bitcoin

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott  · 9 May 2016  · 515pp  · 126,820 words

.” —Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT; coauthor of The Second Machine Age “An indispensable and up-to-the-minute account of how the technology underlying bitcoin could—and should—unleash the true potential of a digital economy for distributed prosperity.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Throwing Rocks at the

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on the most exciting new technology since the Internet. A work of exceptional clarity and astonishingly broad and deep insight.” —Andreas Antonopoulos, author of Mastering Bitcoin “Blockchain Revolution beautifully captures and illuminates the brave new world of decentralized, trustless money.” —Tyler Winklevoss, Cofounder, Gemini and Winklevoss Capital “A fascinating—and

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for Liberty and Democracy Peronet Despeignes, Special Ops, Augur Jacob Dienelt, Blockchain Architect and CFO, itBit and Factom Joel Dietz, Swarm Corp Helen Disney, (formerly) Bitcoin Foundation Adam Draper, CEO and Founder, Boost VC Timothy Cook Draper, Venture Capitalist; Founder, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Andrew Dudley, Founder and CEO, Earth Observation Joshua

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com Marco Santori, Counsel, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP Frank Schuil, CEO, Safello Barry Silbert, Founder and CEO, Digital Currency Group Thomas Spaas, Director, Belgium Bitcoin Association Balaji Srinivasan, CEO, 21; Partner, Andreessen Horowitz Lynn St. Amour, Former President, The Internet Society Brett Stapper, Founder and CEO, Falcon Global Capital LLC

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Todd, Chief Naysayer, CoinKite Jason Tyra, CoinDesk Valery Vavilov, CEO, BitFury Ann Louise Vehovec, Senior Vice President, Strategic Projects, RBC Financial Group Roger Ver, “The Bitcoin Jesus,” Memorydealers KK Akseli Virtanen, Hedge Fund Manager, Robin Hood Asset Management Erik Voorhees, CEO and Founder, ShapeShift Joe Weinberg, Cofounder and CEO, Paycase Derek

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propitiously, a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto outlined a new protocol for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system using a cryptocurrency called bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies (digital currencies) are different from traditional fiat currencies because they are not created or controlled by countries. This protocol established a set of

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store the full blockchain. Finally, the blockchain is public. Anyone can see transactions taking place. No one can hide a transaction, and that makes bitcoin more traceable than cash. Satoshi sought not only to disintermediate the central banking powers but also to eliminate the ambiguity and conflicting interpretations of what

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, respond to government requests for data without users’ knowledge, and implement large-scale changes without users’ consent. Breakthrough: The energy costs of overpowering the bitcoin blockchain would outweigh the financial benefits. Satoshi deployed a proof-of-work method that requires users to expend a lot of computing power (which requires

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would benefit the system overall and accrue to their reputations, however they chose to identify themselves. The resource requirements of the consensus mechanism, combined with bitcoins as reward, could compel participants to do the right thing, making them trustworthy in the sense that they were predictable. Sybil attacks would be

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car payment, a receivable or a payable, or of course a currency. Sidechains are blockchains that have different features and functions from the bitcoin blockchain but that leverage bitcoin’s established network and hardware infrastructure without diminishing its security features. Sidechains interoperate with the blockchain through a two-way peg, a cryptographic

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That terrifies a number of people on Wall Street.” The solution? Confidential transactions on so-called permissioned blockchains, also known as private blockchains. Whereas the bitcoin blockchain is entirely open and permissionless—that is, anyone can access it and interact with it—permissioned blockchains require users to have certain credentials, giving

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a transaction processor, also unacceptable from a regulatory point of view.”32 These permissioned blockchains, or private chains, appeal to traditional financial institutions wary of bitcoin and everything associated with it. While Blythe Masters is the CEO of a start-up, her keen interest represents broader involvement of traditional financial actors

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retail banking and capital markets to accounting and regulation. They will also force us to rethink the role of banks and financial institutions in society. “Bitcoin cannot have bail-ins, bank holidays, currency controls, balance freezes, withdrawal limits, banking hours,”85 said Andreas Antonopoulos. Whereas the old world was hierarchical,

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platform that runs decentralized applications, namely smart contracts, “exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third party interference.” Ethereum is like bitcoin in that its ether motivates a network of peers to validate transactions, secure the network, and achieve consensus about what exists and what has occurred

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.”11 Executives should be excited about blockchain technology, because the wave of innovation coming from the edge may well be unprecedented. From the major cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin, BlackCoin, Dash, Nxt, and Ripple—to the major blockchain platforms—Lighthouse for peer-to-peer crowdfunding, Factom as a distributed registry, Gems for decentralized

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gold standard. It’s a pure market, driven by supply and demand rather than quantitative easing. Not surprising, the first 2016 presidential candidate to endorse bitcoin for campaign payment was Rand Paul. The libertarian bent has given opponents of digital currencies fodder for dismissing blockchain technologies outright. Jim Edwards, founding editor

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based on the government’s commitment to its participation in the “pay for success” model. Pegging Smart Social Contracts to Political Reputations Just as the bitcoin network uses blockchain technology to constantly ensure the integrity of payments, government networks can use blockchains to ensure the integrity of their transactions, records,

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Muller responded emphatically, “I’m not into ‘business as usual.’”26 Digital Content Management System Nor is Colu, a digital content management platform based on bitcoin blockchain technology. It provides developers and enterprises with tools for accessing and managing digital assets including copyright, event tickets, and gift cards—much of what

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paid immediately according to their asset shares with immediate transparency for all parties. It is exploring various techniques for encoding this information, such as a bitcoin script inside transactions. While its initial target market is fine art, Artlery has significant traction in other copyright industries such as music, books, and

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don’t type in an IP address. You type in a name, a word that you can remember. And the same goes with the bitcoin addresses. Bitcoin addresses shouldn’t be exposed to the average user. Little things like that make a difference.”4 So there’s much work to be done

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upheaval. Where governments had succeeded in beheading centrally controlled networks like Napster, pure peer-to-peer networks like Tor were able to persist. Could the bitcoin blockchain network hold its own against mighty central authorities? That might be the biggest unknown. What will legislators, regulators, and adjudicators around the world

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in mind appropriate economic incentives to sustain miner decentralization, so that the network gets good value from miners in exchange for the large sums of bitcoin. Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd likened this task to designing a robot that can buy milk at the grocery store. “If that robot doesn’t have

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self-regulatory organization if it comes to that.”21 Notable universities such as Stanford, Princeton, New York University, and Duke also teach courses on blockchain, bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies.22 Governments, Regulators, and Law Enforcement Governments all over the world are uncoordinated in their approach—some favoring laissez-faire policy, others diving

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Web payments a priority, and blockchain is central to that discussion.57 Additionally, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has hosted sessions about blockchain and bitcoin, where participants have explored new decentralized governance frameworks enabled by this technology.58 Boundaries between old and new are fluid, and many leaders in the

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many issues—from climate change to the blockchain.68 Blockchain Implications: As blockchain technology gains in systemic importance, stakeholders must aggregate and scrutinize data. The bitcoin blockchain may be radically open, transparent, and reconcilable, but closed blockchains used in everything from financial services to the Internet of Things might not be

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-currency/. 11. Leigh Buchanan reports on the Kauffman Foundation research in “American Entrepreneurship Is Actually Vanishing,” www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the-bitcoins-2013-12. 12. This definition was developed in Don Tapscott and David Ticoll, The Naked Corporation (New York: Free Press, 2003). 13. www.edelman

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, July 22, 2015. 18. Interview with Blythe Masters, July 27, 2015. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21007/nasdaq-selects-bitcoin-startup-chain-run-pilot-private-market-arm/. 23. Interview with Austin Hill, July 22, 2015. 24. July 2015 by Greenwich Associates; www.bloomberg.com/news

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-in-wall-street-survey. 25. Blythe Masters, from Exponential Finance keynote presentation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ6WR2R1MnM. 26. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21007/nasdaq-selects-bitcoin-startup-chain-run-pilot-private-market-arm/. 27. Interview with Jesse McWaters, August 13, 2015. 28. Interview with Austin Hill, July 22, 2015. 29.

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11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3mf3orbRX; www.coindesk.com/citi-hsbc-partner-with-r3cev-as-blockchain-project-adds-13-banks/. 37. http://bitcoinnewsy.com/bitcoin-news-mike-hearn-bitcoin-core-developer-joins-r3cev-with-5-global-banks-including-wells-fargo/. 38. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015/12/linux-foundation-unites

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Daniel R. Fischel, The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 18. Vitalik Buterin, “Bootstrapping a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation: Part I,” Bitcoin Magazine, September 19, 2013; https://bitcoinmagazine.com/7050/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i/. 19. Nick Szabo, “Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks

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42. http://cointelegraph.com/news/114404/true-democracy-worlds-first-political-app-blockchain-party-launches-in-australia. 43. www.techinasia.com/southeast-asia-blockchain-technology-bitcoin-insights/. 44. Ibid. 45. www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of

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20, 2015. 4. Interview with Tyler Winklevoss, June 9, 2015. 5. Satoshi Nakamoto, P2pfoundation.ning.com, February 18, 2009. 6. Ken Griffith and Ian Grigg, “Bitcoin Verification Latency: The Achilles Heel for Time Sensitive Transactions,” white paper, February 3, 2014; http://iang.org/papers/BitcoinLatency.pdf, accessed July 20, 2015. 7

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impacts-of-forking-blockchains-due-to-malicious-actors/. 41. Interview with Keonne Rodriguez, May 11, 2015. 42. Vegetabile, “An Objective Look.” 43. Peter Todd, “Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements,” The Mail Archive, June 1, 2015; www.mail-archive.com/, http://tinyurl.com/pk4ordw, accessed August 26, 2015. 44

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. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Re: Bitcoin P2P E-cash Paper,” Mailing List, Cryptography, Metzger, Dowdeswell & Co. LLC, November 11, 2008. Web. July 13, 2015, www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography.

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Andresen, June 8, 2015. 48. Ibid. 49. Interview with Austin Hill, July 22, 2015. 50. Interview with Gavin Andresen, June 8, 2015. 51. Andreas Antonopoulos, “Bitcoin as a Distributed Consensus Platform and the Blockchain as a Ledger of Consensus States,” interview with Andreas Antonopoulos, December 9, 2014. 52. Andy Greenberg, “Hackers

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Antonopolous, July 20, 2015. 12. Interview with Erik Voorhees, June 16, 2015. 13. Interview with Jim Orlando, September 28, 2015. 14. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital/. 15. E-mail correspondence with Tim Draper, August 3, 2015. 16. Interview with Gavin Andresen, June 8, 2015. 17. Ibid. 18. Interview

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Interview with Joichi Ito, August 24, 2015. 20. Interview with Jerry Brito, June 29, 2015. 21. Ibid. 22. www.cryptocoinsnews.com/us-colleges-universities-offering-bitcoin-courses-fall/. 23. Interview with Adam Draper, May 31, 2015. 24. Interview with Benjamin Lawsky, July 2, 2015. 25. Interview with Perianne Boring at Money

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dismantled its successor, the Second National Bank, in 1836. 45. Interview with Carolyn Wilkins, August 27, 2015. 46. http://qz.com/148399/ben-bernanke-bitcoin-may-hold-long-term-promise/. 47. In Canada: www.bankofcanada.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/regulation_canadian_financial.pdf; in the United States: www.federalreserve

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13, 118, 150, 161, 229, 235 Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), 261 Arab Spring, 200 Ariely, Dan, 279 Art (artists), 21, 239–43 buying through bitcoin blockchain, 240–42 ownership rights, 45–49, 132–33 profile of next-gen patron, 242–43 Artificial intelligence (AI), 91, 123, 265, 274 Artist-centric

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buying art through blockchain, 240–43 design principles. See Design principles implementation challenges. See Implementation challenges the players, 283–89 Bitcoin Foundation, 305 Bitcoin Lightning Network, 59, 288 Bitcoin Magazine, 279 Bitcoin Weekly, 279 Bitcoin XT, 271–72 BitFury, 261 BitGo, 287, 303 BitLicense, 286, 291 BitMoby, 50–51 BitPay, 48, 72, 246, 260,

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services industry, 70 high-performance services and operations, 203–7 players in blockchain ecosystem, 286–87 second era of democracy, 211–15 stifling or twisting bitcoin, 263–65 tools of twenty-first-century, 223–25 Grande, Ariana, 228 Greifeld, Bob, 65, 66, 84 Guardtime, 199 Guez, Bruno, 238 Gun rights,

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5, 6, 133 design principles, 29–31, 34–37, 39–42, 50, 152, 282, 308 implementation challenges, 256, 263, 269 Scalability, 152, 285, 288 Scaling Bitcoin, 288 Scalingbitcoin.org, 305 Scaling ignorance, 213 Scenario planning, 223 Schelling, Thomas, 279 Scherbius, Arthur, 27 Schmidt, Eric, 270 Schneider, Nathan, 259 Search costs, 95

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?

by Dominic Frisby  · 1 Nov 2014  · 233pp  · 66,446 words

Cryptography. Financial systems. Governments. Organized crime. Attempted murder. Political insurrection. Inspiring bursts of generosity. Squatters. Poker players. City traders. And people just like you. How Bitcoin could change everything Everybody is constantly thinking about ways to make money. The average American spends more hours of each day attempting to earn it

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economies. Meanwhile, over half the world’s population still doesn’t have access to basic financial services and is shut out. Suddenly, along comes Bitcoin, an open-source currency with no central authority, offering an alternative that could undermine the existing monetary order. Nobody even knows who designed it.

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point list of obvious likely bugs was systematically destroyed by a codebase that quite frankly knew better.’26 What was exceptional was the robustness of Bitcoin. The pitfalls and security problems that even experienced programmers usually end up accidentally creating in their code were almost completely absent. The implication was

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Nakamoto) is preferable to bs. Well done. You’ve just finished the hardest chapter in the book. 2 The Anarchic Computing Subculture in which Bitcoin has its Roots Cypherpunks write code. Eric Hughes, mathematician and Cypherpunk In September 1992, Tim May, a computer scientist whose inventions had once made him

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project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring

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been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.’ Then Bitcoin was mentioned on Slashdot again, alongside WikiLeaks and the outspoken libertarian US congressman, Ron Paul. Meanwhile, the Financial Action Task Force issued warnings that

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near field communication – a form of radio communication between smart phones. The first decentralized mining pool, P2Pool, mined a block. August saw the first Bitcoin conference in the US, and the following November Europe had its first conference in Prague. Overall, 2012 was a year of consolidation, development and relative

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quiet for Bitcoin. Its volatile price pattern – one of huge, quick gains, followed by long, drawn-out declines – continued. It more than tripled between November 2011

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period continued into 2014. Russian authorities said, ‘Systems for anonymous payments and cyber currencies that have gained considerable circulation – including the most well-known, Bitcoin – are money substitutes and cannot be used by individuals or legal entities.’47 Russian law, they said, stipulated that the rouble was the sole official

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– Cypherpunks have a long history of communicating anonymously. It is part of their tradition. Pseudonyms, such as Satoshi Nakamoto, are not unusual. We know Bitcoin required knowledge of Cypherpunk technological ideas: the Hashcash invention of Adam Back and Hal Finney’s reusable proofs of work. It’s not quite so

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engineering, software architecture and engineering, and computer/network security. I can travel just about anywhere.’154 All of these, incidentally, are areas of expertise Bitcoin’s inventor would have needed. The circumstantial evidence continues. In April 2008, Szabo wrote on his blog about bit gold, ‘I suspect this is all

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bit gold independently of each other. Adam Back tells me others came up with similar ideas to his own Hashcash. Perhaps something similar happened with Bitcoin. Perhaps Satoshi’s philosophical and technical roots have nothing to do with Cypherpunks. Perhaps they lie somewhere else altogether, somewhere that nobody has yet

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large traditional bureaucracy (bank). Choose your poison.’ The first people he followed – Gavin Andreson, Andrew Miller and Peter Todd – were all heavily involved in Bitcoin from an early stage. The first companies he followed were Blockstream Project – which is ‘digitizing the entire planet’s assets for the betterment of all

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that do. This process will not stop until inflation is measured accurately and honestly and until taxation is reformed. Forget property – money is theft. Why Bitcoin is libertarian Utopia There are four ways a government funds its activities. The first is through taxation – income tax, property tax, road tax, sales

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is the crucial process by which mankind prospers and progresses. 9 A Billion-Dollar Hedge Fund Manager and a Super-Smart Mathematician Forecast the Future [Bitcoin] is a techno tour de force. Bill Gates, computer programmer, founder of Microsoft It was a breakthrough technology. Everyone agreed about that. And

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serious financial ramifications. So, while the community discussed ideas, few changes were made. Instead, coders began to develop alternative cryptocurrencies, aping some aspects of Bitcoin but changing others. These were known as altcoins. There are now 300 or more kinds of altcoin. Many of them are scams and get-rich

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we’ll find Wall Street will be all over it in no time. Goldman Sachs and UBS have already published notes. Bloomberg publishes the Bitcoin price. Bitcoin is being taken seriously and it is being looked at. To say that Wall Street’s unaware and carrying on regardless isn’t true.

