Review : A page turner but it’s more like a Winklevoss Twins memoir, rather biased in favour of them.
Highlights
To me, the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it’s not built around Satoshi, it’s not built around anyone. To understand Bitcoin, you only need to understand Bitcoin.
Erik Voorhees
Bitcoin had to find its place within the financial framework that already existed. Facebook didn’t bring down the internet, it had just pushed the internet in a direction that worked for Facebook. As far as the twins were concerned, getting the Bitcoin story out there was only the first step in the journey. Getting people into Bitcoin was the next.
Cameron was convinced that the people who were most likely to fight Bitcoin were those who had the most to lose by its adoption. Which meant all the middlemen, rent seekers, and toll collectors of the legacy financial world – the banks, money transmitters, money emitters, credit card companies, and governments.
Five Phases of Bitcoin
① Development of the open-source community – a geeky, nerdy, crypto-libertarian thing, 2009 to 2010
② Vice – Silk Road, drug trafficking, gun running, 2010 to 2011
③ Speculation & trading, 2013 to 2014
④ Transactional – real merchants accepting Bitcoin
⑤ Programmable money – when money can move via a programmable infrastructure
Programmable money refers to programmed transactions between banks or individuals that could be self-validating and perfectly efficient; smart contracts that could be set in place to occur automatically, without any middlemen or oversight.
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