Yifu Guo

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Jeremy Rubin

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Jim Harper 

That Time I Shipped $12,000 Off to Eastern or Central Europe

The Cemetery Made Just for Bitcoin

Chris Derose

The First Thing You Do When You Hear About Bitcoin

Why Silk Road Won't Always Be a Black Eye for Bitcoin

Juan Llanos

This Policy Group Started As Ross Ulbricht Was Getting Arrested

MK Lords

An FBI Investigation Led to Bitcoin Anti-War Donations

Bryan Bishop

I Thought Bitcoin Was Just Another P2P Piece of Crap

John Carvalho

I Hate Authority – Bitcoin Was a Powerful Alternative

Jon Holmquist

Black Friday (And How It Changed Bitcoin's Narrative)

Andrew Bard

How I Became That Annoying Fucking Bitcoiner

The State of New Jersey Killed My Bitcoin Project

Roger Ver

It Started With Libertarian Radio... And Ended In a Hospital

Kiara Robles

Some Weirdo Gave Me a Bitcoin Physical – And It Changed My Life

Stephanie Murphy

From Let's Talk Love to 'Let's Talk Bitcoin'

Nine pages. 398 sentences.
That’s how long it took bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto <a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf">to first sum up</a> his idea for bitcoin. Yet, newcomers to the technology will be the first to admit, the white paper far from a friendly read for those who lack a background in say, cryptography or computer science.
Today, it’s safe to say, the paper is more of a destination than a starting place for those on their journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole.
But that’s in no small part to the myriad evangelists and enthusiasts who, over the years, have attempted to pick up where Satoshi left off, re-interpreting and re-introducing bitcoin with everything from videos to to explainers to songs.
No doubt everyone has their favorite – their first, the one that got them hooked. Here, we give our list of the best seven videos of the past decade.
Watch for a refresher (or just for the lolz).
<h2>The first video</h2>
&#8220;What is Bitcoin? (v1)&#8221; is perhaps the oldest bitcoin explainer video.
Created by Stefan Thomas, a long-time bitcoin enthusiast and now the founder of Coil, he actually made the video with a friend in an effort to win a bitcoin bounty.
They spent a couple of months on the project, an earnest explainer of a technology most viewers hadn’t yet discovered. It describes a peer-to-peer form of money which lives entirely on the internet and which no bank can freeze.
But it’s also notable for what it doesn’t say.
You won’t hear the word “blockchain” once for example, and there’s not even a hint of speculation about what the price might do. Published in early 2011, the video predates the big run-ups and crashes of 2013 and 2017.
Underscoring how little bitcoin was worth at the time, <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=697.0">the bounty</a> – posted by Dan Larimer aka “bytemaster,” who’d go on to create Steem and EOS – paid out 9,002 bitcoin.
At the time of this writing, that’s $35.3 million.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Um63OQz3bjo" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
<h2>Still don&#8217;t understand?</h2>
In 2013, more attention was being paid to bitcoin as its price fluctuated between $100 and $300, but many still didn&#8217;t understand what in the hell bitcoin really was.
This old-school gem of a video, posted in mid-October 2013, perfectly captures what it felt like to get introduced to bitcoin at the time when technical jargon and utopic dreams were being thrown around as the nerds were finally getting a chance to say, &#8220;We told you so.&#8221;
While the video had some killer truths – &#8220;Already bitcoin is the currency the fuels what&#8217;s known as the dark web, which is essentially an underground Ask Jeeves&#8221; – the host concluded that no one really knows what a bitcoin is.
And judging from the conversations CoinDesk staff hear at bars or get asked on our online dating profiles, 10 years on, that&#8217;s still pretty true.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HYSEwwOt_ic" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
<h2>Paper cut-out explainer</h2>
By 2014, the mainstream media was beginning to pay attention to bitcoin, as this arts-and-craftsy video from the Guardian shows.
For an explainer from that era, the video ages relatively well, positioning bitcoin in terms of the broad problem it was trying to solve – the costs and risks of relying on financial intermediaries – as well as the particular cryptographic issue that frustrated earlier attempts at creating a digital currency: the double-spend problem.
In some ways, little has changed from what’s described in the video: the boom-and-bust cycle, the clash of hope and skepticism, questions about utility.
In other ways, the video captures a particular moment: Silk Road and Mt. Gox get mentions (neither complimentary).
And there’s a charming pre-2017 naivety on display with the line, “a cheaper, quicker and easier way to spend money.”
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s4g1XFU8Gto" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
<h2>Bitcoin is … [indecipherable]</h2>
<a href="https://www.clickhole.com/">Clickhole</a> is one of the internet&#8217;s greatest gifts.
And in July 2015, the satirical website launched by The Onion took on explaining bitcoin in a way that parodied the buzzword-heavy vernacular of crypto enthusiasts of the time.
While most of the presenter&#8217;s words are inaudible, &#8220;across the world,&#8221; &#8220;bitcoin,&#8221; &#8220;blockchain,&#8221; private key&#8221; and &#8220;even the Winklevoss Twins&#8221; are stated clearly so the audience knows what&#8217;s really important.
All the rest?
You don&#8217;t need to know how it works on the back end. No one knows how Facebook works but they still use it, right – and that&#8217;s not turning into a complete data privacy shitshow.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4APcgsRdW6w" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
<h2>&#8220;You&#8217;re so stupid&#8230;&#8221;</h2>
With the price of bitcoin inching closer towards $20,000 per coin, a self-proclaimed ultra spiritual YouTuber JP Sears said, &#8220;If you would have bought bitcoin three months ago, you&#8217;d have tripled your money. You&#8217;re so stupid for not buying it then.&#8221;
Parodying bitcoiners who spend nearly every waking minute posting about bitcoin on social media and annoying their friends, and even strangers, while talking about bitcoin over drinks, Sears still manages to be spot on about certain aspects of the industry.
For instance: &#8220;Now with bitcoin, I&#8217;m all the sudden the most qualified financial advisor I know.&#8221;
We can all roll our eyes to that.
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<h2>Last Week Tonight!</h2>
The crypto explainer video as a genre probably reached its apex during the recent hype with John Oliver’s brutal send-up on his comedy news show Last Week Tonight.
The show introduced a new audience – left-leaning millennials, mostly – to the culture and vocabulary of this generation of crypto traders and entrepreneurs. It tends to dwell on the frothy, pseudo-revolutionary ID of the sector, forcing more level-headed crypto enthusiasts into some difficult conversations with friends and family.
It also records a few key moments for posterity: the shock of realizing that Block.One, a startup that had yet to release its promised protocol, EOS, had raised $1.5 billion.
In hindsight, we’re left to wonder if Oliver kept up with the storyline – if he’s aware that Block.One raised over $4 billion in the end, and that EOS’ market cap is now under $3 billion.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g6iDZspbRMg" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
<h2>Ratskins, dodo heads, tepid lemonade</h2>
History says more about the time when it was written than the times it’s about – at least, that’s certainly true of this work of scholarly brilliance.
It ostensibly documents the 7th century BC Europeans’ skepticism of gold (versus the dominant means of exchange, chickens).
But of course, it’s really about crypto.
The best part about this particular video is that is manages to send up the won’t-take-no-for-an-answer evangelism of crypto true believers – and the unimaginative Luddism of the crypto haters.
It’s a rare mockery that doesn’t come down on one side or the other. Although, come to think of it, gold did end up having a pretty good run.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YHjYt6Jm5j8" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