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I think that what is more interesting is to find a good altcoin – to find a real network that’s growing that’s not Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin itself is a very interesting investment. You should probably have some money there. But on the side if you want to make the real

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when investments stratospherically rise to the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ is still ahead for block chain tech – even if it might not necessarily be for Bitcoin. Bitcoin may be just the beginning of something bigger. So, keep your eyes and ears peeled – block chain tech is the next great bull market.

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world. That’s what makes it controversial. That’s what gets it discussed. And that’s what gives it power. So, what exactly is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a means to an end. It is a way to involve billions in the world economy. If you’re one of the unbanked, or

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J King, Charles Bry and Vladimir Oksman were brought into the fray as a result of a patent they filed a few days before the Bitcoin website was registered. Professor Penenberg, who was Satoshi-sleuthing for Fast Company, argued that it contained some suspiciously similar terms, including the phrase ‘

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computationally impractical to reverse.’ Except their patent actually contained the phrase ‘reverse-map’, which is different. Penenberg was also excited by the fact that bitcoin.org was registered in Finland and Charles Fry had travelled to Finland in 2007. The site was registered in Finland for no such reason – it

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open-source community. Nevertheless, in stylometrics tests, which analysed word-length frequency and character frequency, Chaum ranked as a very low possibility.202 Moreover, Bitcoin makes little use of Chaum’s ground-breaking blind signatures, which is, as blogger Gwern writes to me, ‘a bit like Newton not using Calculus

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not least I thank Satoshi Nakamoto. You have given the world something special. Bibliography There are various websites I have returned to repeatedly. These are: Bitcoin Wiki – bitcoin.it/wiki BitcoinTalk – bitcointalk.org Coindesk – coindesk.com Cryptography Mailing List – mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com Forbes – forbes.com P2P Foundation – http

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Reddit – reddit.com Sourceforge – sourceforge.net Nick Szabo’s Essays, Papers and Concise Tutorials – szabo.best.vwh.net/ Unenumerated – unenumerated.blogspot.com ‘All About Bitcoin.’ Top of Mind 21. Goldman Sachs. March 11, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8hR ‘Anonymous Speech.’ June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8hQ. Bank of England

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Connor, Steve. ‘Flu epidemic traced to Great War transit camp.’ Irish Independent. January 8, 2000. Accessed February 11, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8yf. Cox, James. Bitcoin and Digital Currencies: The New World of Money and Freedom. Baltimore: Laissez Faire, 2013. ‘Credit card ownership statistics.’ Statistic Brain RSS. July 24, 2012. Accessed

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http://bit.ly/1tHFaGm. ‘Find, Create, and Publish Open Source Software for Free.’ Sourceforge. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF8yk. Foley, Stephen. ‘Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency failures.’ Financial Times. November 28, 2013. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://on.ft.com/1tHFaGn. Gilbert, David. ‘FBI

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2014. http://bit.ly/1tHFaGq. Hayek, Friedrich A. Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined. London: London Publishing Partnership, 1976. Hill, Kashmir. Secret Money: Living On Bitcoin In The Real World. Forbes Media, 2014. Ebook. http://onforb.es/1tHFaGr. ‘How Currency Gets into Circulation.’ Federal Reserve Bank of New York. February 7

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Leslie, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. ‘The Byzantine generals problem.’ SRI International April 1980. http://bit.ly/1tHFaGv. Lons, Rob. ‘A complete, interactive history of Bitcoin.’ Mashable. February 10, 2014. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://on.mash.to/1tHF8OG. ‘M2 Money Stock’. Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. February 10, 2014

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bbc.in/1tHF8OS. ‘Reddit’. Reddit: The Front Page of the Internet. Accessed June 15, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHFaWT. ‘Researchers uncover likely author of original Bitcoin paper.’ Aston University. April 16, 2014. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHFaWU. Riegel, Edwin C. The New Approach to Freedom: Together with

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Essays on the Separation of Money and State. San Pedro, CA: Heather Foundation, 2003. http://bit.ly/1tHF956. ‘Russian authorities say Bitcoin illegal.’ Thomson Reuters. February 9, 2014. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://reut.rs/1tHFaWV. Smith, Andrew. ‘Desperately seeking Satoshi.’ The Sunday Times. March 2,

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2014. Southurst, Jon. ‘Why China is leading the global rise of Bitcoin.’ CoinDesk RSS. November 18, 2013. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF957. Standard, Liberty. ‘Exchange rates 2009.’ New Liberty Standard – An Economic Revolution.

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2014. http://bit.ly/1tHFaX0. Szabo, Nicholas. ‘Bit gold markets.’ Unenumerated. April 8, 2008. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF95b. Szabo, Nicholas. ‘Bitcoin – what took ye so long?’. Unenumerated. May 28, 2011. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHFbde. Szabo, Nicholas. ‘Bit gold.’ Unenumerated. December 29, 2005

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Thomas, Keir. ‘Could the Wikileaks scandal lead to new virtual currency?’ PCWorld. December 10, 2012. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF95n. Titcomb, James. ‘Bitcoin under threat as MtGox goes offline.’ The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, February 25, 2014. Accessed June 16, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF9lC. Treanor, Jill, Wintour

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2014, http://nyfed.org/1tHF8OC. 12 Bank of England Statistical Release, January 30, 2014, accessed February 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF7KB. 13 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency,’ P2P Foundation, accessed January 28, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaWL. 14 Ibid. 15 David Chaum. ‘Blind signatures for untraceable

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+ Ordering not possible on MtGox’, BitcoinTalk, June 19, 2011, accessed March 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru4S5. 63 ‘IT pro needed for venture backed bitcoin startup,’ BitcoinTalk, October 11, 2011, accessed March 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7xg. 64 Ulbricht Criminal Complaint. FBI Agent Christopher Tarbell before Honorable Frank Maas

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Mainstreamlos, January 24, 2014, accessed February 28, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru4S7. 72 Ibid. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? 73 Leah McGrath Goodman, ‘The Face Behind Bitcoin,’ Newsweek, March 6, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaGp. 74 Dorian Nakamoto, ‘Reviews,’ Amazon, accessed March 11, 2014 http://amzn.to/1tru7Nv. 75 Ibid. 76

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Nakamoto, ‘Re: They want to delete the Wikipedia article,’ BitcoinTalk, July 20, 2010, accessed May 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcha. 94 Nick Szabo, ‘Bitcoin, what took ye so long?’, Unenumerated, May 28, 2011, accessed March 25, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFbde. 95 Gwern Branwen, ‘Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto,’

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’ – is that something a native English speaker would say? I guess so, possibly, just.) 116 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: How fast do the fastest computers generate bitcoins?’, BitcoinTalk, June 22, 2010, accessed March 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxA. 117 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Re: Potential Disaster Scenario,’ BitcoinTalk August 15, 2010, accessed

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Nakamoto, ‘Re: Transactions and Scripts: DUP HASH160…EQUALVERIFY CHECKSIG,’ BitcoinTalk, June 18, 2010, accessed March 5, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcxI. 125 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency,’ P2P Foundation, February 11, 2009, accessed February 19, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tru840. 126 Satoshi Nakamoto Profile, P2P Foundation

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on ‘Satoshi Nakaoto is (probably) Nick Szabo,’ Reddit, December 1, 2013, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru849. 148 Adam L. Penenberg, ‘The Bitcoin Crypto-Currency Mystery Reopened,’ Fast Company, October 11, 2011, accessed May 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHF8OR. 149 Satoshi Nakamoto, email message to Wei Dai

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158 Nick Szabo, ‘Antiques, time, gold, and bit gold,’ Unenumerated, August 28, 2008, accessed April 1, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFbdq. 159 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency’, P2P Foundation February 11, 2009, accessed March 30, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tru840. 160 ‘Bit gold.’, 161 Ibid. 162

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164 Nick Szabo, ‘Ben Bernanke plays John Law,’ Unenumerated, May 13, 2008, accessed May 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaX0. 165 Hal Finney, ‘Re. Bitcoin P2P ecash paper,’ Cryptography Mailing List, November 8, 2008, http://bit.ly/1trvGLt. 166 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘They want to delete the Wikipedia article,’ BitcoinTalk, July

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20, 2010, accessed March 30, 2014, http://bit.ly/1trBcha. 167 Gwern Branwen, ‘Bitcoin is worse is better,’ Gwern.net, May 27, 2011, accessed April 1, 2014. http://bit.ly/1tHF7KL. 168 Andrew Smith, ‘Desperately seeking Satoshi,’ The Sunday

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200 Jed McCaleb, ‘Hiring C++ and JS programmers,’ BitcoinTalk, September 11, 2012, accessed March 11, 2014. http://bit.ly/1CNGtWX. 201 Michael J. Casey, ‘Bitcoin Foundation’s Andresen on Working with Satoshi Nakamoto,’ Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2014, accessed March 10, 2014, http://on.wsj.com/1tHF8yc. 202 ‘Occam

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Standish-White Tony Stanmore Kostadin Stoilov Nick Stoneman James Sturgeon Damian Sweeney Emilia Tai Graham Tanker Ezra Tassone Chris Taylor Jamie Taylor Jeremy Tetlow The Bitcoin Rat Ulf V Thoene Andrew Thomas Graham Thomas Piers Thomas Dave Thompson Gary Thompson Steve Thompson Daniel Thorley Jan Thorskov David Tickle Alan Tonkin

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar  · 19 Oct 2017  · 416pp  · 106,532 words

-quality thought leadership and insights. —VINNY LINGHAM, cofounder and CEO of Civic.com, Shark on Shark Tank South Africa, and board member of the Bitcoin Foundation Since Bitcoin’s creation, people have been wondering why it and other cryptoassets have any value. Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar give the most compelling case

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fraught with risks and pitfalls. No one should venture into this world without preparation. Cryptoassets explains, in simple to understand terms, the full paradigm of Bitcoin and its successor currencies, and it provides everything needed to explore this exciting world. —JOHN MCAFEE, founder of McAfee Associates A thorough, balanced, and

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busy explaining the benefits of cryptocurrencies to audiences around the world. Now, with Cryptoassets, they describe, as nobody has before, why every investor should incorporate bitcoin, ether, and new blockchain-based assets into their portfolios, and how to analyze these tokens in order to make the right investments. —TRAVIS SCHER, investment

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Chapter 13 Operating Health of Cryptoasset Networks and Technical Analysis Chapter 14 Investing Directly in Cryptoassets: Mining, Exchanges, and Wallets Chapter 15 “Where’s the Bitcoin ETF?” Chapter 16 The Wild World of ICOs Chapter 17 Preparing Current Portfolios for Blockchain Disruption Chapter 18 The Future of Investing Is Here Chris

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business is not the social web, big data, the cloud, robotics, or even artificial intelligence. It’s the blockchain, the technology behind digital currencies like bitcoin.”7 Incumbents are sensing the inherent creative destruction, especially within the financial services sector, understanding that winners will grow new markets and feast off the

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project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would

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the concept itself, with no particular implementation in mind. It is the most amorphous, so our least favored of the terms. Chapter 3 “Blockchain, Not Bitcoin?” In drawing a line between public and private blockchains, we have entered contentious territory that the innovative investor should understand. The difference between these two

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forward with improving the protocol and building applications atop it. During that time, conversations about the underlying technology gained momentum, as early Bitcoiners9 emphasized that Bitcoin was important not only because of the decentralized currency aspect but also because of the architecture that supported it. This emphasis on the technology supporting

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“blockchain” Data sourced from Google Search Trends Masters’s focus for blockchain technology in financial services is on private blockchains, which are very different from Bitcoin’s blockchain. Pivotal to the current conversation, private blockchains don’t need native assets. Since access to the network is tightly controlled—largely maintaining security

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As a general purpose technology, blockchain technology includes private blockchains that are going to have a profound impact on many industries and public blockchains beyond Bitcoin that are growing like gangbusters. The realm of public blockchains and their native assets is most relevant to the innovative investor, as private blockchains have

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at over $4 billion. Yes, the numbers have changed a lot since. Crypto moves fast. As the investment landscape for cryptoassets continues to grow beyond bitcoin, it’s vital for the innovative investor to understand the historical context, categorization, and applicability of these digital siblings, so that potential investment opportunities can

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architectures help provision these digital resources in a distributed and market-based manner. In this chapter, we focus on the most important cryptocurrencies today, including bitcoin, litecoin, ripple, monero, dash, and zcash. The next chapter covers the world of cryptocommodities and cryptotokens, the development of which has been accelerated by

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paramount, and cryptoassets have such security in spades. THE EVER-EVOLVING NATURE OF CURRENCIES The pursuit of a decentralized, private, and digital currency predates bitcoin by decades. Bitcoin and its digital siblings are just part of a broader evolution of currencies that has taken place over centuries. At their inception, currencies were

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would lead to increased centralization of the mining network. For a decentralized currency, increased centralization of the machines that processed its transactions was concerning. Fortunately, Bitcoin’s protocol is open-source software, which meant developers could download the entirety of its source code and tweak the aspects they felt most needed

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and specialized mining devices called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). ASICs required custom manufacturing and specifically designed computers. As a result, Lee correctly foresaw that bitcoin mining would ramp beyond the reach of hobbyist miners and their homegrown PCs. Lee wanted a coin that retained its peer-to-peer roots and

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experienced cryptoasset investors. Monero and Its Predecessor, Bytecoin Monero is a descendent of a lesser-known cryptocurrency called Bytecoin. Bytecoin was crafted quite differently from Bitcoin, using technology known as CryptoNote. Similar to Litecoin’s scrypt, CryptoNote’s block hashing algorithm aims to avoid the specialization and therefore centralization of the

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Canada. He had the good fortune of a freethinking father,2 who in February 2011 introduced 17-year-old Buterin to Satoshi’s work and Bitcoin.3 Bitcoin had only been functioning for two years at that point, and no major alternative was in existence. It would not be until October of

