Digital Gold Quotes

“Like Argentina, China had incredibly restrictive rules about moving money into and out of the country. But in China, unlike Argentina, these rules were not a response to runaway inflation, but instead part of the government’s effort to keep tight control over the exchange rate of the yuan, in order to promote the export economy. The authoritarian government also wanted to keep a close check on what its citizens were doing. Each Chinese citizen could move only the equivalent of $50,000 out of the country each year. As a result, it became difficult for wealthy people, including government officials, to get their riches out of China and into more secure foreign bank accounts.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Bitcoins are not illegal in and of themselves and have known legitimate uses,” the FBI agent, who drew up the complaint, wrote. This brief sentence was one of the strongest statements to date about the legality of Bitcoin in the United States—and it came from one”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Satoshi Nakamoto’s aim in creating the decentralized Bitcoin ledger—the blockchain—was to allow users to control their own money so that no third party, not even the government, would be able to access or monitor it. But people were still opting for the convenience of centralized services like Coinbase and Bitstamp to hold their coins.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“He also pointed to all the eager Bitcoiners looking to spend their money with anyone who would take the currency. But in interviews he emphasized the more practical reasons for any company to make the move: no more paying the credit card companies 2.5 percent of each transaction (the company helping Overstock take Bitcoin, Coinbase, charged Overstock 1 percent); no more dealing with chargebacks from customers who received shipments and then disputed the charges; and no more worrying about holding lots of sensitive financial information for customers. On the first day, Overstock processed more than $100,000 in orders paid for with Bitcoins.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Economists who had taken note of Bitcoin also pointed out that the virtual currency actually had built-in incentives discouraging people from using it. 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 situation, which is known as deflation, encouraged people to hold on to their Bitcoins rather than spend them. The notion of Bitcoiners around the world sitting on their private keys and waiting to become rich begged the question of the intrinsic value of these digital files. What were all these locked-up virtual coins really worth if no one was doing anything with them? What was backing up all the value the coins seemed to have on paper?”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“But the PayPal experience also explained why there was a hunger for the idea of a virtual currency. There was a lingering memory of this unfulfilled dream of Silicon Valley. While the Internet had freed information and communication from the postal service and the publishing industry, the Internet had essentially never disrupted money, and dollars remained bound by the old networks run by the credit card companies and the banks.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Briger was a big gruff man, who was known for his bold bets on distressed debt—the troubled bonds and loans that everyone else was too afraid to touch, and that gave Briger and his firm arm-twisting leverage over large companies and occasionally small countries. He sometimes called himself a “financial garbage collector” and he looked the part.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“One particular incident had seared itself into Wences’s memory. In 1984, during the first major episode of hyperinflation after the Argentinian military junta lost power, Wences’s mother came to get him and his two sisters from school. His mom was carrying two grocery bags filled with money—the salary she had just been given in cash. She rushed with Wences and his sisters to the grocery store and had them run through the aisles, grabbing as much food as possible before the hyperinflation caused the goods to be repriced. A man walked through the aisles all day doing nothing but repricing the items on the shelves to keep up with the rapidly changing value of the peso. When Wences and his mother got to the register, he and his sisters would run back and grab more food if they still had any money left. Holding on to money was equal to losing it. These experiences gave Wences insights into the nature of money that most people in the world learn only from textbooks. In America, the dollar seamlessly serves the three functions of money: providing a medium of exchange, a unit for measuring the cost of goods, and an asset where value can be stored. In Argentina, on the other hand, while the peso was used as a medium of exchange—for daily purchases—no one used it as a store of value. Keeping savings in the peso was equivalent to throwing away money. So people exchanged any pesos they wanted to save for dollars, which kept their value better than the peso. Because the peso was so volatile, people usually remembered prices in dollars, which provided a more reliable unit of measure over time.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“March 2012, a month before Charlie found his investors, the Federal Reserve had held a daylong conference about consumer-payment systems at which there was a lot of grousing about the fact that despite all the technological innovation going on in the world, the infrastructure for moving money around the country was still based on technology from the 1960s and 1970s. The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since; this helped explain why bank transfers took at least a day to go through. For most Americans, the easiest and fastest way to send money to a friend or family member was still the old-fashioned paper check. This problem was not just in the United States. A week before New York Tech Day, the Canadian government announced the launch of a new digital currency effort, called Mint Chip, that it hoped would spur innovation in payments.