of drugs. Then there was the challenge of buying the Bitcoins. He was allocated $1,001 for his shopping excursion. So he took the cash, deposited it in a bank, then went to a Bitcoin exchange Web site where he could swap the dollars for Bitcoins. It wasn’t as easy as picking up drugs with cash on the street or finding a used bicycle on Craigslist, but it was still surprisingly painless considering what he was buying. During his first expedition to the Silk Road, Jared had three goals.

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Ross’s cut from the commission fees was now averaging $10,000 a day and growing higher—quite literally—by the hour. In reality Ross’s wealth was doubling and tripling every few weeks as the exchange rate for Bitcoins rose. If Ross had $100,000 in one of his Bitcoin accounts on Monday, it could be worth as much as $200,000 by Friday without his doing a thing. If VJ’s predictions were correct, in a bear case Ross could personally be making $100 million a year by 2014. In a bull case, if the current value of Bitcoins continued to grow as it had been doing, he could be making ten times that in no time at all. But the pile of digital money introduced a whole new set of problems.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

In 2013 US courts officially recognized bitcoin as a convertible decentralized virtual currency; in 2015 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) classified bitcoin as a commodity. Today, bitcoin can be used to pay for things and services, investors use it as an investment and there are places around the world where you can convert bitcoins into real cash; there are even derivatives on the value of bitcoin. Bitcoin, therefore, seems to be a classic example of Minsky’s theory. With blockchain and bitcoin, we do have the currency that seems to have been accepted quite widely, and the platform on which to trade it. Moreover, there are no government officials in sight, intent on padding their own pockets and building their own little bureaucratic empires.

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Dread Pirate Roberts is now in prison serving a life sentence. The authorities still can’t get their hands on most of his bitcoins. 17. L. Katz, ‘Criminals may ditch bitcoin for Litecoin, Dash, study says’, Bloomberg, 8 February 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-08/criminals-are-ditching-bitcoin-for-litecoin-and-dash-study-says. 18. Bateman, ‘Bitcoin might make tax havens obsolete’. 19. Ibid. 20. Conducted in January 2018. (Source: J. Wieczner, ‘Bitcoin investors aren’t paying their cryptocurrency taxes’, Fortune, 13 February 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/02/13/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-tax-taxes/). 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. E.

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These and other cases of fraud across China’s shadow banking industry have prompted a broader crackdown on debt and financial risk by the authorities, partly driven by the desire to avoid expensive bailouts, as a number of China’s wealth management firms, many of which are Ponzi schemes, fold.14 BLOCKCHAIN If peer-to-peer is engulfed in scandals, what about blockchain and its most famous cyber offspring, bitcoin? Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin show the truism of Hyman Minsky’s theory. Minsky, one of the greatest financial economists of the twentieth century, once said: ‘Anybody can create money, the problem is to get it accepted.’ Bitcoin is a currency that virtualizes in cyberspace as a reward for solving an algorithm. Bitcoin mining is an expensive business: one needs not only human capital but a lot of computer power, which in turn consumes a lot of energy. In 2013 US courts officially recognized bitcoin as a convertible decentralized virtual currency; in 2015 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) classified bitcoin as a commodity.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

These are just a few examples of a new marketplace technology paradigm that may power the next generation of crowd-based capitalism, To better appreciate the economic and social impacts of these marketplaces, we first need to understand how some of them work. The right place to start is by understanding Bitcoin. Understanding Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Exchange In the simplest possible terms, bitcoin is a digital currency. (I refer to the currency using lowercase “b,” and the platform, technology, or ecosystem using uppercase “B.”) You can acquire bitcoin by exchanging it for your dollars, euros, or yen, by providing someone with a product or service that they pay you for in bitcoin, or by “mining” bitcoin (more on this later). Your acquisition and subsequent possession of this bitcoin exists as one or more entries in a public ledger (the blockchain) in which you are identified by a secure anonymized “key.”