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Some thought it outrageous that the team supporting a blockchain architecture could raise $18 million without a functioning product, as this was clearly different from Bitcoin’s process. Venture capital investors (VCs) often invest in ideas and development teams, having faith they will work their way toward success. Ethereum democratized

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client’s portfolio in alternatives. A smaller but not insignificant percentage of advisors recommended 16 percent to 25 percent of their clients’ portfolios in alternatives. Bitcoin and other cryptoassets are alternative assets that can be safely and successfully incorporated into well-diversified portfolios to meet these asset allocation recommendations.15 However

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Cryptoassets As with Tulipmania, cryptoassets are vulnerable to the speculation of crowds. This is especially true as people fixate on the incredible returns some early bitcoin investors enjoyed and hope that the latest cryptocurrency, cryptocommodity, or cryptotoken will make them rich too. However, remember that just because the unfettered enthusiasm of

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new developers forked the code of the cryptoasset to experiment with it. Recall that this is how Litecoin, Dash, and Zcash were created from Bitcoin: developers forked Bitcoin’s code, modified it, and then re-released the software with different functionality. Subscribers refer to people wanting to stay actively involved with the

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10 Frequency of developer activity for different cryptoassets (March 29, 2017) Data sourced from CryptoCompare Using this standardized measure for developer activity, it’s clear Bitcoin and Ethereum are two standout projects. With Dash as the baseline, Ripple developers are 80 percent more active and Monero developers 40 percent more. However

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and evaluated using technical analysis, allowing the innovative investor to better time the market and identify buy and sell opportunities. • • • Innovative investors must independently examine bitcoin and other cryptoassets, avoiding the temptation to buy or sell simply because everyone else is doing so. There’s a growing wealth of information and

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examples as it provides the scaffolding necessary to investigate similar options for other cryptoassets. The best resource for learning more about different kinds of bitcoin wallets is bitcoin.org,33 and we include additional information sources in the Resources section of this book. Recognize that as interest and access to more cryptoassets

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capital market vehicles holding cryptoassets, so it is an area of development that the innovative investor should watch. The pricing problem is particularly acute for bitcoin that trades in different geographies and with different fiat currency pairs. Currently, the operations of different cryptoasset exchanges can be thought of as isolated liquidity

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algorithms that account for market liquidity, manipulation attempts, and other anomalies that occur throughout the global exchanges.39 While all of the aforementioned indices are bitcoin-focused, we expect to see many indices focused on other maturing cryptoassets appear. This will foreshadow more capital market vehicles to come. TALKING TO A

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awareness related to this investment vehicle from financial advisors, whether they’re independent or from a wirehouse. At this point, innovative investors should recognize that bitcoin and other cryptoassets can have a positive impact on their investment portfolios. Financial advisors and investment firms would be well served to be knowledgeable, informed

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rebukes after the financial crisis of 2008. The incumbents protect themselves by dismissing cryptoassets, a popular example being JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, who famously claimed bitcoin was “going to be stopped.”5 Mr. Dimon and other financial incumbents who dismiss cryptoassets are playing exactly to the precarious mold that Christensen outlines

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on for most all of the notable cryptoassets. Blockchain.info: https://blockchain.info/charts The best place for charts and easily downloadable CSV files of Bitcoin network statistics. BraveNewCoin: https://bravenewcoin.com/ A bevy of resources from analysis, to APIs, to carefully crafted indices, BraveNewCoin is focused on providing professional-grade

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.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/001-2014-3A-V1-LehmanBrothers-A-REVA.pdf. 19. https://www.stlouisfed.org/financial-crisis/full-timeline. 20. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 21. http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09980.html. 22. https://www.fdic.gov/news/news/press/2006/pr06086b.pdf. 23

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. http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg10006.html. 26. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/200904_CREDITCRISIS/recipients.html. 27. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block. 28. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/article2160028.ece. 29. http://historyofbitcoin.org/. 30. http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

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.org/. 17. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0. 18. https://litecoin.info/History_of_cryptocurrency. 19. https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoin/Alternative_work_in_progress_version. 20. https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20170101/. 21. http://ryanfugger.com/. 22. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/disruptor-chris-larsen-returns

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-with-a-bitcoin-like-payment-system. 23. Ibid. 24. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128413.0. 25. http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/opencoin-developer-ripple-protocol

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/04/06/world/europe/panama-papers-iceland.html. 45. https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/Policies/Distributed_Digital_Currencies_and_Economies. 46. https://news.bitcoin.com/polls-iceland-pro-bitcoin-pirate-party/. 47. http://bitcoinist.com/iceland-election-interest-auroracoin/. 48. https://cryptonote.org/inside.php#equal-proof-of-work. 49. https://cryptonote

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-free rate. 9. Using weekly returns to standardize for # of days scalar multiplier. All previous charts have used daily data. 10. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-price-2014-year-review/. 11. http://corporate.morningstar.com/U.S./documents/MethodologyDocuments/MethodologyPapers/StandardDeviationSharpeRatio_Definition.pdf. 12. Market cap is an abbreviation of market

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://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/semperaugustus.html. 18. Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost. 19. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/04/bitcoin-bubble-tulip-dutch-banker. 20. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/. 21. https://z.cash/. 22. Recall that a coinbase transaction is the transaction that pays

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hardware maintaining and building a blockchain. 11. http://startupmanagement.org/2015/02/15/best-practices-in-transparency-and-reporting-for-cryptocurrency-crowdsales/. 12. Here are bitcoin’s social repository points from CryptoCompare: https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/btc/influence. You can substitute any cryptoasset symbol for “btc” in this address to

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not easily ascertainable and to avoid controversy the most accurate announcement date of the new cryptoasset was used. 15. https://www.openhub.net/p?query=bitcoin&sort=relevance. 16. http://spendbitcoins.com/. 17. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/. 18. https://blockchain.info/charts. 19. https://etherscan.io/charts.

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20. http://www.coindesk.com/using-google-trends-estimate-bitcoins-user-growth/. 21. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp. 22. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions. 23. https://etherscan.io/chart/tx. 24

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but interesting reading, especially regarding the “Wild West” early days): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576337#post_toc_22. 16. Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvest Money (Harper Collins, 2015). 17. https://www.cryptocompare.com/exchanges/#/overview. 18. There

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digital-currencies-as-commodities/. 32. http://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/pr7231-15. 33. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/tax-day-is-coming-a-primer-on-bitcoin-and-taxes-1459786613/. 34. Coinbase does provide a specialized Cost Basis for Taxes report to customers. See https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/1496488

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221, 292n11 as web wallet, 225 CoinCap, 286 CoinDance, 286 Coindesk.com, 198, 199, 202, 207, 209, 286 CoinMarketCap.com, 286 CoinWarz, 215 COINXBT. See Bitcoin Tracker One Cold storage, 221–222 Collaboration, 111 community and, 56 platforms for, 159 Collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), 4–5 Colored coins, 53 Commodities, 80

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, 80, 231 clients of, 281 cryptoassets and, 243–245 Financial Conduct Authority, UK, 159 Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), 276 Financial Crisis of 2008, 77 bitcoin and, 3–9 Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), 233, 303n21, 304n12 Financial Planning Association (FPA), 243 Financial sector, 266–267 Financial services, 18 Financial systems

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

by David Golumbia  · 25 Sep 2016  · 87pp  · 25,823 words

Ian Bogost The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living with Apple Andrew Culp Dark Deleuze Grant Farred Martin Heidegger Saved My Life David Golumbia The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism Gary Hall The Uberfication of the University John Hartigan Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach Mark Jarzombek Digital Stockholm Syndrome

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scenes; and more generally that the governmental and corporate leaders and wealthy individuals we all know are “controlled” by those same “elites.” Understanding how Bitcoin comes to embody these extremist ideas requires situating it within two broader analytical frameworks. The first of these is the phenomenon that scholars call cyberlibertarianism

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come from the political right, especially when digital technologies are at issue. The most important of these redefined terms that occur repeatedly in discussions of Bitcoin are “freedom” and “government,” both of which are central to all cyberlibertarian and political libertarian rhetoric. Referring to the 1994 manifesto “Cyberspace and the

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rightist tropes about central banking and governmental tyranny I describe here, and those that do not (e.g., Bauwens 2014) emerge very skeptical about Bitcoin. Perhaps Bitcoin and the blockchain can serve politics other than the ones from which they were birthed and which they continue to embody; my goal here is

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and whose writings on finance and the Federal Reserve (especially Sutton 1995) repeat many of the same “facts” and inferences found in Mullins and others. Bitcoin enthusiasts repackage material from these writers almost verbatim, regardless of whether they know the origins of that material. Despite the general rightist orientation of much

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sometimes known as computationalism; see Golumbia 2009). This computer-centric point of view is extremely common throughout digital culture, and it is especially notable in Bitcoin discussions. The implication is that this lack of technical expertise disqualifies the critic from speaking on the topic at all. Of course, no such

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the government against efforts that directly and purposely contravene perfectly valid law (regardless of whether one agrees with that law). Despite the fact that Bitcoin appears here to be operating against corporate power, what Matonis paints is a picture—one confirmed by the rhetoric surrounding newer proposals like blockchain-based

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any number of serious and meaningful justifications, many of them directly implicated in the securing of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When Bitcoin enthusiasts extol the currency’s existence beyond “regulation by nation-states,” they frequently blur the lines between these two very different forms of regulation, which

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’ll call “legal regulation”) despite there being very little reason to think that might be true. Some of the issues in legal regulation that Bitcoin enthusiasts routinely say their currency addresses are ones with significant justification in law enforcement—thus, statutes making money laundering illegal, forcing banks to report transactions

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over US$10,000, having limits on international transfers, and so on. Typically, Bitcoin defenders respond to criticisms of the cryptocurrency based on such deficiencies by pointing out that cash transactions can face at least some of the same

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than the selfsame “destruction of value”—is touted as a virtue. When another commentator, “DakatobornKansan,” writes that “what doomed communism, and will likely undermine Bitcoin, is the delusional hope that a protocol, a procedure, a network, an algorithm can neutralize the ugly selfish traits of human beings,” user “Robert Dudek

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response was found on the rightist economics blog Against Crony Capitalism, whose editor Nick Sorrentino wrote a piece titled “Paul Krugman Is Scared: He Says ‘Bitcoin Is Evil’: Undermines Central Banks” (2013). Others immediately leapt to discredit Krugman’s authority altogether (see Gongloff 2013; Yarow 2013). Comments to the piece

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also motivated to hoard, the discount becomes the equilibrium price at which the two hoarding instincts are matched. With discounts of 30% on the Bitcoin price, most Bitcoin retailers are not experiencing difficulty overcoming the hoarding instinct and generating revenue. It remains to be seen whether the deflationary aspect of the currency

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economic retraction” (176). This argument builds on the conspiratorial account of deflation (and inflation) to admit and then abruptly dismiss well-established economic principles, to Bitcoin’s advantage. “Discounting from vendors,” especially when seen from the perspective of producers rather than of retailers, is nothing more or less than accepting substantial

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devoted to the question of whether “blockchain technology [can] help build a foundation for real democracy,” where “real democracy” is contrasted to representative democracy and Bitcoin is posited “as the new First Amendment app,” Nozomi Hayase (2015) discusses the “tyranny of central banks” and writes, “In tracing the history of

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” 2011). Such beliefs require one to ignore the direct evidence of one’s own eyes. Precisely because it is outside of legal regulatory structures, Bitcoin is particularly prone to the kinds of hoarding, dumping, derivation, and manipulation that characterize all instruments that lack central bank control and regulatory oversight by

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, and it is this feature of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies that all non-rightist political thinkers need to take seriously. Part of what makes Bitcoin such an intriguing cultural phenomenon is that while its proponents are firmly convinced of its success, they have serious difficulty agreeing about what that success

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primary social function is to spread these ideas and give them more widespread legitimacy than John Birch Society pamphlets ever did. Pushed to its limit, Bitcoin revels in contradictions that only committed ideologues could think reasonable. Jeffrey Tucker—an avowed anarcho-capitalist, “Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me,”

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-peer” and “sharing” (in particular Tucker 2015a) along with his relentless disparagement of democratic governance should give all non-right-wing digital enthusiasts pause. Bitcoin and its associated exchanges and services have been thoroughly implicated in scams and manipulation of every sort (for just a partial list through the end

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(Bustillos 2015). These are problems of governance, authority, and centralization, and rather than a decentralized, super-democratic, and distributed governance mechanism revealing its efficacy, even Bitcoin’s own governance structures displayed exactly the autocracy, infighting, bad faith, and centralization that the blockchain is often said to have magically dissolved. Few attitudes

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political–economic practice. Central Banking Conspiracy Theories 1. All reader comments have been lightly standardized for spelling and punctuation. Software as Political Program 1. On Bitcoin’s failure to meet the standard criteria for money see Yermack (2014), Davidson (2013), and Gans (2013). Even some responsible libertarian economists demur from

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-printed guns, see Silverman (2013). 3. Some of the few exceptions to this rule in scholarship—political analysis that acknowledges the parallels or connections between Bitcoin discourse and far-right political beliefs—include Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz (2013), Payne (2013), and Scott (2014). Robinson (2014) is the best introduction to

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the general system of beliefs found among Bitcoin promoters. Bibliography Abel, Andrew B., Ben S. Bernanke, and Dean Croushore. 2008. Macroeconomics. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson. Allen, Katie. 2013. “Gold Price Volatility Hits

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. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Birchall, Clare. 2006. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Oxford, UK: Berg. Boase, Richard. 2013. “Cypherpunks, Bitcoin, and the Myth of Satoshi Nakamoto.” Cybersalon (September 5). http://www.cybersalon.org/. Borchgrevink, Jonas. 2014. “Ron Paul Loves His Own Ron Paul Coin and

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Is Positive about Bitcoin.” CryptoCoinsNews (January 16). http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/. Brands, H. W. 2006. The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War over the American

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Norton. Bratich, Jack Z. 2008. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Brito, Jerry, and Andrea Castillo. 2013. Bitcoin: A Primer for Policymakers. Arlington, Va.: Mercatus Center, George Mason University. Brown, Ellen Hodgson. 2008. Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth about Our Money System

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Posthuman Terrains.” Existenz 8, no. 2: 47–63. —. 2013b. “The Superlative Summary.” Amor Mundi (July 14). http://amormundi.blogspot.com/. Casey, Michael J. 2014. “Bitcoin Foundation’s Chief Jon Matonis to Resign.” Wall Street Journal (October 30). http://www.wsj.com/. Chomsky, Noam. 2015. “Creating the Horror Chamber.” Jacobin (July

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Carta for the Knowledge Age.” Future Insight (August). http://www.pff.org/. Emery, Joel, and Miranda Stewart. 2015. “All around the World, Regulators Are Realizing Bitcoin Is Money.” The Conversation (August 11). http://theconversation.com/. Epperson, A. Ralph. 1985. The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History.

