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

But many of them did fly to Austin just as the conference was ending, to attend another conference, SXSW, the storied public gathering where Silicon Valley mingled with celebrities. On the first day of SXSW, in a marquee session with Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Google’s “director of ideas,” Jared Cohen, responded to a question about Bitcoin with

out on June 5 when Senator Chuck Schumer of New York held a heavily covered news conference, at which he decried the brazen business of Silk Road and called for prosecutors to shut it down. He described Bitcoin as an “online form of money laundering used to disguise the source of money, and to disguise who’s both selling and buying the drug.”

Watching Roger evangelize with his usual gusto about “the most important invention in history since the Internet,” Charlie said to the others, with

Wences gave $100,000 of his own money to two high-level hackers he knew in eastern Europe and asked them to do their best to hack the Bitcoin protocol. He was especially curious about whether they could counterfeit Bitcoins or spend the coins held in other people’s wallets—the most damaging possible flaw. At the end of the summer, the hackers asked

The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since;

“Bitcoins are the most important invention since the internet itself. They will change the way the entire world does business.”

When people entrust money to financial institutions, they generally don’t have the expertise or time to make sure the institution is doing its job. In most cases, it is much more efficient for people to band together and pool resources to ensure that their banks and exchanges are on the straight

For the sake of Bitcoin as a whole, there were many who worried that the consumers who were buying things online through Bitpay were pushing the price of Bitcoin down; generally when online retailers accepted Bitcoins they immediately sold them off for dollars, creating a downward pressure on the overall price.

The controls also made it harder for China’s rising middle class to invest in anything that wasn’t Chinese. It was all but impossible to buy American or European stocks and bonds. This meant that ordinary Chinese investors eagerly latched onto every half-plausible new investment opportunity that presented itself.