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Some of you may recall Mt.Gox, the exchange that held its users’ bitcoin in its own centralized Bitcoin accounts while maintaining a parallel off-the-blockchain system of keeping track of which users had how much bitcoin. Mt.Gox ceased operations in 2014 following the 2013 loss of the equivalent of $450 million of its users’ bitcoin because of what appeared to be a hacker having gained access to its Bitcoin accounts. There are also concerns that someone who controls significantly more than 51% of the computing power being used to clear transactions (in Bitcoin’s case, for example, for mining bitcoin) has the ability to alter ledger entries by “building their own chain,” which, over time, will replace the true blockchain as the one that is associated with consensus. In 2014, ghash.io, a bitcoin mining pool, did attain this dominance in computing power being spent on mining bitcoin, and were in a position to launch a “51% attack” of this kind, although they were quick to reassure the community that they had no intention of doing so.

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Your acquisition and subsequent possession of this bitcoin exists as one or more entries in a public ledger (the blockchain) in which you are identified by a secure anonymized “key.” Each time you use your bitcoin, the new transaction is recorded as yet another entry in the ledger. A lot of the attention paid to Bitcoin has focused on its success in creating currency without a government backer, about how bitcoin value measured in traditional money fluctuates a lot over time (although its exchange rate has stabilized considerably in 2015), and perhaps also about the use of bitcoin for commerce that many governments consider illegal. Instead of rehashing those topics, I focus here on thinking about Bitcoin as one of many applications of a new set of enabling technologies.

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

This ledger holds a record of every transaction ever done on the network and it is shared with the network, i.e., anyone who is part of the network can see the information in this ledger. Miners who do these two functions—verifying the transaction and recording it on the blockchain—are then rewarded with bitcoins for their effort. This is how bitcoins are “mined.” Since the number of bitcoins is fixed to 21 million, it is like mining the bitcoins out of a reservoir. Hence the term miner. Although these series of operations seem relatively straightforward, they include elements of cryptography, computer science, game theory, and classical economics. The above breakdown is certainly not enough to pierce the complexities of how blockchains work, but is portrays how this decentralized and distributed value exchange system works.

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All books have been referred to in the writing of this book Table A-1.Technical and business reference list Name Author Area of focus Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies Andreas Antonopoulos Technical book that gives readers an understanding of how bitcoin works. Useful for computer scientists and advanced readers. Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics Pedro Franco Technical book that gives readers an understanding of how bitcoin works and the economic implications of the technology. Useful for students, business persons, and advanced readers. Value Web Chris Skinner General book that offers a holistic view of how FinTech and Blockchain firms are using technology to create a new internet of value.

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As the blockchain gains more traction in formal financial circles, its first manifestation in the form of Bitcoin is increasingly being excluded from the dialogue. This seems to be contrary to the symbiotic link between the two. What is more surprising is the fact that this tendency to separate bitcoin from blockchain is a repeat of what happened when the Internet first came into existence. As banks try to harness the power of the blockchain by creating private blockchains, we find ourselves witnessing the same execution of events as when private companies tried to create intranets instead of simply using the Internet. Whether you are a fan of the bitcoin or the blockchain or both, having a nuanced or biased view on the subject needs to be developed using the scientific method.

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

How It Works The idea of selecting a transaction history based on the computational effort that was spent for creating it has led to the following two criteria: • The longest-chain-criterion2 • The heaviest-chain-criterion3 The Longest-Chain-Criterion The longest-chain-criterion is based on the idea that the blockchain-data- structure that comprises the most blocks represents the most aggregated computational effort. In order to study this criterion, let’s consider an initial situation were all the nodes of a distributed system maintain and agree on 2Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008. https://bitcoin. org/bitcoin.pdf. 3Wood, Gavin. Ethereum: A secure decentralized generalized transaction ledger. 2014. http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf; Okupski, Krzysztof. Bitcoin developer reference. Working paper. 2014. Blockchain Basics 169 the identical version of the blockchain-data-structure, as depicted in Figure 19-1, which presents a schematic blockchain-data-structure that omits many details for simplicity.

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Hence, the whole round trip through cryptography can be summed up as: start with some data, produce cypher text by encrypting the original data with a cryp- tographic key, preserve the cypher text or send it to someone, and finally recover the original data by decrypting the cypher text with a cryptographic key. Figure 12-1 illustrates the basic functioning of cryptography. 1Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008. https://bitcoin. org/bitcoin.pdf. 2See Van Tilborg, Henk, and Sushil Jajodia, eds. Encyclopedia of cryptography and security. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2014. 96 Step 12 | Identifying and Protecting User Accounts Figure 12-1. Schematic illustration of basic cryptographic concepts and their terminology What happens if someone tries to decrypt cypher text by using an incorrect key?