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of Payments, 21–71. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968. —. 1993. Why Government Is the Problem. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press. Frisby, Dominic. 2014. Bitcoin: The Future of Money? London: Unbound. Frisch, Helmut. 1983. Theories of Inflation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Frontline. 2009. “Interview with Brooksley Born.” (October). PBS

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York: Houghton Mifflin. Galloway, Alexander R. 2014. “The Reticular Fallacy.” The b2 Review (December 17). http://boundary2.org/. Gans, Joshua. 2013. “Time for a Little Bitcoin Discussion.” Economist’s View (December). http://economistsview.typepad.com/. Giddens, Anthony. 1985. The Nation State and Violence. Vol. 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical

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of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Glaser, Florian, Kai Zimmermann, Martin Haferkorn, Moritz Christian Weber, and Michael Siering. 2014. “Bitcoin: Asset or Currency? Revealing Users’ Hidden Intentions.” Twenty Second European Conference on Information Systems. http://papers.ssrn.com/. “Gold Fix: The London Gold Fix.” BullionVault

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Revolutions in Rhetoric.” uncomputing (June 26). http://www.uncomputing.org/. —. In preparation. Cyberlibertarianism: How the Digital Revolution Tilts Right. Gongloff, Mark. 2013. “Paul Krugman Trolls Bitcoin Fans: Guess What Happens Next.” Huffington Post (December 30). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. Goodley, Simon. 2013. “Could Gold Be the Next Libor Scandal?” The Guardian

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(March). http://www.theguardian.com/. Greenberg, Andy. 2013. “Meet the ‘Assassination Market’ Creator Who’s Crowdfunding Murder with Bitcoins.” Forbes (November). http://www.forbes.com/. Griffin, G. Edward. 1998. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. 3rd ed.

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Medium (January 14). https://medium.com/@octskyward/. Hoepman, Jaap-Henk. 2008. “Distributed Double Spending Prevention.” http://arxiv.org/. “History of Bitcoin.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/. “How Does Bitcoin Work?” 2015. Bitcoin.org. http://bitcoin.org/. Hughes, Eric. 1993. “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.” Electronic Frontier Foundation. http://www.eff.org/. Hutchinson, Frances, Mary Mellor

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77. May, Timothy C. 1992. “The Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto.” Activism.net. http://www.activism.net/. Meiklejohn, Sarah, and Claudio Orlandi. 2015. “Privacy-Enhancing Overlays in Bitcoin.” Financial Cryptography and Data Security Nineteenth Annual Conference. http://fc15.ifca.ai/. Mellor, Mary. 2010. The Future of Money: From Financial Crisis to Public Resource

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Diginomics.com. Paul, Ron. 2003. “Paper Money and Tyranny.” U.S. House of Representatives (September 5). Archived at https://www.lewrockwell.com/. Payne, Alex. 2013. “Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology.” al3x.net (December 18). http://al3x.net/. Perelman, Michael. 2007. The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right-Wing Extremism and

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. Kent, U.K.: Commonwealth Publishing. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Popper, Nathaniel. 2015. Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money. New York: HarperCollins. Powers, Shawn M., and Michael Jablonski. 2015. The Real

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Schneider, Nathan. 2014. “Meet Vitalik Buterin, the 20-Year-Old Who Is Decentralizing Everything.” Shareable (July 31). http://www.shareable.net/. Schroeder, Jeanne L. 2015. “Bitcoin and the Uniform Commercial Code.” Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper 458. http://papers.ssrn.com/. Scott, Brett. 2014. “Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics

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of the Bitcoin Blockchain.” E-International Relations (June). http://www.e-ir.info/. —. 2016. “How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and

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. Shoff, Barbara. 2012. “Ron Paul Sound Currency Message Is Resonating with Worldwide Leaders, Including China.” PolicyMic (October). http://mic.com/. Shostak, Frank. 2013. “The Bitcoin Money Myth.” Ludwig von Mises Institute (April). http://mises.org/. Silverman, Jacob. 2013. “A Gun, a Printer, an Ideology.” New Yorker (May). http://www.newyorker

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Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State.” Bloomberg View (April). http://www.bloombergview.com/. Sorrentino, Nick. 2013. “Paul Krugman Is Scared: He Says ‘Bitcoin Is Evil’: Undermines Central Banks.” Against Crony Capitalism (December 29). http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/. Suarez, Daniel. 2006. Daemon. New York: Dutton. —. 2010. Freedom™. New

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E. J. M. Zarazaga. 2014. “Inflation Is Not Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phenomenon.” Economic Letter (June). http://www.dallasfed.org/. Varoufakis, Yanis. 2013. “Bitcoin and the Dangerous Fantasy of ‘Apolitical’ Money.” Yanis Varoufakis (April 22). http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/. Vigna, Paul, and Michael J. Casey. 2015. The Age of Cryptocurrency

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In Weber, The Vocation Lectures: “Science as a Vocation,” “Politics as a Vocation,” 32–94. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004. Weiner, Keith. 2013. “Paul Krugman Is Wrong: Bitcoin Isn’t Evil, but Monetary ‘Stimulus’ Is.” Forbes (December). http://www.forbes.com/. Welch, Robert. 1966. “The Truth in Time.” American Opinion (November). http://www

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

by David Gerard  · 23 Jul 2017  · 309pp  · 54,839 words

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law. A Bitcoin FAQ © 2013 Christian Wagner, used with permission. (This section is also available for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported [cc-

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are also extensive footnotes, with links in the digital edition to the sources for further reading, and a glossary. Chapter 1: What is a bitcoin? Why Bitcoin? Paper notes and metal coins are annoying and inconvenient, and we have the Internet now. So digital money sounds like a useful idea. The

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to 25 BTC in 2012 and 12.5 BTC in 2016 – and will stop entirely in 2140. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins.) Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator, needed a task that people could compete to waste computing power on, that would give one winner every ten minutes. The difficulty

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no bank account or access to even basic financial services; “banking the unbanked” is much discussed in international development circles. Around 2013, Bitcoin advocates started claiming that Bitcoin could help with this problem. Unfortunately: The actual problems that leave people unbanked are the bank being too far away, or bureaucratic barriers

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generally no evidence the money-printing machine you’re renting even exists. Scam wallets: sites offering greater transaction anonymity, but which just take everyone’s bitcoins after a while. Biased “provably fair” gambling: “Provably fair” gambling sites generate their random numbers in advance then send you a cryptographic hash of

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No doubt subprime-mortgage-backed collateral debt obligations, Business Consulting International and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were just severely underpriced investment opportunities. Pirateat40: Bitcoin Savings & Trust Now that Pirateat40 closed down his operatations thanks to all the fud that was going on and growing on the forum, I expect

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you trade between different cryptocurrencies, crypto assets and conventional currencies, and some even offer short-selling and other margin trading, which are enormously popular. Bitcoin exchanges were started by amateur enthusiasts. Most were computer programmers whose approach to anything outside their field was “I know PHP, how hard could running

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the price was on the upward slope of the first bubble. (Particularly if you stole the electricity, a popular strategy.) The sort of thing home Bitcoin miners proudly photographed to show everyone back in the day. Source: Killhamster, Buttcoin Foundation; original source unknown. There are many hilarious and horrifying stories

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Searching for Satoshi Since Nakamoto’s disappearance, there has been endless speculation as to his identity – as whoever was behind “Satoshi” owned 1.1 million bitcoins that haven’t moved since his disappearance. The Wikipedia article on Satoshi Nakamoto even has a section listing people suspected of being him – cypherpunks Hal

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peak of the bubble in November for $1198 each.158 Some time in 2013, he posted backdated entries to his personal blog with references to Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related concepts: A post dated August 2008 mentions he will be releasing a “cryptocurrency paper” and references “Triple Entry Accounting,”159 a 2005 paper

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. Some small darknet markets allow minor cryptocurrencies like Monero. In May 2017, AlphaBay, the largest darknet market, started offering Ethereum as an option204 – because Bitcoin was failing to serve its primary consumer use case. Ransomware Ransomware combines computer malware, encryption and anonymous payment systems. Malicious software spreads through email spam

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Microsoft Windows vulnerability that had been fixed in March, but many organisations had not updated their Windows installations. Some victims have tremendous difficulty obtaining the bitcoins to pay the ransom – most exchanges have strong identity verification requirements, and often the delay before allowing trades is longer than the ransomware’s

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deadline. Not to mention the frequent delays getting Bitcoin transactions through at all. Bitcoins are so hard for normal people to use that from CryptoLocker on, ransomware operators have been known to provide technical support to victims

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by 7.5%; adding the text would have lost them $140,000 over the campaign, for the sake of a few thousand dollars in Bitcoin.222 The Bitcoin community, of course, claimed that this literal direct measurement was somehow statistically bogus, listing objections that showed they didn’t understand what an A

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else, substantially pre-mining the coin before release. They launch it with speculative promises of interesting future features, then sell their coin off (for bitcoins), telling the new bagholders they’re actually early adopters. Some went further: DafuqCoin compromised exchanges with a rootkit because the exchanges failed to check the

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interesting hypothetical. When blockchains came along, smart contract advocates were very interested in the blockchain’s immutability. There were some smart contract experiments on Bitcoin, but Ethereum was pretty much the first practical platform for writing and running computer programs on a blockchain. Humans are bad at tasks requiring perfection

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move was permissioned blockchains, for approved users only. There are various consensus models, or ways to choose who gets to write the next block. Bitcoin-style competitive Proof of Work is stupendously wasteful. Most permissioned blockchains use something else, typically various forms of just agreeing to take turns, because trustlessness

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. Blockchains do not offer a better way to do this. An August 2015 blog post from Vitalik Buterin discusses “public”, “consortium” and “private” blockchains. Bitcoin and Ethereum are “public” blockchains.377 This comment chain on the post concisely summarises the innovations the private blockchain brings: Andrey Zamovskiy: Let’s just

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Masters, pioneer of the credit default swap, the financial instrument behind the global financial crisis of 2008 that may have provoked Nakamoto to finally release Bitcoin.) Sawtooth Lake: Intel’s contribution to Hyperledger.org replaces the blitheringly stupid and wasteful Proof of Work with something equally stupid but less wasteful,

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Bancor 95, 97 Bandcamp 130 banking the unbanked 29 baphomet (8chan) 53 BBC 32, 66 Beanie Baby 35 Berklee Rethink 128 BFX 85 Bitcoin creation of new bitcoins 14 economic aims 22 economic equality 30 exchanges 42 invention 20 irreversibility 26 limited supply 31 Satoshi Nakamoto (creator) 59 security 25 transactions

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per second 28 Bitcoin Bowl 77 Bitcoin Jesus 37 Bitcoin Mining Accidents 55 Bitcoin Relay Network 58 Bitcoin Savings & Trust 40 Bitcoinica 43, 83 bitcoinmarket.com 35 Bitcointalk 40, 41 Bitfinex 40, 83 BitGo 84 Bitgold 19

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official symbol should be named starting with an X), though most people use “BTC” anyway. [6] For all the technical detail, see: “Developer Guide”. Bitcoin.org. [7] Bitcoin power consumption was estimated at between 0.1 and 10 GW average by June 2014; Ireland consumed around 3 GW by this time. O

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The PayPal Wars: Battles With eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth. World Ahead Publishing, 2004. Chapter 1. [11] Charlie McCombie. “Bitcoin Predecessor – Liberty Reserve Founder Receives 20-Year Prison Sentence”. CoinTelegraph, 10 May 2016. (archive) [12] David Chaum. “Blind signatures for untraceable payments”. Advances in Cryptology

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”. Falkvinge on Liberty (blog), 6 March 2013. (archive) [59] A good short overview: Marie Vasek, Tyler Moore. “There’s No Free Lunch, Even Using Bitcoin: Tracking the Popularity and Profits of Virtual Currency Scams”. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2015. Blog post. [60] Gwern

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Charges They Deceived Consumers”. Federal Trade Commission (press release), 18 February 2016. [63] Cyrus Farivar. “Digging for answers: The ‘strong smell’ of fraud from one Bitcoin miner maker”. Ars Technica, 22 April 2014. [64] A good, though technical, explanation: Jon Matonis. “BitZino And The Dawn Of ‘Provably Fair’ Casino Gaming”.

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(contributor blog), 31 August 2012. (archive) [65] keepinquiet. “How 999dice.com is stealing your coins, and exactly why you won’t believe me”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Trading Discussion > Scam Accusations, 7 February 2015. (archive) [66] Jeffrey Tucker. “A Theory of the Scam”. Beautiful Anarchy (blog), 2 January 2015.

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as the net: the first e-commerce was a drugs deal”. The Guardian, 19 April 2013. [110] Satoshi Nakamoto. Comment on “Re: Porn”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Economics > adf, 23 September 2010. (archive) [111] “Join the Tor Challenge”. Electronic Frontier Foundation. [112] Yasha Levine. “Almost Everyone Involved in Developing

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. “Feds Seize Silk Road 2 in Major Dark Web Drug Bust”. Wired, 6 November 2014. [128] Satoshi Nakamoto. Comment on “A few suggestions”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Development & Technical Discussion, 12 December 2009. (archive) [129] For a collection of firetrap home mining rigs: Killhamster. “Mining Rig Megapost”. Buttcoin Foundation, 13

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] The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute site collects every public post by him, and emails people have released. [142] Gwern Branwen. “Happy birthday, Satoshi Nakamoto”. Reddit /r/bitcoin, 5 April 2014. [143] e.g., Dominic Frisby. “The Search for Satoshi”. CoinDesk, 8 November 2014. [144] Gwern Branwen. “Blackmail fail”. [145] Leah McGrath

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a Billion Dollar a Year Crime and Growing”. NBC News, 9 January 2017. [190] “Frequently Asked Questions: Find answers to recurring questions and myths about Bitcoin”. bitcoin.org. (Archive of 29 July 2015; archive of 4 August 2015; archive of 7 August 2015.) [191] Giuseppe Pappalardo, T. Di Matteo, Guido Caldarelli,

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to the individual responsible for the Bitfinex security incident of August 2, 2016”. Bitfinex blog, 21 October 2016. (archive) [269] Andrew Quentson. “Bitfinex’s Hacked Bitcoins Are on the Move; 5% Recovery Bounty Offered”. CryptoCoinsNews, 27 January 2017. (archive) [270] “100% Redemption of Outstanding BFX Tokens”. Bitfinex Announcements, 3 April

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2017. (archive) [271] Yuji Nakamura. “Inside Bitfinex’s Comeback From a $69 Million Bitcoin Heist”. Bloomberg, 17 May 2017. [272] “USD Withdrawals Update”. Bitfinex Announcements, 12 May 2017. (archive) [273] “Phil Potter ‘Solved’ Banking Problems in the past by

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[279] CoinDesk price. [280] Voogru. Comment on “[Daily Discussion] Tuesday, May 23, 2017”. Reddit /r/bitcoinmarkets, 23 May 2017. (archive) [281] Joseph Young. “South Korean Bitcoin Exchange Suffers $5 Million Hack, Issues Bitfinex-Like Tokens”. CryptoCoinsNews, 28 April 2017. [282] Unclescrooge. “[shame thread]The sorry and thank you Pirateat40 thread”. Bitcointalk

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code that injects the rootkit is jawdroppingly blatant and worth reading. Richiela. “READ ME NOW! – dafuqcoin is a trojan – pool operators/exchanges beware”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Altcoin Discussion, 22 April 2014. (archive) [288] Wikipedia: Doge (meme). [289] Clay Michael Gillespie. “Dogecoin Leaders Present Evidence that CEO of

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Is Long-Time Scammer”. CryptoCoinsNews, 16 October 2014. (archive) [290] Duncan Riley. “Mintpal scammer Ryan Kennedy arrested in U.K. over theft of 3,700 Bitcoins”. SiliconAngle, 23 February 2015. [291] “Ryan Kennedy convicted of three counts of rape against three women”. Crown Prosecution Service (press release), 26 May 2016. [

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’”. CoinTelegraph, 1 August 2015. (archive) [303] e.g., Vlad Zamfir. “About my tweet from yesterday …” 5 March 2017. (archive) [304] “Vitalik’s Quantum Quest”. Bitcoin Error Log (blog), 16 August 2016. (archive) [305] Jordan Ash. “Why Turing Machines are Quantum.” Noospheer (blog), 4 September 2013. “If successful, it will have

