Digital Gold Quotes

“Wences had first learned about Bitcoin in late 2011 from a friend back in Argentina who thought it might give Wences a quicker and cheaper way to send money back home. Wences’s background in financial technology gave him a natural appreciation for the concept. After quietly watching and playing with it for some time, Wences gave $100,000 of his own money to two high-level hackers he knew in eastern Europe and asked them to do their best to hack the Bitcoin protocol. He was especially curious about whether they could counterfeit Bitcoins or spend the coins held in other people’s wallets—the most damaging possible flaw. At the end of the summer, the hackers asked Wences for more time and money. Wences ended up giving them $150,000 more, sent in Bitcoins. In October they concluded that the basic Bitcoin protocol was unbreakable, even if some of the big companies holding Bitcoins were not. By”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“It’s either going to change everything, or nothing,”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“DE4E FCA3 E1AB 9E41 CE96 CECB 18C0 9E86 5EC9 48A1.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Hoffman had finally gotten a satisfying answer to this at a dinner with Wences and David Marcus and a few other Valley power players late in 2013. Wences agreed with Hoffman that Bitcoin was unlikely to catch on as a payment method anytime soon. But for now, Wences believed that Bitcoin would first gain popularity as a globally available asset, similar to gold. Like gold, which was also not used in everyday transactions, Bitcoin’s value was as a digital asset where people could store wealth.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi, disappeared back in 2011, leaving behind open source software that the users of Bitcoin could update and improve. Five years later, it was estimated that only 15 percent of the basic Bitcoin computer code was the same as what Satoshi had written.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Decentralized technology was a rather natural fit for Gavin, who had little in the way of an ego. Despite going to Princeton, he had been happy serving as something of a journeyman programmer, working on 3-D graphics at one point, and Internet telephony software at another. For Gavin, the jobs had always been about what he found interesting, not what promised the most money or success.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“He did not know C++, the programming language that Satoshi had written Bitcoin in, so Martti began teaching himself.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“But this argument ignored the fact that the United States government promised to always take dollars for tax bills, which was a real value no matter how much people disliked paying taxes.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“situation, which is known as deflation, encouraged people to hold on to their Bitcoins rather than spend them.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The cap on the number of Bitcoins that could ever be created—21 million—meant that the currency was expected to become more valuable over time. This”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“gold, which anyone could verify by checking the mass and volume of the gold. “We don’t use gold because it’s pretty—that was a stupid assumption of mine and many other people,” Wences would tell anyone who would listen during these days when he was totally immersed in the history. “No, we use it in jewelry because it’s very expensive. It’s not expensive because we use it in jewelry.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Each piece of gold represented a slot on the ledger of all outstanding”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Bitcoin was, very simply, a new way of creating, holding, and sending money. Bitcoins were not like dollars and euros, which are created by central banks and held and transferred by big, powerful financial institutions. This was a currency created and sustained by its users, with new money slowly distributed to the people who helped support the network.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The essential quality of successful money, through time, was not who issued it—or even how portable or durable it was—but rather the number of people willing to use it.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“As Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross became a kind of folk hero for his members, engaging with them on the Philosophy, Economics, and Law section of the forum and later on DPR’s Book Club, where he advocated for a world in which “the human spirit flourishes, unbridled, wild and free!”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The book, by anthropologist David Graeber, argued that historians and economists have wrongly assumed that money grew out of barter. In fact, Graeber argued, and Wences came to believe, barter was never common and money was actually an evolution of credit—a way of tracking what people owed to each other. People used to just keep a mental tally of what they owed each other, but money provided a way to expand the system more broadly among people who didn’t know each other.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Debt: The First 5,000 Years,”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The Federal Reserve will close themselves down eventually when they destroy money,” Paul said on the campaign trail. Meanwhile,”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“I think whatever Jamie does or doesn’t do will be as relevant as what the postmaster general did or didn’t do about e-mail.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Far from a mere libertarian fairy tale or a simple Silicon Valley exercise in hype, Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“For these Silicon Valley power brokers, there was an absurdity to the old-school Bitcoiners who crowed to each other about being the leaders of a new global movement and getting rich in the process. The convention center happened to be hosting the Big Wow! ComicFest at the same time as the Bitcoin conference, and it was sometimes hard to tell who among the long-haired nerds were there for the comics and who for the virtual currency.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The potential of the Bitcoin network as a new, cheaper, and faster payment system represented an opportunity for the network that went beyond the controversial anonymity it appeared to offer, and the ideological attraction of its decentralization.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Satoshi Nakamoto, or whoever could prove ownership of Satoshi’s public key: DE4E FCA3 E1AB 9E41 CE96 CECB 18C0 9E86 5EC9 48A1.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“I’m pretty confident that Bitcoin is the most important invention since the Internet itself. The world is changing because of Bitcoin right in front of our eyes and it’s such an exciting time to be a part of this,” he liked to say. “I’ve been spending just about every waking moment focusing on Bitcoin.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Japan was the only place Roger had encountered where people’s response, when he described Bitcoin, was to call it scary—rather than interesting or silly. This was due, Roger believed, to the way in which the virtual currency broke from the government’s mandates about how money should work.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Ross himself had gained the expertise to build his government-eluding site after attending one of the best-funded public high schools in Texas and two public universities.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Tor network that served as a backbone of Silk Road had been created by the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The only occasional gripe was about the volatile price of Bitcoin, which made it hard to know how much a vendor would be charging a week later. But Ross dealt with this by creating a clever hedging program that allowed customers and vendors to lock in a price.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Occupy Wall Street and the Free State Project were ostensibly leaderless organizations that eschewed new power hierarchies.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money