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Ordering Catalog The ordering catalog of our transformed book equates to the chain of block headers in the blockchain-data-structure. Each page of the ordering catalog equates to a single block header in the blockchain-data-structure. Since the 1Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008. https:// bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 120 Step 14 | Storing Transaction Data block headers are connected with one another via references in a linear fash- ion, like the links of a chain, they form a chain of block headers. Similar to our ordering catalog, the chain of block headers does not store transaction data directly, but only stores hash references to the corresponding transac- tion data.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Alex Hern, “How Iceland Became the Bitcoin Miners’ Paradise,” The Guardian, February 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-became-the-bitcoin-miners-paradise (accessed June 28, 2019); and Foreign Staff, “Iceland Set to Use More Energy Mining Bitcoin Than Powering Homes,” Telegraph (UK), February 12, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/12/iceland-set-use-energy-mining-bitcoin-powering-homes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 53. “Bitcoin Mining Guide—Getting Started with Bitcoin Mining,” Bitcoin Mining.com, https://www.bitcoinmining.com/getting-started/ (accessed June 28, 2019); and “Genesis Mining Review,” Cryptorival.com, https://cryptorival.com/miners/genesismining/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 54. Ben Popken, “Why Did Bitcoin ‘Fork’ Today and What Is ‘Bitcoin Cash?,’” NBC News, August 1, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/why-bitcoin-forking-today-what-bitcoin-cash-n788581 (accessed June 28, 2019); and Max Gulker, “Bitcoin: Decentralized Governance Put to the Test,” American Institute of Economic Research, May 16, 2017, https://www.aier.org/research/bitcoin-decentralized-governance-put-test (accessed June 28, 2019). 55.

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Bitmain Technologies Ltd. has a 25,000 computer server farm in Erdos, Inner Mongolia, where coal power is inexpensive.51 Iceland’s cheap water power has made it a bitcoin miners’ paradise—so much so that Iceland is on the brink of using more electricity to mine bitcoins than to power its homes.52 Anybody can become a bitcoin miner by purchasing the appropriate hardware, downloading free mining software, and joining a bitcoin mining pool. If you want to save yourself the trouble, you can even sign up with a bitcoin cloud mining service such as Genesis for as little as $30.53 The current number of bitcoin miners is anyone’s guess—though it has been estimated that there may be 5,000 full nodes used by 100,000 miners.

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Barrett, “Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Version 1.1,” NIST Cybersecurity Framework, April 16, 2018, https://www.nist.gov/publications/framework-improving-critical-infrastructure-cybersecurity-version-11. 51. “Coal Is Fueling Bitcoin’s Meteoric Rise,” Bloomberg, December 14, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-15/turning-coal-into-bitcoin-dirty-secret-of-2017-s-hottest-market (accessed June 28, 2019). 52. Alex Hern, “How Iceland Became the Bitcoin Miners’ Paradise,” The Guardian, February 13, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/how-iceland-became-the-bitcoin-miners-paradise (accessed June 28, 2019); and Foreign Staff, “Iceland Set to Use More Energy Mining Bitcoin Than Powering Homes,” Telegraph (UK), February 12, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/12/iceland-set-use-energy-mining-bitcoin-powering-homes/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 53.

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

“Benevolent Dictator for Life,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life. 21. “Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations,” http://coinmarketcap.com. 22. “Who Controls the Bitcoin Network?,” Bitcoin website, https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#who-controls-the-bitcoin-network. 23. Bitsmith, “Inside a Chinese Bitcoin Mine,” The Coinsman, August 11, 2014, www.thecoinsman.com/2014/08/bitcoin/inside-chinese-bitcoin-mine. 24. “Government as Impresario: Emergent Public Goods and Public Private Partnerships 2.0,” talk given by Nicholas Gruen as part of a luncheon series at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, January 14, 2014, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/01/gruen. 25.