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EOS.IO. (archive) [319] “EOS Token Purchase Agreement”. EOS.IO. (archive) [320] CoinHoarder. “EOS – Asynchronous Smart Contract Platform - (Dan Larimer of Bitshares/Steem)”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Altcoin Discussion, 6 May 2017. (archive) [321] “Decentralized content publishing”. press.one. [322] Red Li. “Exchanges Alerts ICO Scams and Illegal Fundraising

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), 18 September 2016. (archive) [333] e.g., Stephen Tual, later of The DAO. Gian Volpicelli. “Smart Contracts Sound Boring, But They’re More Disruptive Than Bitcoin”. Motherboard, 16 February 2015. [334] Vitalik Buterin. “Thinking About Smart Contract Security”. Ethereum Blog, 19 June 2016. [335] Matt Levine. “Crossing the Rubicon and

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check actually applied the recommended best-practice of testing the callstack directly.” [348] Peter Vessenes. “Ethereum Contracts Are Going To Be Candy For Hackers”. Blockchain, Bitcoin and Business (blog), 18 May 2016. [349] Martin Holst Swende. “Ethereum contract security: An Ethereum Roulette”. 14 August 2015. [350] Ethererik. “GovernMental’s 1100

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)”. King of the Ether. (archive) [352] “Hi! My name is Rubixi. I’m a new Ethereum Doubler. Now my new home – Rubixi.tk”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Marketplace (Altcoins) > Service Announcements (Altcoins), 11 April 2016. (archive) [353] Vitalik Buterin. “Live example of ‘underhanded solidity’ coding on mainnet”. Reddit

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6 October 2016. [380] Izabella Kaminska. “Blockchains? Where we’re going, we don’t need blockchains”. FT Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, 26 August 2016. [381] “Bitcoin Venture Capital”. CoinDesk, 9 February 2017. (archive of that version) [382] e.g., David Kaaret. “Is Your Firm Ready for Blockchain-Based Trade Processing?”. MarkLogic

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2016. (archive) [388] Kadhim Shubber. “Banks find blockchain hard to put into practice”. Financial Times, 12 September 2016. [389] Richard Lumb, Accenture. “Downside of Bitcoin: A Ledger That Can’t Be Corrected”. Dealbook (blog), New York Times, 9 September 2016. [390] Morgan Grey. “Azure Blockchain as a Service Update #5

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[424] Gideon Gottfried. “How ‘the Blockchain’ Could Actually Change the Music Industry”. Billboard, 5 August 2015. [425] Kevin Cruz. “PeerTracks: Paradigm Shift In Music World”. Bitcoin Magazine, 22 October 2014. (archive) [426] Benji Rogers. “How Blockchain Can Change the Music Industry (Part 2)”. Rethink Music, Berklee Institute for Creative Enterprise, 24

Bitcoin for the Befuddled

by Conrad Barski  · 13 Nov 2014  · 273pp  · 72,024 words

BITCOIN? Why Bitcoin Now? The Benefits of Using Bitcoin The Complexity and Confusion of Bitcoin What’s in This Book? Chapter 2: BITCOIN BASICS How Bitcoin Works in Simple Terms Bitcoin Units The Bitcoin Address The Private Key The Bitcoin Wallet Creating Your First Bitcoin Wallet with Electrum Acquiring Bitcoins in Your Wallet Spending Bitcoins with Your Wallet Bitcoin Addresses Generated by Your Bitcoin

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a multibillion dollar economy that processes hundreds of thousands of transactions per day (and is growing quickly). The Benefits of Using Bitcoin Bitcoin is an inherently international currency; anyone can send bitcoins to anyone else in the world, in any amount, almost instantly. In addition, it is becoming increasingly possible to travel

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private key is more like a PIN: You need it to authorize a withdrawal or an expenditure. When a transaction is broadcast to the Bitcoin network, instructing bitcoins to be moved from one address to another, computers on the network check whether the transaction is authorized before making any updates to the

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the private key. The risk you take in this circumstance is if you lose the private key to an address in which you’ve stored bitcoins, those bitcoins will remain locked in that address forever. Clearly, it is extremely important not to lose your private key! Fortunately, you can easily make digital

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service. In this case, they host the wallet software on their servers but not the private keys. Users can log in, send and receive bitcoins, and monitor Bitcoin transactions using their own private keys (which the company never receives). We refer to such services as online personal wallets because the private keys

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, and to use the more convenient methods for daily spending only. Three reliable and easy-to-use methods for sending and receiving small amounts of bitcoins are described in the following subsections: • Online hosted wallet services • Online personal wallet services • Personal hot wallet Online Hosted Wallet Services As discussed briefly

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You can use the Electrum offline transaction-signing feature, provided you have two computers. Another highly recommended wallet for offline transaction signing is the Armory Bitcoin Client (http://bitcoinarmory.com/), which is open source and designed with maximum security in mind. Armory offers many advanced security features, and if you

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decentralized currency that is impossible to counterfeit and is built on cryptographic principles is more secure than traditional currencies. Figure 3-3: A summary of Bitcoin storage methods. These strategies span the spectrum from low security (but convenient) to high security (but inconvenient). This chart is not comprehensive because new

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example, one of the best methods on this chart, the hardware wallet, was not possible until 2014, five years after the start of Bitcoin. 4 BUYING BITCOINS Buying bitcoins is essentially just like buying any other kind of currency. Think about the various ways in which you typically exchange US dollars for Japanese

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middleman companies • The efficient way: Through currency exchanges • The fun and futuristic way: Through person-to-person purchases Middleman companies make money helping people buy bitcoins easily, with a minimum of fuss. These companies usually have decent customer service and shield you from needing to understand all the complexities of currency

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to discuss is the difference between reversible and irreversible financial transactions. Understanding this difference helps explain why long waiting periods are often involved when acquiring bitcoins from service companies. Authentication Factors Since the dawn of digital technology, many methods have been conceived for computer users to prove their identities: passwords,

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available to mitigate cheating, you can perform financial transactions with strangers with relative safety. These facts drive home one of the central lessons of the Bitcoin revolution: Technology can help society become more decentralized and less reliant on traditional, top-down companies and governments to perform many useful tasks. For

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of volunteers joined Satoshi in contributing new features and fixing bugs (however, the fundamental design never changed). Many cryptographers and programmers began to participate in Bitcoin’s development, including notable computer scientists like Hal Finney, who were longtime contributors to digital currency research (among other topics).4 Although Satoshi communicated frequently

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via forum posts and emails with early Bitcoin users and developers, he never revealed personal details about himself. One of the main contributors, Gavin Andresen, earned Satoshi’s trust over time and

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the frustration of needing to pay someone a small dollar amount but only having a large bill and no change. This problem cannot exist with bitcoins since bitcoins are completely divisible to fractions of a penny. Because computers are efficient at crunching numbers, it’s no surprise that they can handle the

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with these peers to operate the application. Early applications that used this approach include BitTorrent (for movie downloading) and Gnutella (for music discovery/downloading). Bitcoin also uses a peer-to-peer network in its design. Peer-to-peer systems have many advantages over traditional client-server systems, including improved durability

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have been a strong deterrent for other marketplaces trying to adopt Silk Road’s business model. For now at least, only limited evidence suggests that Bitcoin offers criminals any meaningful protection from the law. Additionally, arguing that technologies that promote anonymity are somehow suspect from a purely moral perspective creates

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concept of Keynesian economics,13 which maintains, among other ideas, that frequent injection of new currency into the economy helps promote its growth. Regarding Bitcoin, Keynesians will argue that the inability of governments to print more currency units would seriously damage economic growth.14 They contend that the scarcity enforced

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to stop. The loss of this means of raising money for government projects (including military defense) could reduce the financial viability of some governments. However, Bitcoin is not the only recent technology that is decentralized by design: BitTorrent, Gnutella, Tor, and Freenet are similarly immune to central control. Clearly, computers

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will have on governments, good or ill. In the next chapter, we’ll explore some of the underlying technology in Bitcoin in more detail, starting with Bitcoin cryptography. 7 The Cryptography Behind Bitcoin Bitcoin relies on cryptography to function, which is why it is sometimes called a cryptocurrency.1 But what role does cryptography

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by governments and major corporations to secure financial, medical, and other sensitive information, as well as personal identification data. In fact, the cryptography in Bitcoin could be described as boring, simply because it relies on very conservative cryptographic algorithms. But in some fields of study, such as accounting and dentistry

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transaction history, a node can simply check whether the hash of each block matches the recorded hash of subsequent blocks. Proof-of-Work in Bitcoin Mining Bitcoin mining is based on a lottery system that you can win only by guessing numbers repeatedly, but that makes it is easy for others to

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how the RSA method, using integers factored into large prime numbers, could be used to implement digital signatures. But how are digital signatures implemented in Bitcoin? Many different cryptographic hash functions exist, and although the MD5 method mentioned earlier is widely used, it is not sufficiently secure for a cryptocurrency (

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detected in MD5, resulting in two different inputs leading to the same output). SHA256 and RIPEMD160 are the two cryptographic hash functions used in the Bitcoin protocol. Cryptographic Hash Functions: SHA256 and RIPEMD160 Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) was developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Race Integrity Primitives Evaluation

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process for adding points is very different with elliptical curves. Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) Instead of integer factorization-based schemes, digital signatures in Bitcoin are based on ECC. Although integer factorization works well in principle, faster computers and better algorithms to factor integers have over time increasingly required the

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more efficient schemes for point multiplication need to be used. We leave this as an exercise for the reader. 8 BITCOIN MINING New bitcoins are created through Bitcoin mining. In some sense, Bitcoin mining is similar to digging for gold: It takes time and effort—hence the term mining. The difference between mining gold

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list of all the transactions ➍. One of these transactions is the block reward, which the miner adds to assign himself some new bitcoins. These bitcoins are created from nothing. All bitcoins in existence at one point originated as such a block reward. Including the nonce ➏, the block header consists of six pieces of

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hardware, in terms of energy and capital efficiency, and cheapest electrical power. Because hardware manufacturers have the lowest capital costs per mining device, many profitable Bitcoin-mining companies manufacture their own hardware. These manufacturers may also hire their own research and development engineers to design newer and more efficient computer chips

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you can draw a point below your electricity cost curve for your mining equipment, then you’ll be able to mine profitably on the Bitcoin network. If bitcoins increase in value, the relative cost of electricity decreases, and the breakeven point for the network hash rate increases. If a mining device

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-only wallet (without importing the corresponding private key). However, with deterministic key generation (described in the next section), watch-only wallets can generate new Bitcoin addresses on their own without knowing the private keys that correspond to them. NOTE Deterministic key generation is very useful for point-of-sale terminals

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. These single key generation wallet programs allow you to generate additional addresses manually, but the default behavior is to reuse existing addresses. Among the Bitcoin wallet programs that constantly generate new addresses, differences in implementation exist. Recall that a private key is a 256-bit integer that is usually generated

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be associated surreptitiously. Through the use of coin control, you can choose payment addresses that prevent this association, giving you more privacy. Future Wallets Future Bitcoin wallet programs may offer such features as automatic bill payments, cash flow statements, tax reporting, and tighter integration with traditional financial accounting software. Also, continued

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/install)" brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask brew install brew-cask # Get node.js and bitcoin stuff brew cask install bitcoin brew install nodejs npm npm install bitcoin # Run bitcoin-qt in server mode ~/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/./Bitcoin-Qt -server For Linux Folks If you’re using flavors of Debian Linux, such as

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, you’ll just use the PPA feature to install the libraries: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nodejs npm bitcoin-qt npm install bitcoin bitcoin-qt -server With a working Bitcoin Core server, we’re now ready to start programming. Hello Money! Okay, let’s write

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); Before we start running the app, let’s analyze what the code does line by line. Part 1: Initializing the Connection with Bitcoin Core var bitcoin = require("bitcoin");➊ var client = new bitcoin.Client(➋ { host: 'localhost', port: 8332, user: 'myUsername',➌ pass: 'myPassword'➍ }); var previousBalance = 0;➎ The first line indicates that we’re using the

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if (balance > previousBalance) {➌ console.log("Hello Money! New balance: " + balance);➍ previousBalance = balance;➎ } else { console.log("Nothing's changed."); } }); } setInterval(mainLoop, 5000);➏ First, the function asks Bitcoin Core for the balance ➊. As we do this, we create a callback function, which reads function(err,balance) {}. A callback function is called at some

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, open the file src/main/java/hellomoney/App.java and replace its contents with this program: package hellomoney; import com.google.bitcoin.core.*; import com.google.bitcoin.store.*; import com.google.bitcoin.discovery.DnsDiscovery; import java.io.File; import java.math.BigInteger; public class App { public static void main( String[] args ) throws

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before, we first compile and then run the program: > mvn install > mvn exec:java Some messages should then appear as your program connects to the Bitcoin network and downloads the blockchain. The first time the program is run, this may take a while: Public address: 16YavT6SmJCuJpZgzRa6XG9WefPEu2M45 Private key: L3eoA1rXiD8kWFUzdxw744NWjoZNB5BGsxhzVas6y5KJgVteZ4uD Downloading block

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the file src/main/java/byebyemoney/App.java and replace its contents with the following program: package byebyemoney; import com.google.bitcoin.core.*; import com.google.bitcoin.store.*; import com.google.bitcoin.discovery.DnsDiscovery; import java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException; import java.io.File; import java.math.BigInteger; public class App { public static

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look carefully at the new parts. Importing a Private Key To send money from our program, we need to import the private key of the Bitcoin address from the previous example. Here is the code that does this: DumpedPrivateKey key = new DumpedPrivateKey(params,➊ "L1vJHdDqQ5kcY5q4QoY124zD21UVgFe6NL2835mp8UgG2FNU94Sy"); wallet.addKey(key.getKey());➋ BlockChain chain =

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cryptography, 141 calculating sum of adding two points, 149 pseudocode for summation and multiplication, 158–159 elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), 146–153 signing Bitcoin transaction with, 153–156 verifying signature with, 155 encoding, cryptography, 134 encryption, 130 BIP38, 40 paper wallets, 39–40 password for, 40 energy costs,

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Node.js library, 217, 221 installing, 218 Node Package Manager, 218 nodes broadcast only, 169 full, 191 relay, 170 nominal deflation, 126 nonprofit organizations, accepting bitcoins, 18 NXT, 125 O off-chain transactions, 201 offline transaction signing, 40–41 onCoinsReceived function, 234–235 online wallet services hosted, 36 personal, 34, 37

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Oracle Corporation, 226 orders, placing to buy bitcoins, 65 order of curve, elliptic curve cryptography, 152–153 orphaned blocks, 24–25 P paper money, color copiers as threat, 110 paper wallets, 39 encrypted

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous  · 23 Mar 2018  · 571pp  · 106,255 words

of reserves over annual production, 1980–2015. Figure 21 Total available global stockpiles divided by annual production. Chapter 10 Figure 22 Blockchain decision chart. THE BITCOIN STANDARD The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking Saifedean Ammous Copyright © 2018 by Saifedean Ammous. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken,

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‐world purposes, with its exchange rate being regularly featured on TV, in newspapers, and on websites along with the exchange rates of national currencies. Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third

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parties. In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network

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the world's homogeneous currency, with central banks' monopoly position and restrictions on gold ownership forcing people to use national government moneys. The introduction of Bitcoin, as a currency native to the Internet superseding national borders and outside the realm of governmental control, offers an intriguing possibility for the emergence of

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problem of money, offering individuals sovereignty over money that is resistant to unexpected inflation while also being highly salable across space, scale, and time. Should Bitcoin continue to operate as it already has, all the previous technologies humans have employed as money—shells, salt, cattle, precious metals, and government paper—may