The 7 Best Bitcoin Explainer Videos

Look at how cute he is – that big open mouth, eyes wide, arms raised like goalposts, waiting for bitcoin to mooooooooon.
&#8220;To the moon!&#8221;
It&#8217;s now become a rallying cry for many cryptocurrency enthusiasts, hoping their coin of choice becomes so widely accepted that its price skyrockets, and aptly, lands on the moon. You hear it on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook (really any social media), it emblazons stickers and T-shirts, it&#8217;s one of the catchphrases of the space that&#8217;s been unfazed by bear markets and crypto winter.
And it&#8217;s a phrase most enthusiastically used by the well-known Redditor and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art">ASCII emoji</a> fearless leader, unsurprisingly called <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/ToTheMoonGuy">ToTheMoonGuy</a>, or TTMG.
While it&#8217;s natural that any price bumps would get this little guy&#8217;s hurrah, he expresses his immense enthusiasm for little moments in bitcoin&#8217;s internet heritage, such as when the bitcoin subreddit <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/a2jz3j/congratulations_on_one_million_subscribers/eazh4mo/">reached 1 million subscribers</a> in early December.
Sometimes, when things are slow, <a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZlDG3LJ.jpg">he disappears</a>. But he always comes back, to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/a2jz3j/congratulations_on_one_million_subscribers/eb03ygf/">the delight of his fans</a> who frequent the bitcoin subreddit.
TTMG comes in at least two forms:
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373696" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2.png" alt="" width="439" height="103" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2.png 439w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-205x48.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-90x21.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-136x32.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-348x82.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-350x82.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-419x98.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-270x63.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-438x103.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-282x66.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-206x48.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit_2-281x66.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 439px) 100vw, 439px" />
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373697" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit.png" alt="" width="405" height="111" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit.png 405w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-205x56.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-90x25.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-136x37.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-348x95.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-350x96.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-270x74.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-282x77.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-206x56.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_reddit-281x77.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 405px) 100vw, 405px" />
And his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140402205959/http://tothemoonguy.com:80/pages/about">old website</a> explains his origin story: &#8220;From the time he could stand, he was baptized in the fire of karma. Taught that downvotes on the Interwebs in service to bitcoin was the greatest glory he could achieve in his life.&#8221;
TTMG sketches himself the unlikely hero for taking down the financial establishment and replacing it with cryptocurrency.
His story continues:
<blockquote>&#8220;His conviction strikes fear in the hearts of central bankers, and his courage warms the soul of weary bitcoiners, even in the coldest episodes of oversupply.&#8221;</blockquote>
And while bitcoin&#8217;s tenth birthday might coincide with the markets in red, TTMG is ready to celebrate still – here in this Q&amp;A – because he&#8217;ll never be persuaded to think that bitcoin will not reach that big, beautiful astronomical body.
How did the &#8220;ToTheMoonGuy&#8221; character come about?
It’s hard to remember stories from when I was that young.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been looking up at that big beautiful disk and wondering how long I would have to wait before I can book my ticket.
Who is your creator? Is he pseudonymous? Can we get some pictures?
My creator isn’t very good at pseudonymity, but they’re still much more introverted than me.
I, conversely, love pictures! I had a very good photographer take this one of me back in 2013.
Why &#8220;to the moon&#8221;?
It’s an old saying, but I’ve always loved it for bitcoin because it can convey both a direction and an ethos.
Of course, the primary meaning is the price going upward, but it also hints at the spirit of the bitcoin project. Bitcoin rethinks one of the world’s most foundational technologies: money. It’s a crazy experiment with game-changing implications.
As the cryptocurrency space continues to expand, a huge swath of related technologies – many practically untouched now for thousands of years – may finally face some meaningful competition. Finance, law, identity and rights enforcement are all ripe for disruption in ways few people imagined just a decade ago. Now, I and millions of potential entrepreneurs are taking a second look. We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
As for an exact meaning: as a bitcoin permabull, I think the price of bitcoin – in terms of whatever fiat currency you’re using to measure it – will ultimately be ∞.
Fiat currencies are an inferior product, supported by social inertia. Like all fossilized technologies, they will eventually lose that momentum, and their market will shrink to physical collectors (where they at least have some degree of scarcity).
This presents a peculiar predicament: if cryptocurrency is destined to replace all of the world’s currencies, with what measuring stick can I describe my price target for one bitcoin?
<blockquote>Well, I think one bitcoin will be worth one economy-class trip to the moon. (°◡°)</blockquote>
What are your favorite bitcoin moon moments?
It’s hard to pick favorites, but somewhere near the top has to be when Virgin Galactic started accepting bitcoin for tickets to space!
I <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r7wps/richardbranson_can_you_take_me_to_the_moon_0/">tweeted [Virgin Galactic CEO] Sir Richard Branson</a> about going to the moon. I’m hopeful that he’s just delaying responding until he can sell me my ticket.
In the early days, it was hugely exciting to see bitcoin make the front page of big newspapers and magazines. When Google Finance <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27vc2h/google_finance_now_showing_bitcoin_prices_too/">finally added bitcoin</a>, that was definitely a moon moment.
It’s funny how normal these things now feel.
Other than posts about the real world, I enjoy a lot of the memes posted during bull runs. Probably my favorite meme post of all time (and one I’ve long been waiting for) was when the bitcoin price <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7fkqh5/its_over_9000/">went over $9,000</a>.
(Editor&#8217;s note: This meme comes from the popular anime show Dragon Ball Z, which features a long-standing rivalry between Goku and Vegeta. At one point, Goku flies to a &#8220;power level&#8221; of 9000, considered very high, prompting Vegeta to angrily scream &#8220;It&#8217;s over 9000!&#8221; while crushing a mechanical device that augments his eye.)
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373691" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Dragonball.gif" alt="" width="960" height="540" />
And my favorite gif has to be this classic one.
&nbsp;
What have been your favorite comments?
The Reddit post where <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3r9w6q/where_the_fck_is_tothemoonguy_did_he_get_banned/cwmcph4/">I first started using PGP</a> was very interesting.
(Editor&#8217;s note: PGP is a cryptographic device for privatizing emails, though it&#8217;s mostly for techies, as it&#8217;s notoriously difficult to set up and use).
And perhaps the most unique comment I’ve seen was when <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7fkhbe/daily_discussion_sunday_november_26_2017/dqerfzc/">/u/Brighteyes720 asked me</a> for a PGP-signed autograph!
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373692" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP.png" alt="" width="941" height="780" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP.png 941w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-768x637.png 768w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-141x117.png 141w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-728x603.png 728w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-780x647.png 780w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-82x68.png 82w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-95x79.png 95w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-314x260.png 314w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-54x45.png 54w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-181x150.png 181w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-350x290.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-419x347.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-270x224.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-352x292.png 352w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-241x200.png 241w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-162x134.png 162w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-545x452.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-281x233.png 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-562x466.png 562w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PGP-843x699.png 843w" sizes="(max-width: 941px) 100vw, 941px" />
I think one of the funniest comments <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3icegs/just_opened_my_fortune_cookie_0/cufh5im/">is in this thread hypothesizing</a> that I am Satoshi.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373694" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi.png" alt="" width="1279" height="297" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi.png 1279w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-768x178.png 768w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-205x48.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-728x169.png 728w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-780x181.png 780w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-90x21.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-136x32.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-348x81.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-646x150.png 646w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-350x81.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-419x97.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-270x63.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-438x102.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-282x65.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-206x48.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-545x127.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-1200x279.png 1200w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-281x65.png 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-562x131.png 562w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satoshi-843x196.png 843w" sizes="(max-width: 1279px) 100vw, 1279px" />
And I loved when u/dsterry posted a picture of <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3a7msj/in_honor_of_utothemoonguys_reappearance_heres_a/">a 3D-printed keychain</a> featuring me!
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373695" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain.png" alt="" width="706" height="372" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain.png 706w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-205x108.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-90x47.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-136x72.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-348x183.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-285x150.png 285w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-350x184.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-419x221.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-270x142.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-438x231.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-282x149.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-206x109.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-545x287.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-281x148.png 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/TTMG_keychain-562x296.png 562w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 100vw, 706px" />
What happened to your website? It has such a wonderful description of your origin story.
It was fun to build, but it was distracting me from more important things… like posting to Reddit and Twitter! You can still <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140402205959/http://tothemoonguy.com:80/pages/about">see it on</a> WayBack Machine.
Do you still sell ToTheMoonGuy t-shirts? How many did you sell? Did you sell any other merchandise?
It was fun, but it was a labor of love. I only sold t-shirts, around 200 over the years, and I shipped them to more than 20 countries. Maybe most notably, the Seattle bitcoin meetup made a huge order in 2013. Several bitcoin companies also made orders over the years for employees.
It’s fun to see them show up around conferences, even five years later.
I don’t sell anything anymore, but some wonderful companies carry the torch. As you can imagine, it is hard for a two-dimensional Guy to sell three-dimensional merchandise. I’m happy that you can find great moon-bound swag all around the ecosystem now. (°◡°)
You&#8217;ve been a little more elusive lately – everything OK?
Things have obviously been a bit quieter since the last bull market, but I’m still here! I’m active on Reddit (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/ToTheMoonGuy/">u/ToTheMoonGuy</a>) and also on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/tothemoonguy">@ToTheMoonGuy</a>).
There’s plenty of development going on right now, and there are a lot of exciting projects happening even during this bear market. Who knows, maybe once this latest batch of new developments start to make it into average users’ hands, I’ll be showing up a little more often. (°◡°)
Recently you&#8217;ve been posting a bit about bitcoin cash, the cryptocurrency that split off the main bitcoin chain last year after bitcoin&#8217;s scaling debate came to a head. Do you prefer bitcoin cash to bitcoin?
I don’t think of myself as being a supporter of a specific side.
There are brilliant people working on many projects in this space! If anything, I’m an ardent supporter of currency competition, and I think chain forks are an important element of that competition.
While there’s a lot of work that must go into a network split, it’s a beautiful thing that bitcoin has such a simple, peaceful way of handling protocol disagreements. And better yet, as a holder, I get coins on both sides!
I’d much rather bitcoin evolve via chain splits than be supplanted by a different blockchain. Holders that feel strongly about one tip or the other can make a little money by selling one side to buy the other. Long-term holders can simply ignore the commotion, and their savings are perfectly safe.
When large companies release new software, they often reduce risk by rolling it out slowly to their users. Why not use the same strategy for bitcoin? If we can get better at avoiding disruptions to commerce, I think chain splits will become an incredibly valuable way for the ecosystem to reduce risk while continuing to innovate.
So have you ever thought… maybe the bitcoin price won&#8217;t go &#8220;to the moon&#8221;?
Nope! (°◡°)

When Moon? Bitcoin’s The Moon Guy Tells All

The History of Bitcoin (As Told By Its 7 Most Iconic Memes)