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In the potentiality of block-chain visionaries, the most useful programs, contracts, and methods will be the ones that are most copied, eventually becoming standards. The Bitcoin.org website explains how this is accomplished with Bitcoin: Nobody owns the Bitcoin network.… [It] is controlled by all Bitcoin users around the world. While developers are improving the software, they can’t force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use. In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus.22 While the block-chain protocol has necessarily evolved over the last six years, the evolution is driven by consensus, with the most suitable and widely adopted changes being the ones that win out over the alternatives.

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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.) The Bitcoin software now exists as a platform and set of protocols for how to create, store, and use Bitcoins. Bitcoins are sent from one user directly to another digitally.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Like a commodity, it’s subject to wide swings in price based on speculators investing in the bitcoin market. And like gold, bitcoins are scarce. The Bitcoin protocol limits the number of new bitcoins that come into circulation each year. This number will automatically halve over time until a total of 21 million bitcoins are in existence. Then the issuance of new bitcoins will stop completely. Additionally, unlike almost all currencies currently in existence, Bitcoin isn’t controlled by any government. It’s also completely anonymous. (Well, more accurately, it’s pseudonymous—senders have to have an address to send bitcoins to.) As a result, many, particularly those who possess a more libertarian bent, view Bitcoin as the technological equivalent of the second coming.

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For one, Bitcoin experienced its first major governance crisis at the beginning of 2016. While governance of the Bitcoin network is putatively decentralized, the handful of individuals who have access to and the ability to modify Bitcoin’s source code have an outsized influence. At the beginning of 2016, a few of these individuals resisted change to the Bitcoin protocol and effectively prevented changes that could increase the transaction capacity of Bitcoin’s network. While this governance crisis could be resolved in the future, the lack of a formal governance model for changing the Bitcoin protocol could hamper Bitcoin’s growth.

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However, these platforms are just scratching the surface. The biggest potential disruption of the finance industry comes from the already-legendary Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin? If you want to get into an argument with your tech-savvy friends, just start talking to them about this topic. The simple answer is that it’s a new kind of digital money. But the reality is a lot more complicated than that. Bitcoin is controlled by a programming protocol that determines how new bitcoins enter circulation and how new transactions get verified. Bitcoin is usually considered a currency, but some economists think it looks more like a commodity—a sort of digital gold.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

yeah he got into Bitcoin—while he was here how much money did he lose? No he’s worth millions. He’s been in the New York Times. You’re telling me that our old doorman… is now a Bitcoin whale? Yeah. Hilarious! 22 Billionaire Warren Buffett Calls Bitcoin “Rat Poison Squared” Coindesk Disclosure: Our venture fund SOSV has a 6 percent share of a cryptoderivative platform, BitMex. BitMex is not authorized for use in the United States, because it’s not registered with our financial authorities. If you think buying Bitcoin is risky, BitMex allows you to bet on whether the price of Bitcoin is going to go up or down—and multiply your bet by up to one hundred times.

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The whole system is permissionless, which also means it can’t keep anybody out.” In the Bitcoin universe, nobody needs permission to act like a bank or a broker-dealer. They just need the software. However, Bitcoin is completely out in the open. It makes a public record of every transaction. And because of that, we were told, criminal networks have left Bitcoin for alternative coins like Monero, which is an obfuscated ledger, meaning no user can be tracked or traced. That Bitcoin is no longer favored by criminals has made it more respectable, and led far more investors to get in. But nobody talks about their Bitcoin wealth out in the open. “You can get killed for that,” one whale said.

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That’s the core critique. When the Great Cessation happened, at first Bitcoin fell even faster than the stock market. It really looked like the believers had panicked and lost their nerve. But a few weeks later, when so many world governments created stimulus packages and started printing money by the trillions… the crypto scene went ballistic with moral outrage and disgust. And along with that outrage, the price of Bitcoin rose again. The more the governments bailed out the economy, the weaker those governments looked (financially). In the course of a few weeks, Bitcoin reemerged as the only way to bet against the fiscal policy of all major governments at once.

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

In 2011, Ver discovered and invested in the digital currency Bitcoin. It was a light-bulb moment for Ver, and his enthusiasm for the project compelled him to speak out once more, authorities be damned. “Money without borders is a world without borders,” he repeats, over and over. “Bitcoin is the future.” It didn’t hurt that Bitcoin, in addition to dovetailing perfectly with his political views, made him a rich man: Ver bought in when the currency was selling at around $1 per coin, and before the year was up, its value soared, turning him into a millionaire. When I met Ver in St. Kitts, he helped me set up a virtual wallet for Bitcoin on my iPhone, and moments later, sent me $20 worth of the currency.

