More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
freedom.
revolution.
Ethereum wanted to be peer-to-peer everything.
a more decentralized, freer world.
book-w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Vitalik Buterin.
The Ethereum community lives all over the globe by design, so conferences and hacking contests are especially important as they’re the few times during the year where many see colleagues and fellow Ethereans in person.
My intention is that anyone, anywhere, will be able to pick this up, without prior knowledge of blockchain technology, and be captivated by a fascinating story: an idealistic hero, his band of misfits, and the challenges they face to make their incredibly ambitious dream a reality.
They’re seeking to put that power into the hands of individuals, so that people can have greater control over the things they own, from assets to data, and more freedom to use those things in the ways they choose—that’s what I meant when I said cryptocurrencies are about revolution.
I believe is here to stay and will be increasingly prevalent in the future.
The week of May 11, 2018. New York City.
crypto-entrepreneurs
its price had gone through exponential rallies and crashes three times before. During those past spikes, bitcoin had represented most of the entire cryptocurrency market. But this time it was different.
Ethereum isn’t only a network for its digital currency, ether. It’s meant to be the base layer for developers to build whatever application they can dream of, including issuing their own coin.
lightly regulated online platforms.
Warren Buffett, not one to mince his words, said Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.”
And then there were those who genuinely wanted to create world-changing applications using blockchain technology. They wanted to build a world that would sidestep traditional institutions and allow users to transfer value directly with each other, without having to go through banks and other intermediaries. They wanted to put data and money back under users’ control, instead of in the coffers and computer servers of centralized entities. For them, blockchain technology (and Bitcoin and Ethereum) would wrest power from the big corporations that control tech and finance and put it into the hands
...more
a revolution based on technology and cryptography, which would unfold in a parallel universe where traditional financial laws didn’t apply, and everything was being built from scratch.
underground fight toward a decentralized future.
I was living in Argentina and saw how average people were using the digital currency to protect their savings against inflation and to skirt currency controls.
followed this colorful, idealist, brilliant crew to their conferences and hackathons in Prague, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Berlin, Denver, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Osaka.
a world of impossible dreams:
As with previous generations of internet-based revolutions, it’s hard to keep that vision pure and pristine.
Visionaries like Vitalik dream of traveling to the moon and beyond, frequently underestimating the gravitational pull that mundane forces like human ambition, greed, and fear can exert.
For cypherpunks, cryptography would be a tool to effect wider social and political change.
In 1997, Eric S. Raymond published the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” comparing two software development models: the cathedral, where code development is restricted to an exclusive group of developers, and the bazaar, where code is public and developed over the internet.
the double-spend and Sybil attack problems.
When a transaction is executed, it is broadcast to all the computers in the network for them to update their ledgers. Transactions are bunched together to form a block of data, and once that block runs out of space (1 megabyte right now), computers race to solve a complex mathematical puzzle to verify the transactions, seal the block, and record it on their ledgers.
Programmer Laszlo Hanyecz made the first known purchase using the digital currency when he bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins in 2010. (Those pizzas are worth $85 million at the time of writing.)
leaned libertarian.
He felt a surge of happiness. He had gamed the system. He had dodged this daily grind without ever holding a regular job.
Like so many other Bitcoin enthusiasts, Mihai understood that the great innovation of blockchain technology is that it can cut out the middlemen and pass those savings directly on to the masses.
able to turn complicated concepts into readable and accurate columns.
Vitalik was enjoying himself, investigating a topic he was increasingly interested in, getting paid for it, and becoming a respected voice in this zealous tribe of cryptocurrency believers.
“learn what money is.”
Bitcoin 2013,
WATCH/READ THIS.
He took up a program at the university that allowed him to study for eight months, work for four months, study for eight, work for four, and repeat that for five years until graduation.
Calafou, an anarchist community near Barcelona. They decided to go both because it was cheap and because they hoped to meet interesting people with aligned values of minimal government and corporate control.