HODL Is LOVE: How the Banksy of Bitcoin Created the Decade’s Defining Art

Bitcoin is pretty cool.
Sure that&#8217;s our opinion over here at CoinDesk, but there&#8217;s plenty to back that up.
Think the politically pressured blockade on Wikileaks, Cyrus&#8217; financial crisis, Venezuela&#8217;s evil dictator that&#8217;s inflating the country&#8217;s money into worthlessness. Plus the OG cryptocurrency has been compared to the honey badger – the honey badger, and animal that gives <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg">zero fucks</a>.
While it might seem crazy now that there was a time when you could go to a bar and not overhear some finance bro or pseudo-anarchist hipster talking about bitcoin, that time existed not all that long ago.
People had no idea what we were talking about. And they asked us if we were OK when Mt. Gox went under because they thought we had lost our jobs.
Facepalm.
It was a strange time. A time when one man, Gavin Andresen, was really doing much of the explaining to the n00bs what bitcoin was all about. And he knew how to get the people going.
Sure, Andresen, one of the first volunteer developers of bitcoin and for years the core maintainer of the Github repository, hasn&#8217;t been heard from in some time – having been all but ousted <a href="/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-exile-of-bitcoins-former-face">after throwing his support behind</a> Satoshi Nakamoto-imposter Craig Wright.
But to forget his impact on getting bitcoin into the mainstream consciousness would be regretful – as Andresen had some pretty epic things to say about the cryptocurrency.
<h2>1. Sex, drugs and rock n roll</h2>
&#8220;Bitcoin is a new type of money… A bunch of websites have started to accept bitcoin, everything from sports to rubles to all sorts of drugs, sex and rock n roll.&#8221; 
&#8212; February 8, 2011
Barely two years after the protocol was released, Andresen was one of the few people with a true understanding of the underlying tech making it possible.
And because of Satoshi&#8217;s seeming interest in anonymity – he was one of the first people to give a talk about bitcoin. Speaking at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koIq58UoNfE">Ignite Amherst</a>, an evening of thought-provoking five minute talks, in early 2011, Andresen explained how a bunch of merchants had all the sudden started accepting bitcoin as a payment method.
And with that, bitcoin was becoming something more useful than he had initially expected.
<h2>2. Bitcoin&#8217;s worst problem</h2>
&#8220;Scalability is funny, because it&#8217;s a good problem to have. If we have the problem that there are too many transactions then… Cool! Great! That&#8217;s a great problem to have.&#8221; 
&#8212; August 2011
Even in the very early days, developers understood bitcoin&#8217;s scalability problem.
Based on its architecture, the system can only support a few transactions per second – and as it was being touted as a payment alternative to the card networks and PayPal, which handle thousands of transactions per second – developers understood this would eventually be a hurdle.
Speaking at a 2011 conference, touted as the &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ljx4bbJrYE">world&#8217;s first bitcoin conference</a>,&#8221; Andresen remained optimistic, arguing developers would eventually solve this problem.
Part of the reason, today&#8217;s Core developers started stepping away from Andresen even before his controversial Craig Wright support was because Andresen was advocating for increasing the bitcoin block size through a hard fork upgrade.
That debate finally came to a head in 2017, when Bitcoin Core activated Segregated Witness, ushering in work on a layer-two scaling tech called the lightning network (which is still being vigorously worked on), and the opposition split off the network, creating the competing cryptocurrency bitcoin cash.
<h2>3. World-changing idea</h2>
&#8220;I think it’s great that bitcoin lets people take back control of their money and payments. From a purely technical point of view, it’s just fascinating to me that the technical problems were solved [to make bitcoin happen]. It’s a really interesting project from a technical view. It’s a potentially world-changing idea.&#8221; 
&#8212; May 21, 2013
By 2013, Andresen was well-known as the bitcoin community&#8217;s friendly public face.
Falling in line with the dreams of most bitcoiners&#8217;, the developer <a href="/already-bigger-than-some-currencies-bitcoin-can-get-bigger-gavin-andresen-says">was excited</a> by the idea of a new type of open, programmable money with no leader – something that would allow people to control their own money, instead of relying on the money of companies and governments.
<h2>4. Bitcoin research overload</h2>
&#8220;A few years ago I created a Google Scholar alert for “bitcoin.” And I was happy if I got one alert per month. Today, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all of the great computer science or economics papers related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; in just the last week Mr. Google told me about 30 new papers I might be interested in reading.&#8221; 
&#8212; April 27, 2014
As he stepped down as &#8220;core maintainer&#8221; of bitcoin to take a role as &#8220;chief scientist&#8221; at the now defunct Bitcoin Foundation, Andresen <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150824013103/https://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/bitcoin-core-maintainer-wladimir-van-der-laan/">again expressed optimism</a> about the project.
The blog post went on to explain that Wladimir van der Laan, a quiet developer living in the Netherlands, would be taking over the role as core maintainer.
Still, even with the change, Andresen was at the height of his fame and influence. For instance, MIT Technology Review would soon after call him &#8220;<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527051/the-man-who-really-built-bitcoin/">the man who really built bitcoin.</a>&#8221;
This was a controversial headline, since there are so many diverse contributors putting their time and energy into the open source project – but perhaps didn&#8217;t speak publicly as frequently as he did.
<h2>5. Certain powerful people</h2>
&#8220;I worry about [corporations or certain powerful people having too much influence over bitcoin] a little bit. I think the key is to make sure we keep &#8216;permissionless innovation.&#8217; I think lots of people confuse natural concentrations of power or wealth that come from either being smarter or more savvy or luckier or starting with more power or wealth or reputation with systems that prevent newcomers from competing with entrenched interests.&#8221; 
&#8212; October 21, 2014
In an <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2jw5pm/im_gavin_andresen_chief_scientist_at_the_bitcoin/clfomsc/">Ask Me Anything (AMA)</a> on Reddit, Andresen was asked whether he was worried about bitcoin morphing into a weapon for a powerful company, state or individual – becoming the opposite of the alternative it was created to be.
While bitcoin is intended to be a leaderless decentralized system, people worry about its susceptibility to control.
Andresen&#8217;s response was mostly positive, although also realistic, saying that while concentrations of power – as we&#8217;ve seen with mining hardware – are part of the free market, but as long as the system continues to be open for anyone to use, its core ethos is secure.
<h2>6. Burnt out</h2>
&#8220;When I got involved in bitcoin I never thought it would explode as it did. But it&#8217;s also hard &#8212; really hard. I&#8217;ve been getting a little burnt out recently. This whole block size debate has been getting me down. I was really happy in Montreal [&#8230;] I really hope we can make forward progress.&#8221; 
&#8212; November 2015
By 2015, bitcoin&#8217;s scaling debate was quite the mess.
Andresen led one side, calling for an increase to bitcoin&#8217;s block size parameter, arguing it was the best way to increase the number of people that could use the technology by boosting the amount of transaction volume the system could handle.
As he said the above quote, he sat on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iQSRGT3nfE">a panel</a> with Greg Maxwell and Matt Corallo, influential Bitcoin Core developers who adamantly opposed this change – or at least the proposed process for making it.
Though he had &#8220;hope&#8221; bitcoin would continue to progress, Andresen struck a somber tone, a departure from his usual cheery attitude.
In hindsight, it could be seen as a sign, as just a few months later, the developer received fiery flak when he said he believed Craig Wright was the creator of bitcoin (even while most developers called Wright a scammer).
Andresen&#8217;s perceived gullibility drew criticism even from the likes of well-known security researcher Dan Kaminsky.
&#8220;What is going on here? There’s clear unambiguous cryptographic evidence of fraud and you’re lending credibility to the idea,&#8221; he said in <a href="https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/03/the-cryptographically-provable-con-man/">an email</a> to Andresen.
Soon after that, Andresen all but stopped publicly appearing to promote the project he had loved so much and taken so far.
He has not submitted a code change to bitcoin&#8217;s main software implementation, Bitcoin Core, since February 2016.

Drugs, Sex and Scaling: Gavin Andresen's Best Bitcoin Quotes

Regulators, economists, pundits – all have shot slings and arrows at bitcoin.
But none may have been as tough on the idea of a decentralized digital money as its first recipients, the correspondents on a cryptography mailing list.
Surprising as it may be, in the weeks and months after the white paper’s release, bitcoin faced tough questions from a host of cypherpunks and cryptographers, the very minds who Satoshi hoped would be most apt to sign on to contribute code.
Yet, in subjecting the white paper to endless ‘what ifs,’ the mailing list’s members produced a trove of insight, including predictions about the technology’s future that are still relevant today.
Ten years later, we look back at five of the biggest questions asked, and examine whether answers have yet been found.
<h2>1. Is bitcoin scalable?</h2>
<a href="https://www.coindesk.com/information/can-bitcoin-scale">Scalability</a> has been a notoriously polarizing issue within the bitcoin community.
Discussions about how bitcoin could be programmed to accommodate more users officially went mainstream in 2014 with the infamous “block size debate.” Then in 2017, tensions peaked as the community split into two camps, each of which favored a differing technical roadmap.
Yet, while this might seem like a new debate, it’s arguably bitcoin’s oldest, emerging just days after the white paper was posted – and before the protocol itself was even released.
<h3>November 2, 2008</h3>
Well-known cypherpunk and cryptographer James A. Donald: 
“We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
For transferable proof of work tokens to have value, they must have monetary value. To have monetary value, they must be transferred within a very large network – for example a file-trading network akin to bittorrent.
To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth – each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.”
Donald recently reflected on his comments in an email to CoinDesk: 
“I correctly predicted that scaling law problems would bite hard, and incorrectly predicted that would prevent success. [Satoshi] correctly said that scaling law problems were a long way down the track, and by the time they bit, bitcoin would be a big success. And now bitcoin is a big success and scaling problems are biting hard.”
<h2>2. What is bitcoin worth?</h2>
Bitcoin’s price volatility has resulted in much speculation about what it’s &#8220;true value&#8221; really is.
While those inclined toward Austrian economics contend that bitcoin is akin to gold, others have dismissed it as <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/ubs-economist-compares-bitcoin-to-tulip-mania">a bubble</a>, much like 17th century &#8220;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania">tulip mania</a>.&#8221; As such, the debate roars on, but that discussion is by no means new.
The dilemma of how to determine bitcoin’s value was remarked upon early on by two different well-known cypherpunks – although their conclusions are vastly different.
<h3>November 6, 2008</h3>
Ray Dillinger, a cryptographer who completed a review and security of the bitcoin code in 2008:
“I think the real issue with this system is the market for bitcoins.
Computing proofs-of-work have no intrinsic value. We can have a limited supply curve (although the &#8220;currency&#8221; is inflationary at about 35 percent as that&#8217;s how much faster computers get annually) but there is no demand curve that intersects it at a positive price point.
I know the same (lack of intrinsic value) can be said of fiat currencies, but an artificial demand for fiat currencies is created by (among other things) taxation and legal-tender laws. Also, even a fiat currency can be an inflation hedge against another fiat currency&#8217;s higher rate of inflation.
But in the case of bitcoins the inflation rate of 35% is almost guaranteed by the technology, there are no supporting mechanisms for taxation, and no legal-tender laws. People will not 
hold assets in this highly-inflationary currency if they can help it.”
<h3>January 10th, 2009</h3>
Hal Finney, a now deceased bitcoin developer who received the first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto:
“One immediate problem with any new currency is how to value it. Even ignoring the practical problem that virtually no one will accept it at first, there is still a difficulty in coming up with a reasonable argument in favor of a particular non-zero value for the coins.
As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion.
With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
So, the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about…”
<h2>3. What will people use cryptocurrency for?</h2>
From the early days, bitcoin was framed as a currency, yet Satoshi and others recognized that it had other use cases as well.
Specific examples include reward points, donation tokens, in-game currencies and a mechanism for micropayments. Each of these have projects and companies – the likes of <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/fujitsu-rolls-out-system-that-turns-reward-points-into-blockchain-tokens">Fujitsu</a>, <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/uk-charity-taps-blockchain-platform-to-boost-trust-in-donations">Giftcoin</a>, <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/a-crypto-card-game-is-testing-magics-records-and-it-hasnt-even-launched">Gods Unchained</a> and <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-needs-start-talking-seriously-spankchain">SpankChain</a> – built around them today.
Security tokens, utility tokens and stable coins have also notably developed as an extension of Satoshi’s original concept.
<h3>January 16, 2009</h3>
Satoshi Nakamoto: 
“I would be surprised if 10 years from now we&#8217;re not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won&#8217;t inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party 
gets cold feet.
It could get started in a narrow niche like reward points, donation tokens, currency for a game or micropayments for adult sites. Initially it can be used in proof-of-work applications for services that could almost be free but not quite.
It can already be used for pay-to-send e-mail. The send dialog is resizeable and you can enter as long of a message as you like. It&#8217;s sent directly when it connects. The recipient doubleclicks on the transaction to see the full message. If someone famous is getting more e-mail than they can read, but would still like to have a way for fans to contact them, they could set up Bitcoin and give out the IP address on their website. &#8220;Send X bitcoins to my priority hotline at this IP and I&#8217;ll read the message personally.&#8221;
Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn&#8217;t cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial.
It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.”
<h2>4. What are the implications of valuable proof-of-work tokens?</h2>
Clandestine crypto mining activity, also known as “cryptojacking,” increased an astounding 956 percent between the end of June 2017 to the end of June 2018.
And the victims of these activities were by no means insignificant – Google’s <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/googles-doubleclick-ads-used-distribute-crypto-mining-malware">DoubleClick Ads</a> and Indian government <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/cryptojacking-scripts-found-on-local-indian-government-sites">websites</a> were among those affected.
But a scenario like this was perhaps not wholly unimaginable in bitcoin’s early days. Hal Finney’s prediction that “<a href="https://www.coindesk.com/botnets-are-being-repurposed-for-cryptojacking-kaspersky-says">botnets</a>” might attempt to secretly steal computing power to earn cryptocurrency arguably foreshadowed today’s dilemma.
<h3>January 24, 2009</h3>
Hal Finney: 
“If POW tokens do become useful, and especially if they become money, machines will no longer sit idle. Users will expect their computers to be earning them money (assuming the reward is greater than the cost to operate). A computer whose earnings are being stolen by a botnet will be more noticeable to its owner than is the case today, hence we might expect that in that world, users will work harder to maintain their computers and clean them of botnet infestations.
Countermeasures by botnet operators would include moderating their take, perhaps only stealing 10 percent of the productive capacity of invaded computers, so that their owners would be unlikely to notice. This kind of thinking quickly degenerates into unreliable speculation, but it points out the difficulties of analyzing the full ramifications of a world where POW tokens are valuable.”
<h2>5. Can you regulate decentralized networks?</h2>
Early on, Satoshi and others knew what regulators are coming to terms with today: regulating decentralized networks is hard.
While many governments have been successful in clamping down on some criminality as it relates to the centralized institutions operating in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (think exchanges and wallet providers), it&#8217;s a much more opaque process when a system is fully decentralized without known business operators.
Bitcoin has proved this by merely continuing to exist for the last decade; the crypto community was again reminded of this in July when <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/the-first-augur-assassination-markets-have-arrived">assassination markets</a> appeared on Augur, a decentralized protocol for betting on the outcomes of real-world events.
Though the Augur protocol, built on ethereum, initially included a kill switch through which a designated party could shut the system down, the protocol’s developers relinquished ownership over the function early on, rendering them unable to close the assassination markets.
So, while Satoshi framed decentralization as a means to freedom, the Augur incident led some in the crypto community to reconsider their moral responsibility for the decentralized networks they develop.
<h3>November 6, 2008</h3>
Satoshi Nakamoto: 
“[Lengthy exposition of vulnerability of a system to use-of-force monopolies ellided.]
You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.”
“Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.
Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.&#8221;

