In this relentless transformation of money, there are some casualties. Those who do not have bank accounts and have no access to the world of electronic money must rely on cash to live. But in a universe where bits are king, cash is an expensive commodity — and having to depend on it will trap people in poverty. So the money revolution is likely to widen the gap between rich and poor...
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System The Bitcoin whitepaper is 9 pages long and consists of an Abstract and 12 sections. While i have read many articles about Bitcoin (see references below), for the purposes of this post i refer to the whitepaper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” only: Bitcoin Whitepaper: ABSTRACT – Satoshi Nakamoto outlines: The Problem: There is no way...
Digital Gold (Asset) versus Distributed Computational Economy (Payment Coin) What is worth more? A cryptocurrency that provides a store of value like Gold? Or the original Bitcoin draft code and vision that was looking to build a distributed computational economy that could power global electronic cash, trade and services for a huge percentage of the world (both the banked and the unbanked). It...
Seven Days of Bitcoin Creation “And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” – Genesis bible 2:2 “And on the seventh day Satoshi finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” – Bitcoin Genesis 03 Jan 2009 – Satoshi codes Bitcoin...
Many people who have held bitcoin for a long time have been through several boom and bust cycles. Recently, many folks have noticed a pattern to these cycles linked to the bitcoin halving event that happens every 210,000 blocks or approximately every four years. The next one is anticipated to occur in April/May 2020. Historically, these halving events have not been properly priced into the...
I spent the first part of my career as a Currency Strategist in the City of London. One of the nice things about being a currency forecaster is that expectations of you are very low. Moderate success is a great surprise. But there are a few things which are more certain than others. For example, at any one time, there tends to be a single dominant currency in the financial world, not two or more...
Many cryptographic standards widely used in commercial applications were developed by the U.S. Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Normally government involvement in developing ciphers for public use would throw up red flags, however all of the algorithms are part of the public domain and have been analyzed and vetted by professional cryptographers who know what...
There are many reasons I enjoy working at coinometrics.com, and having access to data I wouldn’t otherwise have is chief among them. Recently, Jonathan Levin had been discussing whether or not Satoshi’s coins had been moved (which was in the news at the time) and Martin Harrigan of QuantaBytes(who had recently started working with us) was able to provide the sort of data...
Some time ago, I received an e-mail from my friend Timo Hanke. If you don’t know Timo, then you should, because he is, apart from a respected mathematician and Bitcoin enthusiast, an excellent person. The e-mail suggested that I looked into the nonce field to see if I could find out the endianess of Satoshi’s original mining machine. He was talking about the nonce in each block header, not the...
Pineapple Fund was an experiment in philanthropy with cryptocurrency wealth. What happens when your ‘play-money’ becomes a treasure chest, and you’re past the satiety point of money? I decided to donate the majority of my cryptocurrency to charities around the world, with an open application process and funding charities big and small. I focused on causes I believe in, or causes...