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government operation. It became increasingly impractical to accumulate capital and wealth without the permission of the government issuing that money. Satoshi Nakamoto's motivation for Bitcoin was to create a “purely peer‐to‐peer form of electronic cash” that would not require trust in third parties for transactions and whose

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example of absolute scarcity, the only liquid commodity (digital or physical) with a set fixed quantity that cannot conceivably be increased. Until the invention of Bitcoin, scarcity was always relative, never absolute. It is a common misconception to imagine that any physical good is finite, or absolutely scarce, because the

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metals' ornamental value, from which they were to acquire a monetary role that raised their value significantly. Being new and only beginning to spread, Bitcoin's price has fluctuated wildly as demand fluctuates, but the impossibility of increasing the supply arbitrarily by any authority in response to price spikes explains

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the meteoric rise in the purchasing power of the currency. When there is a spike in demand for bitcoins, bitcoin miners cannot increase production beyond the set schedule like copper miners can, and no central bank can step in to flood the market with increasing

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be vulnerable to attack by any malicious actor mobilizing large amounts of processing power. In other words, without a conservative monetary policy and difficulty adjustment, Bitcoin would only have succeeded theoretically as digital cash, but remained too insecure to be used widely in practice. In that case, the first competitor

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any physical presence, and being purely digital, is able to achieve strict scarcity. No divisible and transportable physical material had ever achieved this before. Bitcoin allows humans to transport value digitally without any dependence on the physical world, which allows large transfers of sums across the world to be completed

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the other hand, verifying transactions is trivial and virtually costless, as anyone can access the transactions ledger from any Internet‐connected device for free5. While Bitcoin's scaling will likely require the use of third‐party intermediaries, this will be different from gold settlement in several very important respects. First,

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the dealings of the third parties will ultimately all be settled on a publicly accessible ledger, allowing for more transparency and auditing. Bitcoin offers the modern individual the chance to opt out of the totalitarian, managerial, Keynesian, and socialist states. It is a simple technological fix to

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is the foundation of Rothbard's anarcho‐capitalism, and on its basis, any aggression, whether carried out by government or individual, cannot have moral justification. Bitcoin, being completely voluntary and relentlessly peaceful, offers us the monetary infrastructure for a world built purely on voluntary cooperation. Contrary to popular depictions of anarchists

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as hoodie‐clad hoodlums, Bitcoin's brand of anarchism is completely peaceful, providing individuals with the tools necessary for them to be free from government control and inflation. It seeks

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individuals to carry out the uncensorable on‐chain transactions to get around government rules and regulations. In that situation, however, the wide adoption of Bitcoin will have a far larger positive effect on individual freedom, by reducing government's ability to finance its operation through inflation. It was government money

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and instead they were conducted with national currencies fluctuating in value, creating significant problems for international trade, as discussed in Chapter 6. The invention of Bitcoin has created, from the ground up, a new independent alternative mechanism for international settlement that does not rely on any intermediary and can operate entirely

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the problems of settlement between institutions in different countries, which necessitates the employment of several layers of intermediation. In less than ten years of existence, Bitcoin has already achieved a significant degree of global liquidity, allowing for international payments in prices that are currently much lower than existing international transfers. This

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is not to argue that Bitcoin will replace the international money transfer market, but merely to point out its potential for international liquidity. As it stands, the volume of these international

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reserve asset for central banks facing international restrictions on their banking operations, or unhappy at the dollar‐centric global monetary system. The possibility of adopting Bitcoin reserves might itself prove a valuable bargaining chip for these central banks with U.S. monetary authorities, who would probably prefer not to see any

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through academic debate, rational planning, or government mandate. What might appear like a better technology for money in theory may not necessarily succeed in practice. Bitcoin's volatility may make monetary theorists dismiss it as a monetary medium, but monetary theories cannot override the spontaneous order that emerges on the market

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degrees of trust in intermediaries responsible for settling it and transferring it. This might preserve gold's monetary role for in‐person cash transactions while Bitcoin specializes in international settlement. Notes 1 Source: BP Statistical Review. 2 Michael Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,”

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incentive for anyone to try to create invalid transactions. If they tried, they would be wasting electricity and processing power without receiving the block reward. Bitcoin can thus be understood as a technology that converts electricity to truthful records through the expenditure of processing power. Those who expend this electricity are

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fork that adjusts the supply growth to continue offering rewards to miners. This problem is unique to a chain breaking off from Bitcoin, but was never true for Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin mining was always utilizing the largest amount of processing power for its algorithm, and the increase in processing power was always incremental

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A global team of volunteer software developers, reviewers, and hackers have taken a professional, financial, and intellectual interest in working on improving or strengthening the Bitcoin code and network. Any exploits or weaknesses found in the specification of the code will attract some of these coders to offer solutions, debate them

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is, and without requiring all current node operators to upgrade simultaneously. Scaling solutions will come from node operators improving the way they send data on Bitcoin transactions to other network members. This will come through joining transactions together, off‐chain transactions, and payment channels. On‐chain scaling solutions are unlikely

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military's infantry and equipment around a school playground to protect it from invasion and you begin to get an idea of how overly fortified Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is at its essence a ledger of ownership of virtual coins. There are only 21 million of these coins, and a few million addresses

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of its computers individually, and operates under the working assumption that all computer nodes are hostile attackers. Instead of establishing trust in any network member, Bitcoin verifies everything they do. That process of verification, through proof‐of‐work, is what consumes large amounts of processing power, and it has proven

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against it. A miner who successfully executes a 51% attack would severely undermine the economic incentives for anyone to use Bitcoin, and with that the demand for Bitcoin tokens. As Bitcoin mining has grown to become a heavily capital‐intensive industry with large investments dedicated to producing coins, miners have grown to

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all of the Internet infrastructure simultaneously would likely cause significant damage to any society that tries it while likely failing to stem the flow of Bitcoin, as dispersed machines can always connect to one another using protocols and encrypted communications. There are simply far too many computers and connections spread

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back many years. With the increased volatility and the availability of a reliable and relatively stable hard‐money international monetary standard, the incentive for using Bitcoin drops significantly. In a world in which governments' restrictions and inflationary tendencies are disciplined by the gold standard, it might just be the case that

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with investors, making the entire project effectively a centralized project. The trials and tribulations of Ethereum, the largest coin in terms of market value after Bitcoin, illustrate this point vividly. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was the first implementation of smart contracts on the Ethereum network. After more than $150

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be understood outside the context of easy government money looking for easy investment, forming large bubbles in massive malinvestments. Blockchain Technology11 As a result of Bitcoin's startling rise in value, and the difficulty in understanding its operating procedure and technicalities, there has been a significant amount of confusion surrounding it

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for running transactions. If we strip away the trappings of decentralization, proof‐of‐work verification, mining, and trustlessness, and run a centralized version of Bitcoin, it would essentially consist of an algorithm for generating coins, and a database for coin ownership that processes around 300,000 transactions per day. Such

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has not yet managed to break through in a successful, ready‐for‐market commercial application other than the one for which it was specifically designed: Bitcoin. Instead, an abundance of hype, conferences, and high‐profile discussions in media, government, academia, industry, and the World Economic Forum on the potential of

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Financial Exchange interfaces—a technology from 1997 to provide aggregators a central database of customer information—had been down for two months. In contrast, the Bitcoin network was born from the blockchain design two months after Nakamoto presented the technology. To this day, it has been operating uninterrupted and growing

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to overturn the consensus of the network processing power. Applying blockchain technology in heavily regulated industries such as law or finance, with currencies other than Bitcoin, will result in regulatory problems and legal complications. Regulations were designed for an infrastructure much different from that of blockchain and the rules cannot be

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Blockchain Technology as a Mechanism for Producing Electronic Cash The only commercially successful application of blockchain technology so far is electronic cash, and in particular, Bitcoin. The most common potential applications touted for blockchain technology—payments, contracts, and asset registry—are only workable to the extent that they run using the

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better understood as an integral cog in the machine that creates peer‐to‐peer electronic cash with predictable inflation. Notes 1 The question of whether Bitcoin wastes electricity is at its heart a misunderstanding of the fundamentally subjective nature of value. Electricity is generated worldwide in large quantities to satisfy the

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transactions‐on‐my.html 13 Stan Higgins, “Vermont Says Blockchain Record‐Keeping System Too Costly”, Coinbase.com, January 20, 2016 14 S. Russolillo, “Yellen on Bitcoin: Fed Doesn't Have Authority to Regulate It in Any Way,” Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2014. Acknowledgements This manuscript benefited immensely from the help

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, guidance, and technical expertise of Bitcoin developer David Harding, who has an admirable gift for communicating complex technical topics effectively. I thank Nassim Taleb for agreeing to write the foreword to

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Pontus Lindblom, Mircea Popescu, Pierre Rochard, Nick Szabo, Kyle Torpey, and Curtis Yarvin for writings and discussions that were instrumental in developing my understanding of Bitcoin. The research and editing for this book benefited from the work of my very able research assistants, Rebecca Daher, Ghida Hajj Diab, Maghy Farah, Sadim

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the Economy Never Does. Regnery Publishing, 2016. Glubb, John. The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. Blackwood, 1978. Graf, Konrad. On the Origins of Bitcoin: Stages of Monetary Evolution (2013). www.konradsgraf.com Grant, James. The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Greaves, Bettina

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, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order. Princeton University Press, 2013. Stein, Mara Lemos. “The Morning Risk Report: Terrorism Financing Via Bitcoin May Be Exaggerated.” Wall Street Journal, 2017. Sutton, Antony. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Crown Publishing Group, 1974. Szabo, Nick. 2001. Trusted Third

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency

by Ian Demartino  · 2 Feb 2016  · 296pp  · 86,610 words

the companies mentioned in this book, as their status can change at any time. Keywords altcoin: Short for “alternative cryptocurrency”; another cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. There are more than a thousand altcoins currently in existence; most are nearly exact copies of more successful cryptocurrencies, but some very innovative ones have

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BFGMiner: The second most-popular Bitcoin-mining software. Bitcoin/bitcoin: Bitcoin with a capital B refers to Bitcoin the system, the network or the currency as a whole; bitcoin with a lowercase b refers to individual bitcoins, as in, “I have five bitcoins.” Bitcoin-Qt: Also called Bitcoin Core, it is the primary implementation of Bitcoin and what all other wallets

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. In the context of cryptocurrencies it can also mean when miners either accidentally or maliciously start mining a false blockchain. full node: A local Bitcoin wallet that stores the entire blockchain and helps validate and spread confirmed transactions from miners. Unlike miners, full nodes do not require any specialized hardware

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more evidence, Wright backed out. These developments came too late to allow for a proper discussion in this book, however. Section I: What Is Bitcoin? Chapter 1: Bitcoin 101: Blockchain Technology This is what we’ve been waiting for, this is the cyberchryst moment. This is when the activists that have been

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currency—like the familiar euro or dollar—and it is the digital equivalent of cash. Any person can digitally “hand” someone a bitcoin, multiple bitcoins, or a fraction of bitcoin, across the world or in the same room. Like handing someone cash, and unlike older digital financial systems, the money doesn’t

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for the use of Internet currency or “emoney.” Although remittance, distributed funding, micropayments, and accessible investing are often pointed to as the areas where Bitcoin can make the most headway today, the original motivation behind the early iterations of electronic cash was primarily to address these security concerns. In his

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on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party. The paper is available at: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network. No mint or other trusted parties. Participants can be anonymous

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circumstances 3) Ability to stop use of payments media-reported as stolen What is missing from these core requirements is the concept of decentralization. Indeed, Bitcoin would become the first electronic cash system that relies on a decentralized system rather than a centralized one. Digicash, Chaum’s invention, relied heavily

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Machinery, 1982. Accessed June 21, 2015. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf. 10 Tschorsch, Florian, and Björn Scheuermann. “Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey on Decentralized Digital Currencies.” The Digital Currency Challenge. Accessed June 21, 2015. doi:10.1057/9781137382559.0014. 11 Dai, Wei

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“solve a new block” when your computer—or more often, dedicated mining software—figures out the complex mathematical problems that confirm the accounts sending bitcoins have the bitcoins to send and have digitally signed their transactions. Each block currently has 750KB to 1MB worth of transactions.) Roughly every four years, the number

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outside the direct influence of governmental organizations as well as offering the possibility of anonymity for embarrassing or illegal services. From a merchant perspective, Bitcoin also has the advantage of not having large fees from credit card companies that cut into their profits. Credit card companies typically charge between three

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into sustainable industries that treat their employees fairly, increasing worker leverage in their region and eventually worldwide. On a more basic and immediate level, Bitcoin allows for low-cost remittance. Sending money from first world countries where banking is relatively accessible to third world countries where it is not can

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removal of friction enables more investments and more payments. Another service cryptocurrencies can theoretically provide is the role of arbitrator in any transaction. BitHalo, the Bitcoin half of BlackHalo, was the first instance of workable smart contracts, which are regulated by computer code rather than legal force. Smart contracts enable

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the other. BlackHalo was designed for Blackcoin, an alternative cryptocurrency that I will discuss in Chapter 21. BitHalo has the same functionality but works with Bitcoin. It enables quick transfers between the two currencies. More importantly, BitHalo allows for a decentralized marketplace without the need for a third-party arbitrator

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or even other fiat currencies. In the case of Uphold, 27 different fiat currencies and precious metals are supported in addition to four digital currencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether, and Uphold’s own Voxelus). Uphold opens up investment opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable to the average consumer without enough disposable

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available, in whatever form is important to the consumer. That is what it always comes down to in technology. There is no reason to think Bitcoin is any different. 1 Eager, Bill. The Information Superhighway Illustrated. (Indianapolis, Que Pub, 1994) 2 Abdelmessih, Nina, Michael Silverstein, and Peter Stanger. “Winning The

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about stopping. Yet those kinds of medium-sized transactions, as well as smaller ones, are likely to be the kind most enabled by the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin would be less effective than cash for the kind of multimillion-dollar transactions that regular people think of when they hear the term “money

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Electronic Frontier Foundation. October 29, 2014. Accessed June 22, 2015. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/7-privacy-tools-essential-making-citizenfour. Chapter 7: Bitcoin and the Criminal Element Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every

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the Silk Road investigation before being arrested for allegedly committing several crimes as the investigation took place, including the theft of hundreds of thousands of bitcoins from the Deep Web marketplace.3 According to prosecutors, Force had contact with Mark Karpelès during the investigation. According to emails found in court

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documents, Karpelès had reached out to authorities expressing his interest in helping them investigate bitcoins coming in to the exchange from illegal sources. Instead, Force allegedly pressured the Mt. Gox CEO into doing business with him. After Karpelès refused,

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discredited the official excuse that the transaction malleability bug had caused Mt. Gox’s financial woes.6 The paper concluded that only 386 bitcoins in the entire Bitcoin ecosystem were involved in possibly successful transaction malleability exploit attempts before Mt. Gox prevented user withdrawals. There is no possible way that it

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2014): 313-26. ArXiv.org. March 26, 2014. Accessed May 18, 2015. http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6676. 7 Sidel, Robin. “Mt. Gox Resigns From Bitcoin Foundation.” The Wall Street Journal. February 24, 2014. Accessed May 19, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303426304579401883794330454. 8 Southurst, Jon. “Watch This Man Confront

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. http://vtdigger.org/2015/07/08/sec-investigates-vermont-internet-service-company-founder/. 5 Maina, John Weru. “FTC Shuts Down Butterfly Labs… Finally.” CCN Financial Bitcoin News. September 23, 2014. Accessed June 22, 2015. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ftc-shuts-down-butterfly-labs-finally/. 6 Gillis, Rick Mac. “Timeline of

