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January 5 - January 17, 2018
had grown up with grandparents who escaped the communist revolution with only the wealth they had stored in gold.
like a much more easily transportable alternative in an uncertain world.
Five years later, it was estimated that only 15 percent of the basic Bitcoin computer code was the same as what Satoshi had written.
the anger at the government and Wall Street; the battles between Silicon Valley and the financial industry; and the hopes we have placed in technology to save us from our own human frailty, as well as the fear that the power of technology can generate.
it provides a glimpse of where we might be when the government inevitably stops printing the faces of dead presidents on expensive paper.
“My passion is not running a business, it is building the Bitcoin world,” he explained.
Honey, I’m going to try to make a new kind of money.
taken up primarily by four computer screens of different shape and make,
wouldn’t need a bank or any other third party to manage it.
Hal had spent most of his professional life working on programs that allowed people to elude the ever-watchful gaze of the government.
“When Wikipedia started I never thought it would work, but it has proven to be a great success for some of the same reasons,” he wrote to the group.
When the program opened for the first time it automatically generated a list of Bitcoin addresses that would be Hal’s account numbers in the system and the password, or private key, that gave him access to each address.
Satoshi sent Hal a new version of the program, with some of the old material restored, and thanked Hal for his help.
Once it was up, he clicked on the most exciting-sounding function in the drop-down menu: “Generate Coins.”
the Cypherpunks saw that the digitization of life made it much easier for the authorities to harvest data about citizens, making the data vulnerable to capture by nefarious actors.
Hal had imbibed these ideas at Cal Tech and in his reading of the novels of Ayn Rand.
In the 1970s and 1980s, though, mathematicians at Stanford and MIT made a series of breakthroughs that made it possible, for the first time, for ordinary people to encrypt, or scramble, messages in a way that could be decrypted only by the intended recipient and not cracked even by the most powerful supercomputers.
privacy. “It seemed so obvious to me,” Hal told the other Cypherpunks of his first encounter with Chaum’s writing. “Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerization, massive databases, more centralization—and Chaum offers a completely different direction to go in, one which puts power into the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations.”
Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP,
The government categorized encryption technology, such as PGP, as weapon-grade munitions, and this designation made it illegal to export.
the existing financial system was viewed by the Cypherpunks as one of the biggest threats to individual privacy.
If snoopers get access to her credit card statements they can follow her movements over the course of a day.
“When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself,” Hughes wrote.
“no records are kept of where I spend my money. All the bank knows is how much I have withdrawn each month.”
With DigiCash, a central organization, namely Chaum’s company, needed to confirm every digital signature.
certain degree of trust needed to be placed in that central organization not to tinker with balances or go out of business.
His political distrust of government, meanwhile, was not driven by selfish resentment
Instead of being motivated by self-interest, his work seemed driven by an intellectual curiosity that bubbled over in each e-mail he wrote, and by his sense of what he thought other people deserved.
“The work we are doing here, broadly speaking, is dedicated to this goal of making Big Brother obsolete. It’s important work,”
But that is actually a relatively recent state of affairs. Until the Civil War, a majority of the money in circulation in the United States was issued by private banks,
competing bills that could become worth nothing if the issuing bank went down.
Many countries at that time relied on circulating coins fr...
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The search for a better form of money has always been about finding a more trustworthy and uniform way of valuing the things around us—a single metric that allows a reliable comparison between the value of a block of wood, an hour of carpentry work, and a painting of a forest.
The money imagined by the Cypherpunks looked to take the standardizing character of money to its logical extreme, allowing for a universal money that could be spent anywhere, unlike the constrained national currencies we currently carry around and exchange at each border.
characteristics usually found in successful coinage. Good money has generally been durable (imagine a dollar bill printed on tissue paper), portable (imagine a quarter that weighed twenty pounds), divisible (imagine if we had only hundred-dollar bills and no coins), uniform (imagine if all dollar bills looked different), and scarce (imagine bills that could be copied by anyone).
faith of the people using it.
The essential quality of successful money, through time, was not who issued it—or even how portable or durable it was—but rather the number of people willing to use it.
most people in the world believed that the United States and its financial system had a better chance of surviving than almost anything else.
In the United States, the governors of the central bank, the Federal Reserve, who are tasked with overseeing the money supply, are treated like oracles of sorts; their pronouncements are
scrutinized like the goat entrails of olden days.
task of protecting the nation’s currency is entrusted to a specially created agency, the Secret Service,
Alan Greenspan, knew that money was something that not only central bankers could create.