The Cryptography Mailing List: Where Bitcoin Met Its First Critics

&#8220;There once was a girl from Des Moines, Whose breasts were as fine as her loins.&#8221;
You wouldn&#8217;t likely point to deceased computer scientist Hal Finney as the person behind this limerick – but then again, you’d be wrong.
Most people know Finney for his pioneering work on bitcoin. He was the first person to run the bitcoin client and on top of that, <a href="https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988?lang=en">tweet about it</a> on January 10, 2009 (a day after the software was released), leaving a social media timestamp on his first foray into what has become a technology behind $60 billion in value.
He was also the first person to receive a bitcoin payment, from none other than bitcoin&#8217;s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
However, his biggest contribution may have just been his optimism for bitcoin.
While many were initially critical of the new decentralized digital currency, Finney wasn&#8217;t; he was immediately curious and excited by the project. For this reason, many have speculated that he is Satoshi – although it&#8217;s something Finney always denied it and there’s no conclusive evidence to tie him to writing the software.
Throughout the years, people have come back to Finney&#8217;s tweet to pay their respects.
&#8220;Legend.&#8221;
&#8220;The gravitas of this fucking tweet.&#8221;
&#8220;We&#8217;ve come a long way, Hal. Rest in peace, friend.&#8221;
Hal died in 2014 from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) – a disease that eats away at the body&#8217;s neurons, slowly making it more difficult to move. It caught attention several years ago when people participated in the viral &#8220;ice bucket challenge&#8221; (which had people across the globe dumping icy water on themselves) to raise awareness and money for research, in the hopes of one day curing the awful disease.
What many thought was so inspiring about Hal was that even as the disease took over, he worked on bitcoin frequently. And he&#8217;s also got quite the mystique since he decided to have his body cryogenically frozen by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation – what some call the ultimate HODL strategy.
But, there&#8217;s plenty of his story that hasn&#8217;t been told.
In addition to a weird sense of humor – per the limerick – his contributions to bitcoin actually go much deeper than being one of the first to see its potential.
Using his eyes to write, he coded and posted ideas that has inspired coders for years to come.
<h2>1. He messed around with a precursor to zk-SNARKS – 1998</h2>
Finney had a hand in implementing a pretty experimental, but potentially revolutionary privacy technology back in the day.
Zk-snarks started making headlines in the last couple of years as a privacy tech that could potentially do magical things for cryptocurrencies privacy and scalability. With the technology, one person can cryptographically prove to another person with absolute certainty certain information, without ever revealing that information.
Though it could potentially be used for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#Applications">all sorts of use cases</a>, the best-known, real-world example of zk-snarks in the crypto world use is in zcash. In the zcash protocol, zk-snarks is used to privatize user&#8217;s balances and who a transaction is sent to and from.
In a &#8220;<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxSJdYnjz8zdVG9qR0xiX191V28/view">rump session</a>&#8221; at the crypto conference in 1998, Finney described a zk-snarks scheme between &#8220;Peggy the Prover&#8221; and &#8220;Victor the Verifier&#8221; – a bit different than the Alice and Bob the cryptography world is so used to.
About 20 years before the cryptocurrency industry began applying it, Finney was coding up the theory to get a feel for how others could fix it up, as the technology was very clumsy and slow.
Cypherpunk and Blockstream CEO Adam Back told CoinDesk:
<blockquote>&#8220;[Finney] was always reading papers and implementing things to get an idea of how they work, what the performance is like and gain practical experience with interesting cryptographic building blocks.&#8221;</blockquote>
<h2>2. He worked a bit on Hashcash – 2002</h2>
Finney was involved in digital money systems for longer than some might realize.
Back pointed out that years ago Finney contributed to Hashcash, the revolutionary proof-of-work research Back <a href="http://hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf">released in 2012</a>.
Hashcash is widely seen as a precursor to bitcoin and was even one of the few sources cited in the bitcoin white paper based on its research showing that computational power could prevent a person from double spending.
<div id="attachment_373710" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><div class="image-container width-553"><img class="wp-image-373710 size-full" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper.png" alt="" width="553" height="103" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper.png 553w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-205x38.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-90x17.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-136x25.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-348x65.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-350x65.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-419x78.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-270x50.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-438x82.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-282x53.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-206x38.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-545x102.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hashcash_paper-281x52.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px" />Screencap from the Hashcash white paper</div></div>
At one point, over email, Finney described to Back a different preimage method for Hashcash.
&#8220;I evaluated [it] and considered [it] to have advantages and so adopted in Hashcash,&#8221; Back told CoinDesk.
Though the two cypherpunks never met in person, of Finney&#8217;s personality, Back said, &#8220;He was always polite and constructive in online discussion.&#8221;
In 2004, Finney would go on to use Hashcash in a digital money he created called Reusable Proofs of Work (RPOW), a project cypherpunks know well.
While it was never widely adopted and was not as decentralized as bitcoin would eventually be, it did use interesting technology, such as trusted computing in a unique way to ensure that users couldn&#8217;t double spend their coins.
Finney even had rough plans to spread the RPOW software <a href="https://nakamotoinstitute.org/finney/rpow/world.html">across the world</a>.
<h2>3. He once ranted about Cheerios – July 2009</h2>
Finney was, at least for a time, a frequent poster to LessWrong, a forum focused on detecting and eradicating cognitive biases, such as how people tend to believe information that sides with whatever ideology they subscribe to.
In a lengthy post titled <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MtNnFg4uN32YPoKNa/missing-the-trees-for-the-forest">Missing The Trees For The Forest</a>, commenter Scott Alexander argued that when people look at current events, they tend to argue vehemently along the lines of whatever political party they are a part of, whether or not it&#8217;s a reasonable position to take.
To highlight the point, Alexander used a recent debate about the cereal Cheerios. Several months back, the manufacturer of Cheerios, General Mills, had been accused by the government of falsely advertising that their cereal lowers cholesterol.
This sparked a huge debate online, according to Alexander.
&#8220;By the time the right-wing and left-wing blogospheres had finished with it, this became everything from part of the deliberate strangulation of the American entrepreneurial spirit by a conspiracy of bureaucrats, to a symbol of the radicalization of the political right into a fringe group obsessed with Communism, to a prelude to Obama&#8217;s plan to commit genocide against all citizens who disagree with him. All because of Cheerios!&#8221; Alexander continued.
Finney responded <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MtNnFg4uN32YPoKNa/missing-the-trees-for-the-forest#FaDiQM8AAMSJk2drW">with a screed</a> defending Cheerios, arguing with a range of data and links that there is, in fact, evidence that eating Cheerios regularly can lower cholesterol.
When another commenter argued that Finney had missed the point, that this conversation wasn&#8217;t really about Cheerios, but about political bias, Finney responded:
<blockquote>&#8220;A typical comment from an anti-Cheerios advocate. Is this what [LessWrong] is coming to? Cheerios lovers unite!&#8221;</blockquote>
Though he later clarified he was joking – sort of.
&#8220;Anyway it was probably not clear but I was a little tongue in cheek with my Cheerios rant. I think what I wrote is correct, but mostly I was having fun pretending that there could be a big political battle over even the narrow issue of the Cheerios study and what it means,&#8221; he added.
<h2>4. Finney wrote a post about discovering his disease – October 4th, 2009</h2>
Nine months after the Cheerios rant, Finney discovered some heart-wrenching news – he had ALS. He shared his story in more detail on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bshZiaLefDejvPKuS/dying-outside">Less Wrong</a>, saying: &#8220;Even as my body is dying outside, I will remain alive inside.&#8221;
Because victims of the disease don&#8217;t like the idea of not being able to move, many with ALS actually choose to die rather than accept the medical treatment that is available, Finney explained. But, he was going to chose the opposite.
&#8220;I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body,&#8221; he went on.
And sure enough, one of those open source projects became bitcoin.
<h2>5. He inspired a bitcoin refresh – February 7, 2011</h2>
In 2011, before Pieter Wuille was the workhorse of bitcoin, Finney inspired the programmer to take a chainsaw to a core piece of bitcoin.
Finney described a way to boost transaction validation speeds with a new mathematical algorithm. Finding the idea interesting, Wuille started working on it informally as a &#8220;hobby project,&#8221; which ended up blowing up into a much bigger project.
Sure enough, esteemed bitcoin engineers Greg Maxwell and Andrew Poelstra later joined in to work on that effort.
And in 2016, it was finally unrolled on bitcoin, resulting in a huge architectural refresh to the digital money system.
<h2>6. He discovered an attack on bitcoin – February 13, 2011</h2>
Finney was also the first to discover a specific attack that could theoretically be used to steal bitcoins.
Double spending, the vein of attack where one person can spend their coins more than once, is a problem which bitcoin claimed to have eradicated with its setup. Although, it is still possible in certain, very specific instances.
In a bitcointalk post, Finney <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3441.msg48384#msg48384">described a tricky type of attack</a> that would require miners to gamble their block rewards and a merchant to have a policy where they accept the transaction before it has been confirmed.
Because miners would lose out on money and it&#8217;s already considered bad practice for merchants to accept bitcoin without confirmation first, the attack isn&#8217;t considered a huge risk.
But since it&#8217;s technically possible, the attack is now widely referred to as the &#8220;Finney attack&#8221; and is frequently mentioned on the bitcoin IRC, where developers chat about bitcoin tech.
<h2>7. He once wrote a bitcoin limerick – June 2011</h2>
A frequent poster on Bitcoin Talk, Finney graced the forum with this rather awkward <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=11739.msg169110#msg169110">bitcoin limerick</a> at one time.
<div id="attachment_373711" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><div class="image-container width-555"><img class="wp-image-373711 size-full" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick.png" alt="" width="555" height="228" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick.png 555w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-205x84.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-90x37.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-136x56.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-348x143.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-365x150.png 365w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-350x144.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-419x172.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-270x111.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-438x180.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-282x116.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-206x85.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-545x224.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Limerick-281x115.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 555px) 100vw, 555px" />Screencap from Bitcointalk chat forum</div></div>
We don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s any further commentary needed here.
Although, perhaps it&#8217;s worth noting that many sex workers have indeed <a href="/sex-worker-retirement">turned to bitcoin</a> as a way to fund their stigmatized careers.
<h2>8. Finney&#8217;s work on &#8216;trusted computing&#8217; – March 17, 2013</h2>
Wuille isn&#8217;t the only influential bitcoin developer today that Finney inspired.
Finney coded up &#8220;<a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154290.msg1635481#msg1635481">bcflick</a>,&#8221; a patched version of bitcoin, which builds in additional security with the help of so-called &#8220;trusted computing,&#8221; the same technology Finney used in RPOW. Bcflick uses an extra secure area of a computer so that users can limit their wallet to sending only a few bitcoins (or a fraction of a bitcoin) at once.
Why would anyone want to do that? Well, it would make life a lot harder for a hacker should a user&#8217;s wallet be compromised.
And with that, Finney&#8217;s post prompted outspoken bitcoin developer Maxwell to buy a laptop with the trusted computing functionality Finney described.
&#8220;I&#8217;m pretty [&#8230;] eager to see where it goes,&#8221; Maxwell responded <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643945#msg1643945">to the post</a>, before continuing:
<blockquote>&#8220;Seeing you continue on with a productive life is an inspiration to everyone and, speaking for myself usually makes my own difficulties seem a bit more trivial and surmountable — doubly so considering that many of us found your work interesting before your troubles.&#8221;</blockquote>
Another prominent bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, widely known for &#8220;<a href="https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7">quitting</a>&#8221; bitcoin a couple years ago, corresponded with Finney a bunch on the forum.
Hearn told CoinDesk, &#8220;The tech wasn&#8217;t good enough at the time&#8221; and Finney &#8220;died before he was able to really promote or evangelize it.&#8221;
Luckily though, Hearn is still working on something similar using stronger computers that have come out in the years since they first discussed the idea.
He concluded:
<blockquote>&#8220;So our old interest is not forgotten.&#8221;</blockquote>
RIP Hal Finney