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Ethereum.” International Business Times RSS. IBTimes, August 5, 2015. Accessed October 29, 2015. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ubs-barclays-bnp-paribas-are-front-runners-bitcoin-2-0-technology-ethereum-1514138 2 “Linden Dollar Definition.” Investopedia. August 28, 2011. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/linden-

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dollar.asp. Chapter 11: Working for Bitcoin The Bitcoin ledger is a new kind of payment system. Anyone in the world can pay anyone else in the world any amount of value of

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of gaming-focused video cards, then computers designed specifically to mine, and eventually chips specifically made for mining called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). Bitcoin quickly went from a distributed digital currency that anyone could mine and that embodied Satoshi Nakamoto’s directive that “one CPU equals one vote” (i

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mine rather than mine into a pool, that process is simple as well (minus the hardware requirement). First, you will need to download Bitcoin Core, or Bitcoin-Qt. This requires downloading the entire blockchain, which will not be a quick process. The blockchain has been experiencing rapid growth and sits at

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apps that ask you to put in your electricity costs, expected hashing power, and expected difficulty, and will calculate your expected profits. Simply Googling “Bitcoin mining calculator” should provide several suitable options. I do not recommend buying used hardware. Mining is extremely tough on hardware and it is impossible to

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—without a corresponding increase in merchant holding—can cause the price to temporarily drop lower than what the miners would want to sell their Bitcoin for. Bitcoin is distributed enough that miners aren’t the only group that has an effect on its exchange rate. But the rate does ultimately come

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=Vq2EC7OinQQ. 3 “On-Balance Volume (OBV) Definition.” Investopedia. November 24, 2003. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/onbalancevolume.asp. 4 Bitcoin Fib Tutorial - Fibonacci Retracements. Directed by Brian Beamish. Performed by Brian Beamish. Youtube.com/coinigy. April 25, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wj9ITc0444

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virtually nonexistent transaction fees make it particularly suitable for microloans. Although most microloans and microfinancing sites target the middle class and up as its lenders, Bitcoin-powered microlending sites allow even the poor to have an avenue to increase their meager savings via investments in other individuals. Fifty dollars, five

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overhead low enough that fees can remain significantly smaller than those of the traditional services. This tactic has been pursued by a few companies, particularly Bitcoin ATM companies that can install their machines with relatively low overhead costs. Although these ATMs might be suitable for remittance, however, their relatively high

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to the Philippines a viable option for Filipinos living overseas.9 Rebit.ph cofounder Luis Buenaventura explains the strategy behind the service: These services accept bitcoin from overseas, convert it into pesos, dinars, or shillings, then deliver those funds to the final beneficiary via a variety of domestic transfer methods.

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BTC before sending it to the last-mile service, and one could make a reasonably profitable business out of performing that service for them.10 Bitcoin remittance requires regulatory compliance within the receiving country. Although any service looking to establish a physical presence or a digital presence that interacts with

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using. Just as there is no difficulty sending an email from a Gmail account to a Microsoft Outlook account, there is no difficulty sending Bitcoin from one Bitcoin service to another—regardless of how little contact these companies have had, how much distance separates them, or how many borders sit between

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. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.Internetlivestats.com/Internet-users-by-country/. 7 DeMartino, Ian M. “Igot Founder Rick Day: Regulation Has ‘Absolutely’ Hindered Bitcoin In The US.” Mining Pool. April 22, 2015. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://coinjournal.net/interview-with-igot-founder-rick-day-regulation-has-absolutely-hindered

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become a major part of the Internet economy. They are currently used primarily by video game companies to sell items inside video games to users. Bitcoin, however, has the potential to make microtransactions smoother and more effective by eliminating the fees associated with transactions that go through the legacy system.

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has only ever been one somewhat reasonable alternative suggested: microtransactions fueling a tipping economy. Nothing can guarantee that a donation-based economy is feasible, but Bitcoin gives it its best chance at success. 1 Rizzo, Pete. “ChangeTip CEO Nick Sullivan: We Won’t Sell User Data.” CoinDesk. December 18, 2014.

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and marketers will be able to stay afloat in the sea of other altcoins and offer enough unique features that people will choose it over Bitcoin. As Bitcoin became more popular, various developers decided to see if they could emulate its meteoric rise with their own currencies. In 2011, Namecoin launched

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Around 20 seconds Block Reward: 5 Ether per block Maximum Blocksize: 1MB Total Number: No limit I conclude with perhaps the most exciting cryptocurrency since Bitcoin. Ethereum is more than a coin, describing itself thus: “Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed

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with Litecoin Begins.” CoinDesk. September 11, 2014. Accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.coindesk.com/dogecoin-celebrates-litecoin-merge-mining/. 6 Buterin, Vitalik. “Introducing Ripple.” Bitcoin Magazine. February 26, 2013. Accessed June 22, 2015. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/3506/introducing-ripple/. 7 DeMartino, Ian M. “Breaking: Bter Hacked, 50M NXT Stolen.”

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down. Cars and planes made crossing borders quicker than ever before. Next, the Internet broke down communications between borders, blurring the line further. Today, Bitcoin is blurring the financial separation between borders. In the future, blockchain governance might come close to eliminating those lines altogether. Why can’t I choose

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be decades from now—or perhaps in the more immediate future, in small communes as an experiment. Another possibility arises as virtual reality grows alongside Bitcoin. Communities are already growing inside virtual reality’s versions of chatrooms. It isn’t unreasonable to predict that as virtual “places” become more permanent,

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305 NuBits, 296 NXT, 297 Paycoin, 148 Peercoin, 303 Ripple, 234, 291 Stellar, 291 Voxel, 320 Amir Taaki, 67 ASIC Miners, 187 B Bitcoin Wallet, 4 Bitcoin Address, 4 Blockchain, 4, 13 Bitcoin Exchanges: Bitcoin ATMs, 171 Bitquick.co, 170 Cardforcoin.com, 175 Circle, 17 Coinbase, 17 CryptoThrift, 180 Coinigy, 211 Glyde, 181 Local

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, 266 Cloud Mining, 189, 194 Cody Wilson, 86 Coin Mixing, 77 CoinJoin, 79 Darkwallet, 87 Coinality, 178 Coinbase, 140 [blockchain input. See also: Coinbase, Bitcoin Exchanges] Cryptocurrency 2.0 Projects: Bit/BlackHalo, 66 Counterparty, 273, 300 Distributed Automated Corporations (DACs), 69, 324 Factom, 302 iNation, 323 Maidsafe, 302 Mastercoin (see

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

by Ben Mezrich  · 20 May 2019  · 304pp  · 91,566 words

macmillanusa.com/piracy. To Asher, Arya, Tonya, and Bugsy: HODL. It’s all an adventure, and it gets more fun every day. AUTHOR’S NOTE Bitcoin Billionaires is a dramatic, narrative account based on dozens of interviews, hundreds of sources, and thousands of pages of documents, including records from several court

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of cryptocurrency.” “Cryptocurrency,” Cameron repeated, from his daybed. “It sounds criminal. Is it legal?” “I don’t think the word applies. That’s part of Bitcoin’s brilliance. It functions without government approval. There’s no headquarters to raid, and it can’t be stopped without stopping the internet itself.” Stopping

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continued. “They are the pipes that your emails travel through, the tunnels that carry your voice to a listener halfway around the world. The Bitcoin protocol allows bitcoin to move from point A to point B, and allows you to buy this miniature oil can of NEFT Vodka.” “The analogy seems dangerous

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authority—the Federal Reserve, Visa, MasterCard—that monitored transactions and made sure the same digital dollars weren’t spent twice by the same person. But Bitcoin had no authority, no referee. It was also known as the “Byzantine Generals’ problem” in computer science circles and was a problem that was

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a computer could perform in one second. Miners were furiously competing with one another to solve the mathematical problems that validated the current block of bitcoin transactions; the more these miners invested in their hardware—buying faster chips, housing their computers in coolant data centers, and so forth—the better their

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factory stays in business and can continue to make chocolate for everyone.” Voorhees smiled. “That’s very good. And it perfectly illustrates the magic of Bitcoin. Instead of middlemen, or gatekeepers, you have an open competition of miners, individually incentivized to validate transactions. No bank or government sits in judgment of

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its political impact,” laying out “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” The white paper detailed bitcoin’s specific features: • Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network. • No mint or other trusted parties. • Participants can be anonymous. • New

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alter egos to the mysterious inventor, including Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire, and Hal Finney, a game designer and cryptographer who had received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi in 2009; but none of these leads had led anywhere. “To me,” Voorhees said, “the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature

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the inside of the ring. “Is that your private key?” Cameron asked. He was referring to the “password” that gave you control of your bitcoin. Each bitcoin private key was a 256-bit number that could be any combination of 1s and 0s. It was a 256-bit number that allowed 2

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first—‘this is either complete bullshit or the next big thing,’ ” Tyler said. His father nodded, looking out at the water. They’d already discussed Bitcoin at length on the phone and during breakfast that morning. His father had immediately seen the mathematical beauty behind the now three-year-old cryptocurrency

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. The elegance of the blockchain—the open, decentralized ledger where transactions were permanently recorded—immediately made sense to him, and the brilliance of Bitcoin itself, of a currency backed by math and cryptography, with a fixed supply mined by computers running complex equations, certainly thrilled his mathematical mind. But

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would be a logistical nightmare—Mission Impossible shit that only worked in the movies—to get ahold of the three shards that made up the bitcoin private key. Moreover, the twins had replicated this model four times across different geographic regions, to build redundancy into their system—removing the final

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sit down with them out of curiosity alone. But that didn’t mean the businessmen they met with were willing or ready to invest in bitcoin. Bitcoin still seemed too speculative for people who worked at conventional banks and funds. Even managers of hedge funds, the types who had no problem plunking

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drenched glory—on these titans of the industry. Before the meeting, from their email exchanges, it had seemed like John and his partners really understood Bitcoin and were genuinely interested in hearing Charlie’s pitch. But despite the warm audience, things had gone sideways from the moment Charlie had entered the

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understood the cross-section of the finance, fashion, entertainment, and politics better than Matthew Mellon II. Mellon fit perfectly into Tyler and Cameron’s ongoing Bitcoin tour. Although they usually met with institutions like hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, family offices, and other financial companies, they’d decided to expand their

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outreach leading up to the Bitcoin 2013 conference to anyone interesting enough, and interested enough, to take their calls. It was a strategy that had landed them in front of some

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of American banking royalty, literally a descendant of the people who created the banking system in the first place—had trouble getting access to Bitcoin, well then Bitcoin still had major kinks to work out. Following coffee, the twins facilitated Mellon’s request by promising to introduce him to Charlie—a risk

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face much harsher scrutiny if they were located most anywhere else. Online poker companies, sports books, money-lending facilities, and now a growing number of bitcoin companies, large and small. Charlie looked over to Ver, Erik Voorhees, and Ira, who were gathered around an open laptop, pretty much ignoring the

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Charlie’s own thinking. For example, the continuing issue involving BTCKing, still one of the company’s biggest customers: after initially banishing and admonishing the bitcoin reseller, Charlie had privately assured him he was welcome back. And since then, BTCKing had returned in full force. Over the past year he had

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walking into,” Tyler whispered to Cameron. The whispering was probably overkill, but something about the mysteriousness of the moment, the energy, made it feel right. Bitcoin 2013—which would begin the next day—had been hurtling toward them with much fanfare, publicity, and preinterviews. More than a thousand people would partake

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AngelList, a meeting place for investors and entrepreneurs—something Business Insider had once called “Match.com for investors.” Later, the twins had overheard Naval explaining Bitcoin (and explaining it well) to another guest at the dinner—Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster and political activist. That dinner was the first time

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the twins had ever heard anyone from the Silicon Valley “establishment” talk seriously about Bitcoin. After the conversation had ended, the twins and Naval had exchanged contact information. Other than that, they had no idea why Naval had reached out

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from a day spent setting up their respective portable booths, which were now spread across the gargantuan convention center like interlocked cells of a honeycomb. Bitcoin miners, constantly checking their phones to monitor the basements and garages and insulated lairs where their hardware waged constant battle to unlock those elusive block

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back to something he’d said during his own speaking session, a freewheeling, fun, off-the-cuff talk that had the audience applauding and laughing. “Bitcoin is cash with wings … take something local and do it globally.” “And that’s going to overturn the financial infrastructure,” Charlie added. Another minute of

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computer programmers, entrepreneurs, and technologically savvy creatives—who wanted to participate had gathered in this room for a short speech. Then a panel of five Bitcoin investors had discussed the sorts of ideas they were looking to back. After that, the teams had broken off and started “hacking.” They had until

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, and BitInstant could no longer continue operating until it addressed its licensing issues. Though the current money transmission laws had not been designed for the Bitcoin economy, and might not apply, which meant not having licenses might be okay, Charlie’s lawyers had cautioned him otherwise. They believed it was

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The public hearing was being held by the New York Department of Financial Services, the regulator that had subpoenaed him, Cameron, and twenty-two other Bitcoin heavyweights. Given the midmorning traffic between the Flatiron and Tribeca, the trip would probably take thirty minutes. Enough time to calm himself and mentally prepare

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In a way, the subpoena was actually an honor that had been bestowed on the twins. As Forbes magazine had headlined, EVERY IMPORTANT PERSON IN BITCOIN JUST GOT SUBPOENAED BY NEW YORK’S FINANCIAL REGULATOR. Among the people and companies subpoenaed were venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, along with

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-traffickers and other criminals.” The point of the session was not just to gather information, but also to use that information to rein in the Bitcoin economy. In his statement, Lawsky continued: “We believe that—for a number of reasons—putting in place appropriate regulatory safeguards for virtual currencies will

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all governmental efforts to ensure that money laundering requirements are enforced, and look forward to clearer regulation being implemented on the purchase and sale of bitcoins. If the charges were accurate, then Charlie had duped them. Tyler and Cameron had done everything they could to try and make BitInstant a

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laundering and other misconduct.” The boy genius, who could have been sitting here right in this room, sandwiched between the twins, extolling the virtues of Bitcoin, was instead sitting in his mother’s basement under house arrest. “I mean frankly,” Lawsky continued, “if we want innovation to happen, and we

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those people were libertarians and radical.… The second character that attracted a second wave was anonymity—people who thought they could conceal their behavior behind Bitcoin. In the last year and a half a set of people were attracted to two other aspects—first, it’s freeish, dramatically reducing transaction

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2011. Third phase, speculation, trading—we are getting to the end of that now—2013, 2014. Next phase is the transactional phase—real merchants accepting bitcoin. And the final phase is the phase of programmable money—when money can move via a programmable infrastructure.” Programmable money. The phrase sounded space age

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, sci-fi, to Cameron, but he knew it was truly the next step in the nearly instant economy that Bitcoin allowed; basically, it referred to programmed transactions between banks or individuals that could be self-validating and perfectly efficient; smart contracts that could be set

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personnel, customer support representatives, and more. Although their ETF was still a dream, Gemini was humming along, and over the past year, the price of bitcoin had been enjoying a steady rise since January. “See what?” Cameron asked. “Look at your computer.” Cameron shifted in his seat, then faced the screen

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… ? Much as The Accidental Billionaires and The Social Network strove to tell the story of Facebook’s founding—that first year of inception and adoption—Bitcoin Billionaires is an origin story, both of the characters within these pages, and of the cryptocurrency itself. We’ve watched Facebook grow and change over

