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

by Nathaniel Popper

Bitcoin was, very simply, a new way of creating, holding, and sending money.

benefits of a more universal money that doesn’t have to be exchanged at every border; the advantages of a digital payment method that doesn’t require you to hand over your identifying information each time you use it; the fairness of a currency that even the poorest people in the world can keep in a digital account without paying hefty fees, rather than relying only on cash; and the convenience of a payment system that makes it possible for online services to charge a penny or a dime—to

“able to convert qualitative differences between things into quantitative differences that enable them to be exchanged.”

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).