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“After running away from the United States government to pursue his antigovernment vision, Roger Ver had chosen to live in a place that was uniquely unreceptive to his brand of antiauthoritarian politics. Japan was a country that was still deeply wedded to traditional hierarchies with an educational system that taught its citizens from a young age to obey authority. This was evident in the country’s rigid business traditions—the bowing and exchanging of cards—and in the spiky-haired punks in Tokyo, who waited patiently for walk signals, even when there were no cars in sight. Roger had picked Japan, not because it would allow him to be around other like-minded people, but because he liked the orderliness of Japanese culture—and the women. He had met his longtime Japanese girlfriend at a gathering in California and even she had almost no interest in politics. As Roger discovered, the deferential culture made Japanese people uniquely skeptical about a project like Bitcoin that aimed to challenge government currencies. 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. One of the only people with whom Roger had gotten any traction in Japan was a local pornography tycoon.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Jed McCaleb, meanwhile, openly chastised fellow Bitcoiners for their emphasis on the “libertarian, going to replace all other currencies, take over the world stuff.” “That just turns people off,” he said. “The only important thing for people to know is that it is better than what people use now for online payments.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“I try to remind myself that Bitcoin will probably collapse,” he said. “As bullish as I am on it, I try to check myself and remind myself that new innovative things usually fail. Just as a sanity check.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Bitcoin itself is always one big hack away from total failure. But even if it does collapse, it has already provided one of the most fascinating tests of how money works, who benefits from it, and how it might be improved.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent 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

“From the beginning, Satoshi envisioned a digital analog to old-fashioned gold: a new kind of universal money that could be owned by everyone and spent anywhere. Like gold, these new digital coins were worth only what someone was willing to pay for them—initially nothing. But the system was set up so that, like gold, Bitcoins would always be scarce—only 21 million of them would ever be released—and hard to counterfeit. As with gold, it required work to release new ones from their source, computational work in the case of Bitcoins.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“As had happened with several previous decentralized systems, this one had naturally tended toward greater centralization because of the efficiency made possible by specialization.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“He was particularly focused on the limited number of transactions that were being confirmed and recorded on the blockchain with each new block. On average, there were only about four hundred transactions getting confirmed every ten minutes in mid-2014. If Bitcoin wanted to compete with payment networks like Visa, which processed two thousand transactions each second, the software was going to need to change significantly.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“When it came to Bitcoin, Patrick firmly believed, like many in the tech world, that Bitcoin could foment big changes. An open source financial network looked to Patrick like just what was needed to shake up the privileged elite who ran and disproportionately benefited from the existing financial system.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“While the Internet had freed information and communication from the postal service and the publishing industry, the Internet had essentially never disrupted money, and dollars remained bound by the old networks run by the credit card companies and the banks.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Wences took notice as the big names showed their faces: Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo; LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman; Rupert Murdoch’s son, James; and perhaps the most recognizable venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen, an enormous man with a shiny bald head.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Bitcoin is the first time in five thousand years that we have something better than gold,” he said. “And it’s not a little bit better, it’s significantly better. It’s much more scarce. More divisible, more durable. It’s much more transportable. It’s just simply better.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“I was mentally taxed, and now I felt extremely vulnerable and scared,” he wrote in his journal. “The US govt, my main enemy was aware of me and some of its members were calling for my destruction. This is the biggest force wielding organization on the planet.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“If politicians didn’t like the ideas of a particular group, government officials could ask banks and credit card networks to deny the unpopular group access to the financial system, often without requiring any judicial approval. The financial industry seemed to provide politicians with an extralegal way to crack down on dissent.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“they all had to be designed at the beginning to make sure they would be possible later.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“But the policy has faced impassioned criticism, particularly from antigovernment circles, where many believe that the end of the gold standard allowed central banks to print money with no restraint, hurting the long-term value of the dollar and allowing for unbridled government spending.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The issue that Satoshi referred to here—currency debasement—was, in fact, a problem with existing monetary systems that had much more potential widespread appeal, especially in the wake of the government-sponsored bank bailouts that had occurred just a few months earlier in the United States.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work,” Satoshi wrote. “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency,”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“People who joined the Bitcoin network were, quite literally, both customers and owners of both the bank and the mint.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The result of this complicated process was something that was deceptively simple but never previously possible: a financial network that could create and move money without a central authority. No bank, no credit card company, no regulators.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“As was typical in this community, Satoshi gave no information about his own identity and background, and no one asked. What mattered was the idea, not the person.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money