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new companies aimed at servicing, profiting from, and building on this novel technology that springs up every day. The blockchain is everywhere, and Bitcoin knows no borders; Bitcoin believers in nearly every country in the world continue to HODL (hold), even as Wall Street struggles to understand where crypto fits within financial

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that could “give the internet back to the people”—freeing user information from the siloed monopolies of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. The irony is that Bitcoin and its hashes may very well do what Facebook so spectacularly failed to do—protect its users’ data from hackers, misuse, and overarching authority, and

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the possibility of parole for the crimes of money laundering and conspiracy to traffic narcotics by means of the internet. There are many in the Bitcoin and libertarian community—including Roger Ver—who see Ulbricht as a martyr who has been unfairly jailed. Ulbricht will most likely die in prison. * * *

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‘people are panicking, they’re afraid of losing their money.’ ” Guardian, Mar. 17, 2013. Cutler, Kim-Mai. “Mt. Gox’s Demise Marks the End of Bitcoin’s First Wave of Entrepreneurs.” TechCrunch, Feb. 25, 2014. Dabilis, Andy. “Bailout Cuts Cyprus Bank Accounts, Withdrawals Barred.” Greek Reporter, Mar. 16, 2013. Eha, Brian

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Patrick. “Can Bitcoin’s First Felon Help Make Cryptocurrency a Trillion-Dollar Market?” Fortune, June 26, 2017. Epstein, Jeremy. “What you may not understand about crypto’s millionaires

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closes.” Daily Post, Mar. 8, 2018. Osborne, Hilary, and Josephine Moulds. “Cyprus bailout deal: at a glance.” Guardian, Mar. 25, 2013. Popper, Nathaniel. Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money. New York: HarperPaperbacks, 2016. ________. “How the Winklevoss Twins Found Vindication in a

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Times, Dec. 19, 2017. ________. “Never Mind Facebook; Winklevoss Twins Rule in Digital Money.” New York Times, Apr. 11, 2013. ________. “Winklevoss Twins Plan First Fund for Bitcoins.” New York Times, July 1, 2013. ________. “Charlie Shrem and the Ups and Downs of BitInstant.” Coindesk, May 19, 2015. Roy, Jessica. “It’s All About

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29.  Judgment Day 30.  Launched 31.  From Dumas to Balzac EPILOGUE: Where Are They Now…? Acknowledgments Bibliography Also by Ben Mezrich About the Author Copyright BITCOIN BILLIONAIRES. Copyright © 2019 by Ben Mezrich. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New

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by Keith Hayes Cover photograph © bioraven/Shutterstock.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Mezrich, Ben, 1969– author. Title: Bitcoin billionaires: a true story of genius, betrayal, and redemption / Ben Mezrich. Description: First edition. | New York: Flatiron Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019002977

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9781250217745 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250239389 (international, sold outside the U.S., subject to rights availability) | ISBN 9781250217752 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Winklevoss, Tyler. | Winklevoss, Cameron. | Venture capital. | Bitcoin. | Entrepreneurship. Classification: LCC HG4751 .M499 2019 | DDC 332.4 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002977 eISBN 9781250217752 Our ebooks may

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper  · 18 May 2015  · 387pp  · 112,868 words

ThinkCentre, settled in, and clicked on the website he’d gotten in an e-mail the previous day while he was at work: www.bitcoin.org. Bitcoin had first crossed his screen a few months earlier, in a message sent to one of the many mailing lists he subscribed to. The back

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sight. The issue became one of the first criticisms of the existing financial system that gained popular appeal after the financial crisis. When Satoshi released Bitcoin, just months after these bank bailouts, the design provided a tidy solution for people worried about a currency with no restraints. While the Federal

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in online games, while listening to heavy metal music on headphones. Martti’s reclusive, computer-centric life led him to the ideas behind Bitcoin, and ultimately to Bitcoin itself. The Internet had allowed a teenage Martti to discover and explore political ideas that were far from the Finnish social democratic consensus.

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problem was how to deal with the influx of new users, their potentially malicious behavior, and their competing interests. These problems became particularly pronounced after Bitcoin’s next big jump into the spotlight. In November, WikiLeaks, the organization founded by a regular participant in the old Cypherpunk movement, Julian Assange,

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project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would

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, but Garzik explained that the police would probably be able to determine the identity of users through sophisticated network analysis. “Attempting major illicit transactions with Bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb. :),” Garzik wrote. In conversations with other developers, Garzik

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turned out, was good at keeping track of valuable things. Another incident just days after the Bitomat losses reminded everyone that the companies holding customer Bitcoins had another vulnerability—the integrity of the people running the companies. The losses this time happened to customers of MyBitcoin. The site, which had been

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so they turned to outside experts to secure their money and make it easily available. Meanwhile, the services that had become so popular in the Bitcoin community helped explain why governments and centralized authorities, like regulators, were often granted power in the real world. When people entrust money to financial institutions

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: “Have you ever thought about doing something legitimate, something legal?” Ross, in fact, had considered alternatives, and he began collaborating with Richard on a Bitcoin exchange—not a silly idea given the troubles that Mt. Gox was having. They began designing a prototype for their exchange while Ross continued running

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anonymous markets and decentralized currencies could work in practice. In early 2012 Silk Road was still essentially the only place where people were regularly using Bitcoin to make real online, anonymous transactions—and the system was working as well as the Cypherpunks might have hoped. Silk Road customers were regularly

…

amounts. He also registered with the Treasury Department agency responsible for regulating money transmitters, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCen. The issue of Bitcoin’s reputation had been a steady topic of conversation when Charlie, Gavin, and the others had been in Vienna. At a café Charlie had chatted

…

itself from the virtual currency’s controversial past. Charlie told Peter that those involved had to be people “without tarnishes and have spotless reputations within Bitcoin. Anyone involved with even an inkling of mistrust ruins our whole legitimacy.” Roger was included in the planning of the foundation, and promised to

…

Microsoft executive—who lived on a beautiful, exclusive peninsula near Seattle. When the wealthy neighbors wandered over, Roger immediately got them all set up with Bitcoin wallets on their phones. Watching Roger evangelize with his usual gusto about “the most important invention in history since the Internet,” Charlie said to

…

, is that it entrances fanatical conspiracy theorists, clear-eyed pragmatists, and diehard skeptics alike. Songhurst, the Microsoft head of strategy, who had learned about Bitcoin during his hike with Wences, wrote up a paper and circulated it among some of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley, channeling Wences’s

…

regulations. More important, Jeff Garzik, the programmer in North Carolina, noted, the basic implication of the message cleared up the biggest single cloud: “this solidifies Bitcoin status as legal to possess and use for normal people.” Indeed, Gavin said: “More legal/regulatory certainty is definitely a good thing . . . even if

…

we might not like the regulations.” Over the next few days, Bitcoin companies all raced to understand the specifics of the FinCen guidance. Exchanges clearly needed to register as money transmitters, but what about companies like BitInstant

…

by 10 percent. The government, in other words, was confiscating money from private bank accounts. BusinessWeek ran a story that conveyed the seeming promise of Bitcoin: “BITCOIN MAY BE THE GLOBAL ECONOMY’S LAST SAFE HAVEN,” the magazine’s headline said. Russians who kept their money in Cyprus’s banks were rumored

…

Federally Chartered Bank.” The author, an investor named David Johnston, wrote that the skepticism of traditional banks toward virtual currencies was the biggest roadblock facing Bitcoin’s growth. If people couldn’t send dollars from their bank to BitInstant or Coinbase, the surging interest in virtual currencies would be snuffed out

…

theory, but eventually the community required some cooperation from the existing authorities—people needed the old banks to agree to move their money into the Bitcoin realm. This was like an anarchist commune that ran up against the unwillingness of local officials to continue delivering water and electricity. Such collisions

…

statements from regulators suggested they did not necessarily see a big difference. At the end of May the top financial regulator in California sent the Bitcoin Foundation a cease-and-desist letter accusing the foundation of operating as an unlicensed money transmitter. The accusation was somewhat absurd—the foundation was

…

youngsters and easy access to cheap electronics. But there was another, more systemic explanation for why the Chinese preferred less visible ways of acquiring their Bitcoins. Like Argentina, China had incredibly restrictive rules about moving money into and out of the country. But in China, unlike Argentina, these rules were

…

opportunity that presented itself. Money had poured into the Chinese real estate and stock markets, pushing both into elevated territories that many thought were unsustainable. Bitcoin presented an intriguing new investment that almost anyone with a computer could access. Bobby believed the Chinese would be all too willing to put their

…

out. In response to a questionnaire from Senator Carper’s committee, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, had written down his take on Bitcoin and was surprisingly positive, praising its “long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.” First

…

becoming largely driven by and dependent on the attitudes of government officials. This was no accident. Patrick Murck and the new Silicon Valley advocates for Bitcoin had been arguing for months that the technology was not, as Satoshi Nakamoto had initially intended, a network that allowed participants to make anonymous transactions

…

outside the reach of the government. At the Senate hearings, the Bitcoin panelists all emphasized that the virtual currency was actually a terrible way to break the law. With the full record of transactions on the blockchain

…

blockchain technology to make these sorts of large transfers quickly and securely. For many banks, the biggest stumbling block was the inherent unreliability of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is, of course, powered by thousands of unvetted computers around the world, all of which could stop supporting the blockchain at any

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the company would become worthless. THE TWO VALS running Bitfury were rare as outsiders who were succeeding in the new, more sophisticated, and heavily scrutinized Bitcoin world. The Vals were certainly not entirely alone. Roger Ver, who had recently managed to renounce his United States citizenship, after years of trying,

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a string of thirty-four letters and numbers), and a corresponding private key (generally a string of sixty-four characters). As an example, one actual Bitcoin address is: 16R5PtokaUnXXXjQe4Hg5jZrfW69fNpAtF The private key for this particular address is: 5JJ5rLKjyMmSxhauoa334cdZNCoVEw6oLfMpfL8H1w9pyDoPMf3 Only the person with this private key can sign off on transactions from

…

computers were generating the list of transactions in a block, they included, in their list of transactions, a transaction granting one of their own Bitcoin addresses 50 Bitcoins out of thin air. When a block won the lottery, and was added to the blockchain, this seemingly fictional transaction was turned into a

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name: Hal Finney to CYPH, August 15, 2004. 20The nine-page PDF attached to the e-mail: the current version is available at https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. 22modeled after the contest that Adam Back: While this process was modeled on Back’s program, it also relied on the innovations of several

…

to Satoshi: Satoshi’s mining activities were traced by the Argentinian researcher Sergio Demian Lerner. Sergio Demian Lerner, “The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin Creator, Visionary and Genius,” Bitslog, April 17, 2013, https://bitslog.wordpress .com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/. 25the first

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: Data on the number of transactions per block available at https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block. 38In the very first recorded transaction of Bitcoin for United States dollars: Information on the transaction is available at https://blockchain .info/tx/7dff938918f07619abd38e4510890396b1cef4fbeca154fb7aaf ba8843295ea2. 38NewLibertyStandard came up with his own method:

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Specialty+Shop. CHAPTER 4 44But on May 22, 2010, a guy in California offered to call Lazlo’s local Papa John’s: Information about the Bitcoin transaction is available at https://blockchain.info/tx/a1075db55d416d3ca199f55b6084e2115b9345e16c5cf302fc80e9d5fbf5d48d. 44small item on the website of InfoWorld: Neil McAllister, “Open Source Innovation on the Cutting Edge

…

at http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/press-releases/2002/verPlea.htm. 80“Law-abiding citizens can carry on their affairs”: Jerry Brito, “Online Cash Bitcoin Could Challenge Governments, Banks,” Techland blog, Time, April 16, 2011. 80“cuts across international boundaries, can be stored”: Andy Greenberg, “Crypto Currency,” Forbes, April

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20, 2011, http://www.forbes .com/forbes/2011/0509/technology-psilocybin-bitcoins-gavin-andresen-crypto-currency.html. 82“This was—of course—denied”: Mark Karpeles to BTCF, May 1, 2011. 83Silk Road now had over a thousand

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24, 2014. 141group agreed that the bylaws for the foundation would be posted on GitHub: The bylaws are available at https://github.com/pmlaw/The-Bitcoin-Foundation-Legal-Repo/tree/master/Bylaws. CHAPTER 15 154the company made $750 million for its investors: Eric Markowitz, “The $750 Million ‘Mistake,’” Inc., December

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David Lauter, “Public Largely Tunes Out NSA Surveillance Debate, Poll Finds,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2014. 271“We see the intrinsic value of Bitcoin”: Gil Luria, “Bitcoin: Intrinsic Value as Conduit for Disruptive Payment Network Technology,” Wed-bush Equity Research, December 1, 2013. 272“emerge as a serious competitor”: David Woo

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has been deleted, the full statement is still available at http://pando .com/2014/02/10/blame-game-embattled-mt-gox-points-to-flaws-in-bitcoin-protocol-bitcoin-community-calls-bs/. 310He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt: The confrontation was recorded and is viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

…

member, 176 planning and creation of, 138–142 regulatory problems, 217–219, 233–236 resignation of Charlie Shrem, 302 Bitcoinica, 237 Bitcoin Investment Trust, 314 Bitcoin Meetups. See conferences (Bitcoin and others) Bitcoin mining about process vulnerability, 41–42 creating blocks and recording transactions, 359–361 creation of ASIC chip, 189–192, 259, 329

…

Bitomat (Polish exchange), 97–98 BitPagos (Argentinian payment service), 278–279 BitPay, 134, 211, 219, 272 Bitstamp (Slovenian exchange) about founding, 203 attendance at 2014 Bitcoin Pacifica, 252–253, 337 regulation of virtual currencies, 271 response to Mt. Gox collapse, 309–310, 315 surpassing Mt. Gox volume, 236 trading volume, 262

…

154, 162, 243, 352 Casares, Wences. See also Lemon Digital Wallet and Xapo background and arrival at Bitcoin, 153–165 Bitcoin as commodity, 274 Bitcoin holdings, 287–288 Bitcoin promotion, 179–180, 185–187, 197, 209–210 Bitcoin promotion in Argentina, 240–242 conference attendance, 181–185, 214–216, 349, 351–355 development of Lemon

…

Digital Wallet, 201–205 sale of Lemon Digital Wallet, 252, 280–283 seeking business investors, 291–296 startup business financing, 305–306 2013 Argentina, Bitcoin meeting, 277 Xapo founding and operations, 349–351 Casascius coins, 126–127 chronicpain (screen name). See Green, Curtis cimon (screen name). See Variety Jones [

…

298 The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories (Jack B. Nimble), 69 Costollo, Dick, 181 Cowen, Tyler, 286 CRASH (CRypto caSH), 12 credit cards Bitcoin as replacement, 23, 158–160, 235, 292 digital wallets and, 101, 154, 209 disputes and chargebacks, 64, 134, 343 lack of privacy, 11 Target Corporation

…

20 Darkcoin (digital currency), 270–271 Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber), 157, 179 decentralized systems/technology. See also Blockchain about Bitcoin ideology, 236 Bitcoin comparison to gold, x building Bitcoin system, 55–56, 141, 292–294 development of payment systems, 129, 133 disadvantages of centralization, 113–114 Internet as, 182 Occupy

…

227, 248. See also Ulbricht, Ross drugs/drug trafficking. See Silk Road eDonkey (file sharing website), 50–51 Ehrsam, Fred, 334–336. See also Coinbase (Bitcoin service) Electronic Frontier Foundation, 80, 270 Eleuthria (screen name), 195 encryption technology, 8–12. See also Public-key cryptography exchange-traded funds (ETF), 222, 250

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