8 Things About Bitcoin Pioneer Hal Finney You Didn't Know

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373726" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi.png" alt="" width="484" height="656" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi.png 484w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-86x117.png 86w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-50x68.png 50w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-58x79.png 58w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-192x260.png 192w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-111x150.png 111w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-258x350.png 258w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-309x419.png 309w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-184x250.png 184w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-215x292.png 215w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-148x200.png 148w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-99x134.png 99w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Jedi-281x381.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 484px) 100vw, 484px" />
&#8220;It&#8217;s been a very surprising ride so far. Who knows where [bitcoin] will go,&#8221; says Pieter Wuille.
Even he, one of the most respected bitcoin developers, who spends virtually all his time trying to improve the cryptocurrency, isn&#8217;t about to guess where the project is headed.
Yet, based on the quality – and quantity – of contributions Wuille has made to the protocol, it&#8217;s worth keeping an eye on what he&#8217;s working on to understand what might be the next. Segregated Witness, introduced in 2017, was by far his most visible work, but Wuille was the mind behind several code proposals that fixed glaring problems and are still used today.
Sure enough, in the course of CoinDesk&#8217;s research, developers and bitcoin enthusiasts often called out Wuille by name as one of the most important people behind the project.
&#8220;If Wuille said tomorrow, &#8216;I&#8217;m done with bitcoin and I&#8217;m not going to work on it anymore.&#8217; That would be a big, &#8216;Oh no,'&#8221; Tadge Dryja, a long-time bitcoin developer who wrote the white paper introducing the lightning network, told CoinDesk.
Here&#8217;s a look at how it all happened – how Wuille aided bitcoin&#8217;s development over the past decade and why bitcoin wouldn’t be the same without him.
Circa 1991 &#8211; Wuille, probably about 7 years old, is at lunch with his parents. All of a sudden, he sets down his fork and informs them, &#8220;Numbers are so cool. You can do so many things with them that you can&#8217;t do with words.&#8221;
His father, seeing a spark of curiosity, pulls Wuille up to a computer and shows him a little programming for the first time.
December 2010 &#8211; Shortly after finishing his PhD in computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and while working at Google in Switzerland, Wuille hears about bitcoin on a developer chat channel dedicated to the programming language Haskell.
Intrigued by the idea of a different kind of online money with &#8220;no business interest around it,&#8221; he begins to mine bitcoin.
February 19, 2011 &#8211; Wuille then stumbles on a bitcoin code contest <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3638.msg51582#msg51582">on bitcointalk</a>, posted by the legendary cryptographer Hal Finney.
<div id="attachment_373729" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><div class="image-container width-1018"><img class="wp-image-373729 size-full" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk.png" alt="" width="1018" height="274" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk.png 1018w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-768x207.png 768w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-205x55.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-728x196.png 728w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-780x210.png 780w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-90x24.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-136x37.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-348x94.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-557x150.png 557w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-350x94.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-419x113.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-270x73.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-438x118.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-282x76.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-206x55.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-1014x274.png 1014w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-545x147.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-281x76.png 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-562x151.png 562w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Hal_bitcointalk-843x227.png 843w" sizes="(max-width: 1018px) 100vw, 1018px" />Screencap from bitcoin chat forum Bitcointalk</div></div>
Basically, Finney posts a bitcoin private key and wonders how long it will take for someone to collect the bitcoin locked inside.
While that sounds easy today, back then, developers needed to code up a way to import the private key into a wallet before they could actually claim the money, making this, in fact, a coding competition.
Wuille wasn&#8217;t quite quick enough to earn the prize (Mike Hearn won the contest), but bitcoin developers at that time were nevertheless impressed by his effort.
February 2011 &#8211; Losing the contest didn&#8217;t get Wuille down though.
Instead, after reading a post w<a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3238.0">here Finney pointed out</a> that a key piece of bitcoin&#8217;s protocol – the cryptography for generating the keys needed for sending and receiving bitcoin – is sluggish and described a better way of going about the process, Wuille decided to take on this crucial issue as a &#8220;hobby project.&#8221;
May 2011 &#8211; In May, Wuille is asked by bitcoin&#8217;s lead developer Gavin Andresen to contribute further to the software.
Wuille&#8217;s first major contribution is a <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/220">code change</a> that, for the first time, allows users to take their keys out of the Bitcoin Core client, as well as put keys into the client. This gave users more freedom and flexibility, giving them a way to switch between wallet providers for instance.
Wuille then goes on to help clean up the bitcoin client codebase.
Bitcoin might be a breakthrough, but the code Satoshi left was notoriously monolithic, which developers are, to this day, untangling bit by bit.
February 11, 2012 &#8211; &#8220;Bubble, jump, blockchain, zoology.&#8221;
This string of seemingly random words might look vaguely familiar if you&#8217;ve ever used a bitcoin wallet.
When signing up for one, the first thing generated is a human-readable phrase like this, roughly 20 words long. Using this &#8220;seed,&#8221; bitcoiners can recover all of their keys and unlock their bitcoin – even if they&#8217;ve lost their alphanumeric private key.
You can thank Wuille for this. With <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki">Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 32</a>, a specification for hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, he created this standard, making storing and recovering bitcoin keys a bit easier but still secure.
&#8220;[What wallets use today] is not quite what I described at the time, but it&#8217;s still used today,&#8221; Wuille said.
That&#8217;s a bit of an understatement considering most major bitcoin wallets now use the standard to help users backup their keys.
2013 &#8211; Wuille&#8217;s hobby project, inspired by Finney&#8217;s post about generating keys from 2011 eventually morphed into the full-fledged &#8220;<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1">libsecp256k1</a>&#8221; – an important library of code underpinning bitcoin.
While pretty technical, libsecp256k1 proposes using a different mathematical elliptic curve algorithm – one that is much faster than the one used on bitcoin. TL;DR: better math.
That proposal attracted a crew of notable contributors, including developer Peter Dettman, mathematician Andrew Poelstra and long-time Bitcoin Core contributor Greg Maxwell.
May 17-19 2013 &#8211; Wuille attends the <a href="/bitcoin-2013-to-draw-1000-and-the-winklevii-to-san-jose-this-weekend">San Jose bitcoin conference</a> hosted by the now-defunct Bitcoin Foundation.
&#8220;This was the moment for me it looked like the bitcoin community totally changed,&#8221; Wuille told CoinDesk.
While the conferences he attended in 2011 and 2012 consisted of hackers and people with various political opinions, even some of the more extreme, the San Jose conference was &#8220;full of business people and it was huge,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;For me, that conference in San Jose was a turning point. It changed my perception of the ecosystem,&#8221; Wuille said.
Bitcoin was now attracting a larger audience; it wasn&#8217;t just for hobbyists and fringe weirdos anymore.
April 1, 2014 &#8211; Displaying his rather odd sense of humor, Wuille created <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki">BIP 42</a>.
Since bitcoin is deflationary in that less bitcoins are created over time, roughly 100 years from now, the number of new bitcoins will run out.
Wuille&#8217;s joke BIP contends, though, that this is actually not actually true.
&#8220;Although it is widely believed that Satoshi was an inflation-hating goldbug he never said this, and in fact programmed bitcoin&#8217;s money supply to grow indefinitely, forever,&#8221; the BIP reads. &#8220;This poses obvious problems, however. Prominent among them is the discussion on what to call one billion bitcoin, which symbol color to use for it, and when wallet clients should switch to it by default.&#8221;
As such, he aims to &#8220;fix&#8221; this, by setting a cap on the number of bitcoins that will be created.
While the joke might be hard for many to understand, many programmers found it worth a chuckle, seeing how it takes one of bitcoin&#8217;s main features and satirizes it, by wondering about the less technical aspects of the ecosystem.
<div id="attachment_373727" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><div class="image-container width-558"><img class="size-full wp-image-373727" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin.png" alt="" width="558" height="335" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin.png 558w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-195x117.png 195w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-90x54.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-132x79.png 132w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-348x209.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-250x150.png 250w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-350x210.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-419x252.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-270x162.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-438x263.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-282x169.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-206x124.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-545x327.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Scaling_Bitcoin-281x169.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 558px) 100vw, 558px" />Image via Scaling Bitcoin</div></div>
December 7, 2015 &#8211; Amid bitcoin&#8217;s fiery blocksize debate, Wuille introduces <a href="/information/what-is-segwit">Segregated Witness</a> (SegWit), a code change that changes the way data is stored in bitcoin blocks.
It was presented as a way to relieve some of bitcoin&#8217;s scaling hurdles (and in turn, allow the layer-two lightning network to be added to bitcoin), but it also unintentionally fanned the flames of the community&#8217;s biggest debate of the decade.
The code pushed the quiet developer into the limelight.
While Wuille readily admits SegWit is the most &#8220;visible&#8221; change he&#8217;s made, he doesn&#8217;t necessarily think it&#8217;s his best work.
&#8220;Before that I worked on various projects to make validation cheaper. I think [that&#8217;s] helped bitcoin get to where it is today, but this work is less visible,&#8221; he told CoinDesk.
February 23, 2016 &#8211; After years of work, the &#8220;hobby project&#8221; makes it into the real world.
Libsecp256k1 was &#8220;finally introduced&#8221; in Bitcoin Core <a href="https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#signature-validation-using-libsecp256k1">version 12</a>, speeding up (by almost six times) transaction validation, a process required for every single bitcoin transaction sent.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373728" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts.png" alt="" width="557" height="164" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts.png 557w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-205x60.png 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-90x26.png 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-136x40.png 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-348x102.png 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-509x150.png 509w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-350x103.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-419x123.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-270x79.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-438x129.png 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-282x83.png 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-206x61.png 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-545x160.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Wuille_Facts-281x83.png 281w" sizes="(max-width: 557px) 100vw, 557px" />
April 2016 &#8211; Wuille&#8217;s contributions have long been getting noticed.
And in the vein of &#8220;Chuck Norris jokes,&#8221; Blockstream developer Rusty Russell makes light of Wuille&#8217;s accomplishments, launching the website &#8220;<a href="http://pieterwuillefacts.com/">Pieter Wuille Facts</a>.&#8221;
Much like the absurd claims made about how strong Chuck Norris&#8217; martial arts skills are, the site makes over-the-top claims about Wuille&#8217;s intelligence and technological capabilities.
For instance:
&#8220;Pieter Wuille doesn&#8217;t wear his shirt inside-out, he reverse engineers existence.&#8221;
&#8220;When a woman asked Pieter Wuille to talk dirty to her, he described the OpenSSL DER implementation.&#8221;
&#8220;If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, Pieter Wuille knows.&#8221;
August 23, 2017 &#8211; After locking in support earlier in the month, Wuille&#8217;s SegWit proposal <a href="/50-blocks-segwit-bitcoins-coming-upgrade-blockchain-game-changer">is activated</a>, bringing a years-long debate over the change to a close.
Well kinda. Shortly after, an opposition group broke off the main bitcoin network, creating a new blockchain and a new, smaller cryptocurrency, bitcoin cash, of which proponents of both sides still harass each other on social media.
But SegWit also breathed life into the hotly anticipated lightning network, which developers continue to tinker on today, hoping that, once it&#8217;s finished, bitcoin will be able to support many more global payments.
Today &#8211; To date, Wuille has made more than 1,000 code contributions to the main software, Bitcoin Core, underpinning the network.
He&#8217;s also been one of the most active posters to <a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/users">Bitcoin Stackexchange</a>, a resource for understanding bitcoin at a technical level.
Wuille is currently focused on <a href="/schnorr-is-looking-poised-to-become-bitcoins-biggest-change-since-segwit">Schnorr signatures</a>, another upgrade bitcoin developers expect will revolutionize what can be built on top of bitcoin.
By combining signature data, it allows for a new type of bitcoin signature that should make the protocol able to handle more transactions. Plus, it&#8217;s lauded as a way to boost the privacy of payments over the network.

