A decade and a half ago, some unknown person or persons assumed the name Satoshi Nakamoto and cast Bitcoin loose upon the world. In the beginning, the idea was greeted with idle condescension: check out these grandiose Internet dorks and their digital Monopoly money. Soon enough, these "fake" coins found very real uses—to purchase heroin, launder criminal profits, or solicit murder-for-hire—and the sneering of outsiders turned to scorn.
Bitcoin presented a genuinely new mechanism for human coordination. For the first time, a community of far-flung strangers could maintain a collective record of its interactions without the supervision of a third party.
Satoshi Nakamoto's original achievement has been obscured. The Bitcoin white paper, which was released in October, 2008, and the Bitcoin code, which followed shortly thereafter, have at times been disdained as clever bits of engineering pastiche. It seems fairer to say that they were works of genius.
The ideas behind Bitcoin were not unprecedented. In the early nineteen-nineties, a group of people who called themselves 'cypherpunks' coalesced on esoteric and prescient Listservs, where they collaborated to prepare for and perhaps stave off the coming of the digital panopticon.
Collection
[
|
...
]