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And so it was particularly insulting for him to be prevented from preaching the gospel of Bitcoin at the conference in Miami because of national borders and the whims of an American bureaucrat. This is, after all, the man who’s known as “Bitcoin Jesus.” “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.

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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. It also means money can be transferred internationally without any bank fees. Because it is a currency that exists only in computer code, Bitcoin has been vulnerable to easy theft and fraud, making its worth immensely volatile, and some economists have predicted that Bitcoins will soon be worth nothing. Nevertheless, Ver is still an unreserved evangelist. He is playing the long game, perhaps because he truly believes that he will live forever.

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Another major concern under a Bitcoin currency standard (or any digital currency) is inflation. It is true that the supply of bitcoins has been capped at 21 million coins, a limit that is expected to be reached sometime in the twenty-second century. Some people worry that this cap will eventually imply deflation, if world growth continues but the supply of bitcoins is fixed. They should be much more worried about inflation than about deflation. How is that? Because Bitcoin does not have a monopoly on the underlying technology, imitators can appear, and indeed they already have. Over time, Bitcoin 1.0’s first-mover advantage may fade, especially if Bitcoin 2.0 or Bitcoin 3.0 offers a superior mechanism (e.g., much lower maintenance costs and more surefire anonymity).

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A fair dose of encryption technology is also included, and in Bitcoin, for example, individuals are allowed to use aliases with passcode-protected accounts to make it difficult to determine their identities. A lot of truly fascinating science supports the different systems, and one can find many excellent treatments.2 Governments around the world have already begun regulating cryptocurrencies more aggressively. In the United States, Bitcoin wallets must now comply with anti-money-laundering rules, and the Internal Revenue Service has begun to issue rulings on how Bitcoin earnings should be taxed. The European Union, too, is in the process of intensifying its regulations.

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This would substantially reduce costs, particularly in international transactions. The approach can also be used to save on legal contracting costs. Some of Bitcoin’s competitors, notably the newer Ethereum platform, aim to offer the possibility of creating secure exchanges for transactions of almost any type. People sometimes ask whether the cryptocurrency Bitcoin could be a currency (supposing that the government does not interfere). The answer is certainly yes, Bitcoin (or perhaps one of its present or future competitors) can fulfill many of the basic functions of currency, including unit of account and medium of exchange, with or without government adherence.3 In fact, digital currencies in some ways offer the capacity for much more complex kinds of transactions and contracts than traditional paper currency offers, precisely because the former embed so much information, including the history of transactions.

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

It wasn’t long before a couple of them mentioned a maneuver that surprised him: they were creating shell companies in the Cayman Islands to stockpile Bitcoin. “Why are you doing that?” he asked. “It’s because of ransomware,” one replied. “If we have to pay a ransom, we need to be able to do so quickly.” Bill was intrigued. He knew the process of setting up a shell company, and of handling and accounting for millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin, would be “a pain in the ass” for a publicly traded corporation—something they’d only do if they really thought they needed to. He called friends who had left SecondMarket to work at Digital Currency Group, a firm founded by Silbert that invested in Bitcoin and blockchain companies.

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He called friends who had left SecondMarket to work at Digital Currency Group, a firm founded by Silbert that invested in Bitcoin and blockchain companies. Bill wanted to know if anyone had heard of corporations holding Bitcoin reserves in case of a ransomware attack. “Hey, is this a thing?” he asked. “Oh yeah, it’s a thing, and we know because we get calls every day,” a contact told him. Some of the businesses calling Digital Currency Group wanted more than a Bitcoin stockpile; already hit by ransomware, they wanted the firm to pay the Bitcoin ransom on their behalf. Digital Currency turned them away. Paying ransoms was outside the scope of its business, and it was afraid of running afoul of government regulations. But where Digital Currency saw risk, Bill sensed opportunity.

