Considering Bitcoin’s mechanics for the first time, Meiklejohn was intrigued. But when she got home from the hike and began poring over Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper, it immediately became clear to her that Bitcoin’s trade-offs were the exact opposite of the eCash system she knew so well. Fraud was prevented not by a kind of after-the-fact forgery analysis carried out by a bank authority but with an instantaneous check of the blockchain, the unforgeable public record of who possessed every single bitcoin.
