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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The talks included in this book are only a small sample of my work,
While I have a topic in mind before each talk, a lot of my inspiration comes from the energy and interaction with each audience.
We began this book project with a vision: to provide an easy-to-read, short-story style overview of why bitcoin matters, of why so many of us are excited about it.
bitcoin is a really new technology, it’s a really disruptive technology, but it also is an abstraction on a technology that is really old. That technology is money.
The problem with trying to understand the history of money is that money is older than history.
You’re like, "Money’s older than writing? That can’t be.” In fact, if you look at the first forms of writing that we can find, they are spreadsheets. They are accounting ledgers.
If you go even further back, we find ancient forms of money among the ruins of ancient civilizations: beads, feathers, shells, giant stones. Money has taken many forms, but it exists and has existed almost as long as language.
What makes good money? Something that is rare.
So, it has to be portable.
It has to be difficult to forge;
It should be fungible.
Money itself is an abstraction. If it’s not an abstraction, then it’s not money—it’s barter.
Value comes from the assumption that I can use it again.
The internet was still failing to scale. But by now, it had been failing to scale for more than a decade, very gracefully, very successfully.
The phone companies then started this massive campaign to inform us of why packet-switched networks could never carry voice.
Those same phone companies (the ones still in business) now route all of their phone calls over the internet.
Because, clearly, if we had Netflix in 1992, a single video stream to a single user would melt down the entire internet.
The reason for this is really simple: it’s because scale is not a goal to achieve; it is a definition of what you can do with the network today.
Right now, there are a dozen people writing their Ph.D. theses on how bitcoin will fail, has failed, is dying, was dead, and has died again.
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.
It can’t be in limbo because bitcoin doesn’t transmit, it settles.
Bitcoin doesn’t care who the sender or the receiver is, what the application is, what the value of the transaction is. All it cares about is, did you pay the fee? If you paid the fee, your transaction is legitimate by definition because you thought it was legitimate enough to attach that fee.
There is no spam transaction. There is no such thing as an illegitimate transaction. There are only transactions that did get mined and transactions that didn’t have enough fee to get mined.
Every year, we will fail to scale for the next application and succeed to scale for the previous ones.