Calafou had been started by Spanish anticapitalist Enric Duran. Duran was infamous for having masterminded a pyramid scheme in which he would borrow money from one bank to pay loans with another bank, which would raise its limit and let him borrow more money, which he would then use to pay credit with a third bank. So went the cycle until he had borrowed 492,000 euros from thirty-nine banks. He refused to pay, and fled Spain. This was in 2008, when the world was steeped in an economic crisis and Spain had been hit particularly hard. Duran published a pamphlet announcing and explaining his “act
...more
He didn’t run off with the free money he was able to withdraw from the bank accounts in his scheme. At least not all of it. He used part of it to fund anticapitalist and anarchist movements. He cofounded the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, or CIC, which was intended to create a self-sustained economy outside of the state. Activists of the organization negotiated to buy an enormous piece of land complete with a decrepit factory complex. The owner was about to sell it to someone who wanted to turn it into a waste disposal plant, but the activists’ bigger vision finally won. They agreed on a
...more
For Vitalik, the worst part about Calafou was the bathroom. It was an outhouse with a hole in the ground, and which seldom had toilet paper and always had flies. He did his best to ignore the flies, but sometimes he would give up and go to the forest. After that, he would walk another hundred yards to a different place where he could wash his hands. The cold shower wasn’t great, either. He slept on a mattress so thin he could actually feel the ground. But he loved being in the middle of nature. He would take breaks from working on Egora or talking about the possibilities for cryptocurrencies
...more
Vitalik’s worldwide Bitcoin tour started in New Hampshire. The state’s libertarian-leaning ways had a strong appeal for Vitalik, whose father had instilled in him from an early age the idea that society as a whole grows stronger when individual liberties are protected, while big governments end up corroding nations. They were lessons learned from living in communist Russia.
As with large corporations, to him, governments become “inefficient once they cross a certain size threshold.”
The most important announcement to come out of the Amsterdam conference, he thought, was that peer-to-peer digital payments network Ripple would become open source. At the time, the primary criticism of Ripple was that the network was ultimately controlled by a centralized company called Ripple Labs, which was able to change the code without asking anyone in the community. Ripple Labs also owned all 100 billion of Ripple’s cryptocurrency called XRP. “It only plans to distribute a part of them to the community—the rest will go to early investors and the company’s founders. When questioned about
...more
It started to dawn on him that the world doesn’t work according to fair and prescribed rules. The government, he came to believe, is fundamentally flawed, and the monetary and banking systems are made to tilt the scale in favor of an elite few. He contributed to Ron Paul’s campaign because he felt a strong alignment with the libertarian values of individual freedom. In perusing libertarian blogs, he found Bitcoin, a system touted for not being beholden to any central authority.
Tel Aviv.
Soon enough, Vitalik was sleeping on Ofir’s couch in Tel Aviv. It’s his preferred way of traveling: living out of a backpack and couch surfing with friends and friends-of-friends.
In the land of deserts, ancient religious sites, and cobblestone streets winding through the same noisy markets for the past three thousand years, Vitalik found a cluster of entrepreneurs and developers who were making the biggest strides in the blockchain world.
The idea was that traits of blockchain technology—such as having no central point of failure, being uncensorable, cutting out intermediaries, and being immutable—could also benefit other applications besides money. Financial instruments like stocks and bonds, and commodities like gold, were the obvious targets, but people were also talking about putting other representations of value like property deeds and medical records on the blockchain, too. Those efforts—admirable considering Bitcoin hadn’t, and still hasn’t, been adopted widely as currency—were known as Bitcoin 2.0.
J.R., under the name “dacoinminster,” and Ron, under the name “ripper234,” went back and forth in the forum for a bit, but ultimately the sale went ahead as planned, raising over 5,120 bitcoins, or around $500,000 at the time. A foundation was set up after the sale and Ron joined as one of seven board members. This was the first time a blockchain startup had raised funds by selling its own digital token. The crowdfunding mechanism would later be known as an initial coin offering, or ICO, a play on words with initial public offering, or IPO.