Pieter Wuille Isn't Just Bitcoin's Most Prolific Coder – He's Also Its Chuck Norris

They said it was about ideology, politics, anarchy.
The Times of London headline from Jan. 3, 2009 – &#8220;Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks&#8221; – that Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin&#8217;s pseudonymous creator, embedded into the protocol&#8217;s very first block of transactions, its genesis block, has carried the narrative that bitcoin was made as a protest to banks, governments, the state.
But what if there was a different reason behind the clip – something less subversive maybe, but still incredibly powerful?
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According to some, including esteemed bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille, there&#8217;s possibly another reason Satoshi embedded the headline that’s often overlooked.
&#8220;This guaranteed bitcoin was created after that date,&#8221; Wuille told CoinDesk, adding:
<blockquote>&#8220;It&#8217;s quite interesting that whoever created bitcoin found it relevant to say it was not created in the past.&#8221;</blockquote>
It&#8217;s intriguing in that Satoshi seems to have wanted to pin the cryptocurrency&#8217;s creation – and in later years, its age – to a specific date, tagging it to a physical object of which there are millions of copies. (There&#8217;s even a market for those <a href="https://www.thetimes03jan2009.com/">exact newspapers</a> and even <a href="https://www.redbubble.com/people/phneepers/works/28086423-chancellor-on-brink-bitcoin-genesis-block?p=poster">poster replicas</a> of the front page.)
In this way, people around the world, in the real world, have extra evidence that bitcoin is really a decade old.
<h2>Scam prevention</h2>
These folks now not only have the physical representation, but they can also see the headline in the blockchain itself, either by downloading their own node or scrolling through every message ever posted in a block on a site like <a href="https://bitcoinstrings.com/">Bitcoin Strings</a>.
For Wuille, looking back at a cryptocurrency scam from a couple years ago reveals why this immutable history of the technology&#8217;s birth is so important.
That scam is Bytecoin – a cryptocurrency project that began catching attention in 2014 as anonymous accounts on the Bitcoin Talk forum started advertising it as a coin readily used on darknet as early as 2012. For some of crypto&#8217;s oldest developers, it was a claim they just couldn&#8217;t believe.
When they started digging in, it became clear that people were planting all sorts of misleading information to make it seem like Bytecoin was an old-school innovation. The plan for those promoting bytecoin was to make the project seem more legit so that other cryptocurrency enthusiasts would buy in and push the price higher.
It&#8217;s a particularly common scam in the crypto-verse – commonly called a &#8220;<a href="/cftc-joins-sec-warning-crypto-pump-dumps">pump and dump</a>&#8221; – whereby developers (usually anonymous) create a cryptocurrency, acquire a good amount of the coin themselves and then market it profusely, with the hopes of getting rich by selling all their coins off as the price increases.
&#8220;Bytecoin&#8217;s claim that it had existed &#8216;on the deep web&#8217; for [two] years was not well received, because not a single vendor, user, miner, drug addict, drug seller, porn broker, fake ID card manufacturer, student who bought a fake ID card to get into bars, libertarian, libertard, cryptographer, Tor developer, Freenet developer, i2p developer, pedophile or anyone else that is a known person – even just known on the Internet – had ever encountered &#8216;Bytecoin&#8217; on Tor. Ever. Nobody,&#8221; as one pseudonymous user on the Q&amp;A forum <a href="https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/852/what-is-the-origin-of-monero-and-its-relationship-to-bytecoin">Stackexchange</a> wrote.
Not only that, but it came out that the cryptocurrency&#8217;s pseudonymous creator faked a timestamp in its white paper. The white paper, which was supposedly written in 2012, contained a link to a paper posted in 2013 (which wouldn&#8217;t have existed then), among other forgeries.
In this light, Wuille said, Satoshi embedding the newspaper headline into the genesis block, displays the developer&#8217;s impressive foresight.
<h2>A brief history of time(stamps)</h2>
And with that, whether it was intended or not, Satoshi displayed a the very beginning the broader benefit of bitcoin – it&#8217;s ability to timestamp.
Timestamping allows people to prove that a document, an idea or any other information existed at a certain time. And while that might seem like one of its more yawn-inducing use cases, it&#8217;s actually a really important function that&#8217;s been used for centuries.
When the &#8220;father of modern science,&#8221; Galileo Galilei discovered the phases of the planet Venus in 1610, he created an anagram and sent it in a letter to other scientists, in an effort to have physical proof of his work. While he didn&#8217;t want to reveal exactly what he&#8217;d figured out just then, <a href="https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151/kmath151.htm">the anagram</a> – smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras – represented the first letter of each word of his discovery.
By encoding his discovery this way, only he was privy to the information and able to reveal the full sentence. Fast forward to today, timestamping is often done with computers, with the help of cryptography, to provide extra evidence that a document or invention was really created at the claimed date and time.
Timestamps are so important to bitcoin, in fact, the concept is referenced several times in the white paper. Plus, three of the only eight citations at the end of the paper have to do with timestamping – all of which are co-authored by cryptographers Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta.
These papers detail the underlying architecture behind the first centralized blockchain, which was created by the pair in 1995 and used to timestamp documents. The &#8220;blockchain&#8221; (the term blockchain didn&#8217;t exist back then) called Surety is even still running today.
The papers also mention newspapers, since Haber&#8217;s blockchain publishes a hash of all the records verified by Surety each week in The New York Times. That way, anyone with a copy of the newspaper can verify the information existed at that time.
In fact, Satoshi mentions newspapers twice in the bitcoin white paper, as he/she/they call back on Haber&#8217;s research. Haber likens this process of pinning real world events to newspaper publications to a criminal taking a person hostage for ransom.
Back some years ago, in order to negotiate with the criminal, police would want proof that the hostage is still alive, so the hijackers would take pictures of the person holding up that day&#8217;s newspaper to provide that proof.
<h2>A little bit of both</h2>
That said, others believe the timestamping was of course important, but that Satoshi was still making some kind of political statement by picking that headline.
According to Haber, &#8220;Satoshi, by quoting that newspaper headline, was pointing to the fact that the newspaper headline was published after January 2009, while also pointing to the financial crisis.&#8221;
Either way, Satoshi&#8217;s bitcoin software opened up timestamping without a trusted authority to anyone, anywhere.
Though projects like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_Existence">Proof of Existence</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTimestamps">OpenTimestamps</a> have emerged to take advantage of this functionality – allowing users to timestamp their documents and even their tweets – the newspaper clipping shows Satoshi might have understood this potential from block one.
Still, MIT Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula argues to be careful when theorizing what Satoshi might have been thinking. Though it &#8220;seems clear&#8221; Satoshi was making a comment about &#8220;the need for a new financial system, said told CoinDesk, &#8220;we can&#8217;t read Satoshi&#8217;s mind.&#8221;
But does it really matter anyway? Isn&#8217;t that the beauty of open projects?
With that in mind, Narula concluded:
<blockquote>&#8220;And really, it almost doesn&#8217;t matter what he meant [the newspaper] to mean. It&#8217;s come to mean a bunch of different things to different people. It&#8217;s inspiring.&#8221;</blockquote>