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Samsam Kandi happens to be the name of an Iranian village, and the gang was eventually discovered to be operating from Iran. One of Proven Data’s final payments to SamSam—for 1.6 bitcoin (about $9,000 at the time)—was sent in November 2018. The payment moved from Proven Data’s Bitcoin wallet to one specified by the attackers, and ultimately to one linked directly to the Iranian hackers. Twelve days after Proven Data made the payment came the indictment of the two Iranians who allegedly developed SamSam. The U.S. Treasury Department banned payments to two Bitcoin wallets connected to the attackers, citing sanctions on the Iranian regime. Victor Congionti said that Proven Data did not know the hackers were affiliated with Iran until they were indicted.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

Both sides, the manufacturers and the political class, even preferred it that way. It would be terrible if bitcoiners were to just sleepwalk into letting the bureaucrats license their firms and activities. “There’s this bitcoin honey badger meme now which really gets under my skin,” Amir went on. “In essence it goes that it doesn’t matter what people or governments do, Bitcoin can just shrug it off and keep going. But it’s this simplistic lens, you know. It discards all of the technological issues and threats facing the protocol that we strive to protect against. Even people like Andreas push this. The idea is that Bitcoin as a consensus system subject to all power groups acting on it is an invincible agent of change no matter what.

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Passing alongside an old border village, Amir brought up the European Central Bank’s new report on Bitcoin, which at that time had simply mentioned the prospect of regulation. “Everyone says it could have been worse!” he exclaimed. “This is the consensus. But these are the same people who accept the ‘being moderate’ fallacy. Like if there are two factions, they will balance out and the market will somehow find the best solution, despite being rigged by the powerful using influence and power to establish their vise grip on Bitcoin.” I nodded. I said the American gun industry was already long in the hands of the state, making it very hard to do anything innovative as a private person.

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I stayed a step behind him, watching my Romanian friend navigate the cobbled streets and cramped corners. I had told Ben by email that Mihai read Falkvinge, the first leader of the Pirate Party. Among his other responsibilities, Mihai was the editor-in-chief of Bitcoin magazine, a position I was told he took after an employee of the magazine ran off with 200,000 bitcoin. Serious money, even at the start of 2013. We slipped through a breezeway and into the stark wind. We passed a gate and climbed a marbled spiral stair. At the highest floor, from behind the first door, I heard a great murmur. Inside were freaks and gangsters, dissidents and hackers, madmen and millionaires.

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

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. A month later Satoshi announced on the Peer-to-Peer Foundation website: ‘I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralised, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust.

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It has since slowly declined. At the time of writing, about $6 billion worth of money is held in bitcoins. But it is still a long way from taking over as the world’s reserve currency. It does not yet work as a unit of account. The volatility and bubble-like behaviour of bitcoins are not encouraging for a world reserve currency, and nor is its relatively small supply. It is also still not easy to get many traders, even online, to accept bitcoins. The first bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in a pile of fraud. Moreover, bitcoins have proved very popular with drug dealers, especially via an online exchange called Silk Road.

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I have yet to come across a description of blockchain technology in English, as opposed to mathematics, that is really clear. In outline, I know that bitcoin is effectively a public ledger – a compendium of transactions, stored by bitcoin users all over the world. To participate, you effectively create a part of that ledger, and share it with others as a cryptographically bound ‘block’. This makes bitcoin infallible and public as a register of who has transferred value to whom, with no bank or other body verifying the fact. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym. The founder or founders of bitcoin wished to remain anonymous, for fairly obvious reasons. Previous inventors of private money had often ended up in deep trouble with a jealous state.

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

A new kind of currency is making official control of this area even harder. Bitcoin is an electronic cash system, produced using cryptography. It is a peer-to-peer currency, made by users, meaning that no central authority issues money or tracks transactions. For every legal bitcoin user, selling web design services or carrying out coding jobs for which they are paid in the currency, there are many more using bitcoins to buy drugs on the Silk Road. Bitcoin is today the preferred choice of hundreds of online drug dealers. You can buy bitcoins using cash or other currencies in hundreds of ways, with varying levels of anonymity. Using bitcoins can be, depending on how you use them, almost completely anonymous.

