More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 21 - July 30, 2019
“It’s the first thing I know where you can both get rich and change the world.”
instead, a tale of a group invention that tapped into many of the prevailing currents of our time: 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.
most were in love with the basic idea of a digital cash that each user could control and move around the world with nothing more than a private key.
For them,
around the globe with a paper check or an old-fashioned wire transfer seemed absurdly backward.
One of the things that’s most fascinating about Bitcoin, I have learned, is that it entrances fanatical conspiracy theorists, clear-eyed pragmatists, and diehard skeptics alike.
We foresee a real possibility that all currencies go digital and competition eliminates all currencies from non-effective governments.
The power of friction-free transactions over the internet will unleash the typical forces of consolidation and globalization and we will end up with six digital currencies: US Dollar, Euro, Yen, Pound, Renminbi, and Bitcoin.
China was a nation of people with an unusual willingness to place a bet on just about anything.
The year 2014 marked a sharper division, than ever before, between Bitcoin’s hobbyist beginnings and an increasingly professionalized future.
Nasdaq’s chief executive, Robert Greifeld showed up to pitch the twins on the advantages of listing the ETF on his exchange.
Nasdaq was not just working with them—the exchange was also dedicating its own employees to look at how the company might employ the Bitcoin technology within its core business, whatever happened with the ETF.
the Coin Center, in Washington, D.C. to educate and lobby regulators and legislators, and the center quickly established itself as the voice of the new elite within Bitcoin.
MIT Media Lab, which started its own digital currency initiative.
Three of the other core developers took jobs with a startup called Blockstream that was working on commercial applications for the Bitcoin blockchain.
the first company to get a BitLicense from New York regulator Ben Lawsky
itBit had gotten approval from New York regulators for something that was more useful than a BitLicense—a trust company charter—which
which allowed it to open as a full-service Bitcoin exchange with a fully-functioning American bank account.
Goldman Sachs, for instance, led an investment in a Boston-based startup, Circle, that aimed to use Bitcoin as the rails for a new payment system that would allow young people to send money
Some of the systems being discussed were tied into the Bitcoin blockchain, but most banks wanted to steer clear of anything related to Bitcoin.
Goldman Sachs had no interest in having any part of its business reliant on anonymous, far-off computer farms.
Masters said: “You should be taking this technology as seriously as you should have been taking the development of the Internet in the early 1990s.”
In a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, business leaders predicted that the first governments would begin collecting taxes on some version of the blockchain in 2023
10 percent of the world’s gross domestic product would be stored on some form of a blockchain by 2027.
Xapo was building systems to allow people in India to buy small amounts of Bitcoin to access the world of online commerce that was otherwise closed off to them.
On the other side, the three core developers, all of whom were now associated with the startup Blockstream, worried that if more transactions were coursing through the system it would be hard for ordinary computers to process the data and participate in the decentralized network.