How a Scam Cryptocurrency Proved the Genius of Satoshi

The Best Bitcoin Slang Words of the Decade

&#8220;Bitcoin is nothing like child pornography.&#8221;
These days that’s perhaps not the first thing you have to say when talking about bitcoin, let alone when you talk about it front of a who’s who of U.S. government representatives.
In the summer of 2013, however, you did. Or more specifically, Patrick Murck, one of the bitcoin industry&#8217;s earliest attorneys and a father of one, did.
Back then, government officials made less of a distinction between the bad things an open payment system powered by code could facilitate, and the technology itself. Such a distinction perhaps wasn’t so obvious to someone like Andrew Oosterbaan, who prosecuted child porn cases for the U.S. Justice Department, and saw bitcoin as a tool for child pornographers.
&#8220;Child pornography is like bitcoin in some ways,&#8221; Oosterbaan <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/21/heres-how-bitcoin-charmed-washington/?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.1940625199f8">said to the group</a>, brought together by Thomson Reuters and the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), seated in the Institute of Peace in Washington.
You could hear the frustration – it might be better to say anger – in Murck’s response. Today, Murck doesn&#8217;t still hold onto any resentment really, instead, he&#8217;s vindicated.
&#8220;I slapped him down and told him, &#8216;That&#8217;s offensive, and that&#8217;s not how we talk to each other,&#8221;&#8221; Murck tells CoinDesk, adding:
<blockquote>&#8220;It set a tone – that we&#8217;re real people, that [the bitcoin community] wasn&#8217;t just a bunch of kids and you can&#8217;t just make up crazy stuff.&#8221;</blockquote>
Flash forward to today and Murck, who got involved in bitcoin actively in 2011, is attending events like DC Fintech Week, where a panel that included a member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a European Commission executive were all talking about &#8220;crypto assets.&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s crazy,&#8221; Murck says of how much things have changed.
But as bitcoin turns 10, Murck believes it’s helpful to look back on meetings like the ICMEC event where such dialogue was ever-present. Early conferences, such as one hosted by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) that culminated in the first Congressional hearings on bitcoin in November 2013, had a lasting effect on the industry.
Murck argues that if it wasn’t for a relatively small group of early advocates, such meetings – and maybe the entire history of cryptocurrency – could have been much different.
<h2>The arguments for</h2>
But if victory was won for technologists, it wasn’t just the product of lawyers alone.
&#8220;One hundred percent of my time is spent working in this space; you spend 100 percent of your time working in this space,&#8221; Murck says, breaking the fourth wall for the interview.
Murck credits the early reporters (like myself) who told the story to the public, and did so with respect for the innovators who may have been otherwise outgunned by the government.
Take Timothy Lee, now at Ars Technica, who is quick to give the bitcoiners that had the balls to go in front of those government officials a lot of credit. Today, Lee calls the time period between the ICMEC event and the Congressional hearings &#8220;one of the most important developments&#8221; in bitcoin&#8217;s history.
They &#8220;got some of the people who you&#8217;d suspect to be the most vehement bitcoin critics in the same auditorium with some bitcoin people,&#8221; Lee recalls. &#8220;And the bitcoin people were effective at blunting what could have been a pretty strong political opposition to bitcoin.&#8221;
According to Lee, the argument that really sold it was telling regulators that if they put down too strict of rules, bitcoin exchanges would hightail it out of the U.S., and without jurisdiction over the exchanges on foreign soil, how exactly were law enforcement officials going to subpoena them for information over who&#8217;s dealing in child pornography?
Yet, Murck wasn&#8217;t the only one involved; Gavin Andresen, the developer widely identified as the one that took over the leadership role of Bitcoin Core after Satoshi Nakamoto went dark, was also involved with these meetings.
For Murck, having Andresen at the event was especially important.
&#8220;Gavin [Andresen] is not a stereotypical bitcoiner from 2012; he&#8217;s a normal person with a family … and that was super helpful,&#8221; Murck says. &#8220;It was an opportunity for people in that world, regulators, law enforcement, policy guys, that bitcoin wasn&#8217;t just people with Guy Fawkes masks running around. It was Gavin. Gavin just has a presence.&#8221;
Another speaker, Jim Harper, who at that time was the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute and also collaborated with the Bitcoin Foundation, says his argument during the meeting revolved around pulling people out of poverty with bitcoin.
Bitcoin, he contended then, was an opportunity to bring people into the sophisticated financial world, it was an opportunity for economic growth. And since the vast bulk of exploitation and sex crimes happen as a result of poverty, bitcoin, he continued, could help alleviate the problem.
&#8220;Surprisingly ICMEC came around, and Ernie Allen specifically, who was the president of ICMEC at the time, came around to recognizing that bitcoin could do more good than harm in this area,&#8221; Harper tells CoinDesk, adding:
<blockquote>&#8220;We got them to see that bitcoin shouldn&#8217;t be made into the next internet boogeyman.&#8221;</blockquote>
<h2>Bringing in Ernie</h2>
There&#8217;s no understating Allen&#8217;s impact among these old-school crypto attorneys.
Not only the president and CEO of the international group, but also that of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Allen had quite the sway.
After the ICMEC meeting, an executive at Thomson Reuters and Allen launched a new group, the Digital Economy Task Force (DETF), in an effort to create a regulatory framework for growing the digital economy – and Murck and other bitcoiners were welcomed in.
According to Murck, a small band of bitcoin defenders were in meeting after meeting around that time, making the same arguments over and over, and Murck spent a lot of time one-on-one with Allen. Ultimately, when the Senate hearing came around – Allen took a seat next to Murck to testify, not against, but with him.
&#8220;What&#8217;s important is that in [Allen&#8217;s] testimony, the head of ICMEC said, &#8216;We should resist the temptation to impose Draconian regulations for fear of the whole space going dark and then no one around to be a good actor,'&#8221; Murck said.
He continues, driving the point home: &#8220;When I make that argument, I&#8217;m supposed to make that argument, but when Ernie Allen from ICMEC does, that&#8217;s compelling. That had a huge impact on how the hearings went that day … and how [the regulators] moved their position over time.&#8221;
Harper echoes this, noting his surprise when that happened since ICMEC and NCMEC had generally been a bit heavy-handed in the past with their calls for legislation. For instance, according to Harper, the groups have always been anti-internet privacy, though he added, &#8220;for the right reasons but maybe to excess.&#8221;
Before those meetings, ICMEC and NCMEC had decided, Harper went on, that they were going to get in the middle of what was going on in bitcoin and attack it if necessary.
&#8220;Bitcoin had made it into the sights of this community and they were going to sick all their friends in the law enforcement community on it,&#8221; he tells CoinDesk.
But after those meetings and various talks with several of the men mentioned, all the sudden Allen and his organizations were rather positive about the implications of bitcoin of missing and exploited children.
<h2>A lasting legacy</h2>
On top of making nice with Allen, Murck also points to those meetings as the first time he met with then director of the FinCEN Jennifer Shasky Calvery.
&#8220;We met in the green room between my panel and her talk; she was a perfectly reasonable person and I&#8217;d like to think she thought the same of me,&#8221; Murck says.
And surely she did because shortly after that meeting, Shasky Calvery reached out to him to set up <a href="https://www.paymentssource.com/news/for-better-or-worse-bitcoin-foundation-goes-to-washington">another couple meetings</a>.
Speaking to the ICMEC event and the connections it allowed him and other bitcoiners to make, Murck says, &#8220;For me personally that event got us there and then all the sudden were instantly plugged into all these avenues. All the time, we planted a seed, and it sprouted into a tree.&#8221;
Sure enough, Murck sees that work he did to this day, in how regulators like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) talk about bitcoin and the other technology the industry has spurred. For him, the regulators understand that this is important technology, and merely want to eliminate any fraudulent behavior in the space to protect investors and consumers.
&#8220;That&#8217;s a very different tone from 2011 when the SEC wasn&#8217;t making any statements and Chuck Schumer was saying he wants to shut down the Silk Road and bitcoin,&#8221; Murck says.
It wasn&#8217;t easy, though.
According to Murck, &#8220;There were a number of people that were Bitcoin Foundation members that opposed us going; people called and told me it was a trap we were walking into.&#8221;
It&#8217;s the same grief Andresen was given when he went to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to brief them on bitcoin. It&#8217;s why there&#8217;s still speculation that the meeting is why Satoshi Nakamoto signed off without another word.
And it&#8217;s the same contention Harper felt when he went to Florida to brief U.S. Central Command, or CentCom, a combatant command of the Department of Defense.
&#8220;They thought I was playing footsies with the forces of evil – and partly maybe that&#8217;s true – but I wanted them to understand the tech and the benefits,&#8221; Harper explains. &#8220;There were very knowledgeable people in the military that got it, both the benefits and the threats, and we ended up with the U.S. military taking an even-keeled approach rather than jumping into attack mode.&#8221;
That makes sense, according to Murck. Each time, he says, it was either participate in the conversation or have the conversation happen without you, and so he and several others decided to take the meeting. And that had a lasting effect on the community.
Lee from Ars Technica would agree.
The bitcoiners behind these meetings &#8220;deserve a lot of credit in helping to legitimize bitcoin in the eyes of lawmakers, in ensuring their ideas about it were &#8216;this is innovative tech and not just something for buying drugs and child porn,’” he said.
Marco Santori sees history the same way but highlighted one specific organization that was key in making this happen.
&#8220;That time period when the Bitcoin Foundation was in full swing was an incredibly important one,&#8221; Santori, who spent time working at the foundation, said. &#8220;It was thanks to the work of folks at the Foundation that bitcoin and crypto generally aren&#8217;t outlawed today. Thankfully because of their work … we have a much saner, safer industry.&#8221;
It&#8217;s a legacy not many will remember since, after that, the Bitcoin Foundation became <a href="https://www.paymentssource.com/news/can-bitcoins-original-advocacy-group-rebuild-its-reputation">marred by controversy</a> and ultimately <a href="https://www.paymentssource.com/news/the-final-days-of-the-bitcoin-foundation">was dismantled</a>.
And Harper told CoinDesk similar things.
&#8220;People don&#8217;t realize it today – and that&#8217;s fine – that time was an inflection point for bitcoin where the organs of the U.S. government were deciding whether to attack or to embrace bitcoin and cryptocurrency,&#8221; he says.
&#8220;There are plenty of people out there in the world who sit behind keyboards and say the technology would surpass all those challenges … and in a narrow sense that&#8217;s true,&#8221; he continues devoutly. &#8220;In the next 100 to 200 years, bitcoin might have built up that community to secure themselves against government.&#8221;
But, he concluded:
<blockquote>&#8220;For the rest of us &#8230; you want acceptance, mainstream acceptance so bitcoin and crypto can find widespread adoption, this inflection point was the decision point over whether every agency turned their sights on bitcoin to kill it off or to incorporate it into their world.&#8221;</blockquote>
And as we see today, it&#8217;s the latter that&#8217;s been adopted.