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A lot of people out there think you do.’7 But the determined user can retain anonymity easily enough in the US at least, by entering a bank and paying cash into an exchanger’s account, for bitcoins are now traded just as dollars and euros are. (They now have a value that is decided by the market. The total bitcoin market capitalization stood at £72 million in November 2012 – with around 10 million coins valued by the secondary market at around £7.50 each.) By this method, cash exits the real world, and from there can enter the miasmic smog of this market. Bitcoin addresses are generated anonymously and instantly, and infinitely. You can launder bitcoins bought with pounds from your bank account and send it through 100, or 1,000, anonymous bitcoin accounts that you have generated and which you control in just a few hours, then use them to buy drugs.

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My belief is today those that seek personal freedom become enemies of the state (as far as the state is concerned) and are in the eyes of the state criminals. Not unlike those who deal in drugs on Silk Road.’ In 2009 Laszlo Hancyez, an American programmer, made the world’s first purchase using bitcoins.5 He sent the bitcoins to a British man who called in a credit card payment transatlantically. It was a pizza, and it cost 10,000 – a sum worth £75,000 in November 2012. Today, many thousands of bitcoins are circulating around Silk Road users, and around 12,000 per day are spent on the site, at a value in late 2012 of around £7.50 each. Silk Road users value the currency for its supposed anonymity, although it is not entirely untrackable to the curious and competent, nor is it entirely safe.

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

Better, the Spider calculates, to buy time and find a way to control BitCoin, and make a profit from it. BitCoin is a surprisingly strong model in some ways, yet it still has several vulnerabilities. It will depend on exchanges for converting BitCoin to other currencies until it gains (if it ever does) a sufficient internal market. BitCoin transactions -- the blockchain -- are essentially public, and it's been shown that you can tie transactions back to individual identities. Lastly, and most importantly, the whole system depends on a distributed network of "miners," who recalculate transactions, and in the process generate new BitCoin. BitCoin depends on its miners to remain honest.

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It depends on conventional broadband, so is vulnerable to surveillance. BitCoin transactions are public and individual BitCoin holders' transactions can be identified. It depends on a "digital wallet" held on a computer, which is vulnerable to malware attacks and physical seizure. The history of money on the Internet and the power of the banking industry suggest that BitCoin will come under serious attack in coming years. We can expect to see the same attacks that we've seen often before: Financial blockades, prosecutions, and technical attacks on BitCoin exchanges. Association of BitCoin users with terrorists and child pornographers.

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It turned out the FBI had been demanding secret keys from him, with a gag order to stop him talking about it. So it seems fair to assume that the Spider puts pressure on many firms, including US-based BitCoin exchanges. FinCEN has stated that anyone buying or selling BitCoins for profit (even in tiny amounts will need a license. This includes BitCoin miners, who are key to the BitCoin network, since they process transactions. In May 2013, the largest BitCoin exchange, Mt. Gox, a Japanese business, had its US accounts seized by the Department of Homeland Security, another of the Spider's many arms, for operating without a money transmitter's license.

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

Recall the dilemma of Antonio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice discussed in chapter 4, whose ship had not reached shore a n e w co d e ? 199 yet. 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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Cryptocurrencies promise greater purity than either state or private money in theory, but in reality, they are deeply infected by the same features that afflict the real world of money, namely, credit, instability, and power. As noted, proof of sufficient funds is required before a Bitcoin transaction closes and the complete chain of verified transaction is recorded on an immutable digital ledger. Yet, 200 c h a P te r 8 nobody prevents investors from buying Bitcoin on credit, which will have to be paid back in state money, whatever the future price of Bitcoin might be when the debt becomes due. The purity of Bitcoin was also compromised when the cryptocurrency was admitted to futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.45 In a futures trade, parties are betting on the ability to predict future price movements, but they will have to deliver, even if they lose.

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Classic theories of money hold that money must perform three functions: it should be a store of value, a means of exchange, and a unit of account.50 Bitcoin has at best traces of the first two features: Its value has been pushed temporarily to unprecedented heights—but the high volatility of its price suggests that it is a lousy storage of value. And while many banks, retailers, and private parties now accept Bitcoins as a means of exchange, their reference price remains the US dollar and, like all holders of private assets, most investors expect to be able to convert Bitcoin into dollars (or another hard currency) at the time of their choosing. The brains behind Bitcoin, whoever they might be, had envisioned that this new private currency would become independent of, indeed an alternative to, state money.

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