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

When the last public forum post came from Satoshi, on December 12, 2010, there was nothing marking it as such. Announcing the latest version of the software, version 0.3.19, the post was markedly different in tone from those early messages, selling the world-beating potential of Bitcoin. The main sentiment now was a warning that Bitcoin was still e

Rather than scaring people away, Schumer’s commentary—and the deluge of media attention it received—brought on yet another surge of interest, sending the price of Bitcoin on an Icarus-like rise that had it at $30 within two days. That was a 600 percent rise from a month earlier, and a 9,000 percent increase from six months earlier. Silk Road now ha

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.

The Fed had, in fact, been making increasingly vocal calls for technology that would allow more direct methods of moving money. During late 2013 and early 2014, a number of branches of the Federal Reserve put out papers discussing the potential for the blockchain technology to eliminate risk in the financial system, if this technology could be harn

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

That ArtForz had not taken advantage of the bug himself was a minor miracle. But it was also what the incentives in the Bitcoin system were designed to encourage. ArtForz had been mining coins himself—using the GPU technology that Laszlo had first pioneered—and he knew that if confidence in the system was undercut his coins would be worthless. The

Although many expressed anger that Mark was violating one of the fundamental tenets of Bitcoin—the irreversibility of Bitcoin transactions—Mark could do so because trades on Mt. Gox happened only within the company’s system, not on the actual blockchain (Mt. Gox interacted with the blockchain only when coins moved into and out of the company).

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.”

“We don’t use gold because it’s pretty—that was a stupid assumption of mine and many other people,” Wences would tell anyone who would listen during these days when he was totally immersed in the history. “No, we use it in jewelry because it’s very expensive. It’s