You're Probably Not in Jail Because of This Ballsy Band of Bitcoin Lawyers

Ross Ulbricht probably gets the most sympathy of any bitcoiner.
A 34-year-old man serving a life sentence in federal prison for allegedly being the mastermind behind the online black marketplace Silk Road (although Ulbricht admits he created the site, he maintains he wasn’t operating it for most of its existence), Ulbricht is the fallen hero of the libertarian&#8217;s bitcoin.
The libertarians, some of bitcoin&#8217;s first enthusiasts, have somewhat been taken over by a new crop of crypto supporters – the entrepreneurs, business executives (some of companies that bitcoin was created to disrupt) and just regular old tech-savvy folks.
But there&#8217;s no doubt that this group of people, and their resistance to the powers that be – not just the Federal Reserve and its bank underlings, but also the miserable overreach to individual liberty that is the War on Drugs – had a powerful impact on how bitcoin grew into the public consciousness.
Ulbricht is no doubt a martyr, one that doesn&#8217;t seem to have any prospect of release (he was charged without the possibility of parole) since he went in on October 2, 2013.
Yet Ross remains optimistic and hopeful, in part, he told CoinDesk in a recent letter, because the crypto community&#8217;s outpouring of support.
On the 10th anniversary of bitcoin&#8217;s release, it&#8217;s our honor to relay the back and forth CoinDesk has with Ulbricht, which displays how much like most other bitcoiners he really is.
The Q&amp;A below has been edited for clarity.
CoinDesk: How did you first hear about bitcoin? What was going on in your life that made you primed to take an interest in bitcoin?
Ross Ulbricht: I first read about bitcoin in 2010 in Digital Gold Currency magazine. I was 26 when I first heard of bitcoin, having just finished grad school.
I had taken an interest in the modern monetary system a couple of years prior. I studied the history of banking and how the gold standard was abandoned for central banks, so I had a good sense of the dangers of inflation and currency manipulation.
[Although] I dismissed it initially because, historically, things used as money had prior value and were already widely circulated. In prison, stamps are money for these and other reasons.
Bitcoin&#8217;s decentralized character intrigued me though, and when people started speculating on its value and accepting it as payment, enthusiasm for what bitcoin could be was enough to bootstrap it into an active medium of exchange. From there, its intrinsic qualities have made it an increasingly competitive currency.
<blockquote>It is superior to every currency that&#8217;s come before it, so long as the free flow of information across the Internet remains unimpeded.</blockquote>
CoinDesk: What kind of emotions did bitcoin evoke in you when you first &#8220;got it,&#8221; and what emotions does bitcoin evoke in you today?
Ulbricht: When I saw that Bitcoin had overcome the bootstrapping problem, I felt like a skeptic that was out of arguments that has no choice but be transformed into an advocate. So I was really excited about its prospects and enjoyed telling people about it.
Nowadays my feelings are mixed only because of what I’ve been through and where I am.
Bitcoin is as exciting and promising as it ever was, but for me, it’s frustrating and sad because I’m missing out on so much.
And for a time I didn’t want to think of it at all because there was too much pain associated with it for me. But I’m over that now.
CoinDesk: What would you change about bitcoin or the even the wider world as it relates to bitcoin?
Ulbricht: I&#8217;m sure Bitcoin can be improved. It&#8217;s a work in progress, but I&#8217;m not the one to say exactly how.
<blockquote>What&#8217;s important is that innovation and competition among bitcoin, its forks and new cryptocurrencies continue.</blockquote>
People should be free to choose their money.
Bitcoin will continue to find wider and wider adoption. In some locations and industries, it may even become the dominant currency.
Just like the last ten years, there will be ups and downs. We&#8217;ll likely see the biggest bitcoin bear market to date sometime in the next decade, but the larger trend is up. Hopefully &#8220;the wider world&#8221; will continue to give bitcoin room to grow and evolve and won&#8217;t fight the change it is bringing.
I feel like there’s huge potential for Bitcoin and other cryptos in “developing” countries. Many of their centralized institutions are weak or ineffective and don’t serve the people, so there’s room for rapid adoption of decentralized solutions to fundamental problems, like a stable currency, property rights, contract enforcement, or financial services like insurance and credit. And it’s probably where the most good can be done because the need is the greatest.
CoinDesk: Why would you say you think there will be a huge bear market?
Ulbricht: I don’t claim to have a crystal ball, but speculative markets don’t tend to move in a straight line.
Every major advance in the price of a bitcoin has been followed by a major decline (up to $32, down below $3; up to over $1,000 down below $200). The entire advance from $0.06 can be taken as a whole that will likely be corrected by a decline at some point.
My question is whether $20,000 was the end of that advance and we’re already in the biggest bitcoin bear market to date, or if the price can make more all-time highs before the real correction begins.
To be on par with the other two major advances mentioned earlier (to $32 to $1,000), percentage-wise, the price would have to reach $90,000, which is what I’m leaning toward.
But assuming that happens in the next 10 years, either way we’ll see a big bear market at least beginning in the next decade.
<blockquote>If that all plays out, it will present a tremendous buying opportunity for anyone who feels like they missed the crypto boat.</blockquote>
CoinDesk: A lot of bitcoiners have said Silk Road (both its rise and fall) is one of the defining moments in bitcoin&#8217;s history. Thoughts?
Ulbricht: I&#8217;m too close to Silk Road to be unbiased.
CoinDesk: How do you still interact with the bitcoin or wider cryptocurrency world?
Ulbricht: I&#8217;ve written letters to be read at bitcoin conferences where my mother, Lyn Ulbricht, advocates for my release from prison.
I get letters all the time from individuals and meet-up groups offering encouragement in my fight for freedom. So many have contributed bitcoin to help fund my court battles and have signed my petition for clemency at freeross.org/petition.
This outpouring of support from the crypto community has given me hope that I may go free someday.
I&#8217;ve had white papers and other literature sent into the prison to try to keep up to date, and someone anonymously sends hundreds of CoinDesk articles from time to time, but Litecoin was the only alt-coin I recall being out before my arrest.
I&#8217;m supportive of altcoins [though].
<blockquote>I wish I had the liberty to participate with these new technologies.</blockquote>
They are good for bitcoin. They increase the pace of innovation and experiment with new ideas bitcoin can adopt.
We&#8217;ve come so far, yet we&#8217;ve only just begun.
CoinDesk: Do other people at USP Florence (the federal prison where Ross is an inmate) know about bitcoin?
Ulbricht: Yes!
Many have heard of Silk Road, too, so I get approached with lots of questions. Some want to know how it works or how to invest in it or how to use it. There are people who&#8217;ve been in here so long they&#8217;ve never used a computer or the Internet, but many are eager to learn.
CoinDesk: If you get out of prison, would you like to work within the bitcoin or crypto ecosystem? What would be the dream job?
Ulbricht: Freedom will be a big adjustment for me and I’ll have to take my time and get back up to speed.
Being in prison is like being put in a time capsule, so I’ll get to experience the closest thing we have to time travel. :)
I’m trying to stay up-to-date on crypto and [artificial intelligence] and any fields that are making big strides since I got locked up, but it’s very difficult without internet access. I’d like to be able to wrap my mind around zero-knowledge proofs and ring signatures. It’s just a matter of getting the right literature into the prison.
<blockquote>Hopefully, I’ll get out soon, and I can find a place where I can contribute quickly.</blockquote>

Behind Bars, Ross Ulbricht Is As Optimistic About Bitcoin as Ever

&#8220;I thought I would go to jail.&#8221;
That&#8217;s why Tadge Dryja, one of two principal researchers who would go on to envision lightning – what has become arguably the most important innovation in the quest to bring bitcoin to the masses – kept his passion for the technology to himself when he first heard about it in 2011.
Yes, you heard that right. While Dryja &#8220;got hooked&#8221; on bitcoin’s vision immediately, even going on to mine a little bitcoin at his home in Japan, he tells CoinDesk he was scared at first to actually put his coding skills to work on bitcoin.
&#8220;I thought that I should not tell anyone about it because it would be illegal and I would get in trouble,&#8221; he said. And there was reason behind the concern.
Dryja’s brings up another private digital money that tried to compete with the U.S. dollar – Liberty Reserve – which ended with the founders, accused of laundering $6 billion, behind bars for their attempts.
On top of that, there was the U.S. government’s whole attempt to limit encryption, now considered a necessary part of keeping sensitive data (such as credit card information) private.
Yet, Dryja saw something unique in bitcoin.
While Liberty Reserve was &#8220;centralized,&#8221; in this case meaning managed and operated by one company, bitcoin promised to be decentralized – ie not the product of one institution, but a group effort between developers, miners, users and various other stakeholders.
And in that way, Dryja thought, bitcoin was seemingly &#8220;impossible to kill.&#8221;
Dryja recalls:
<blockquote>&#8220;I was like, &#8216;Wait this is a huge deal. This is like the biggest thing ever. How come no one cares?&#8217; It was a little difficult to deal with that.&#8221;</blockquote>
But with a job producing e-learning content for medical students at Mie University in Japan, Dryja was hesitant to take his interests any further.
<h2>C-SPAN strikes</h2>
Still, he kept getting sucked in.
Dryja would read about bitcoin on his kindle from time to time on a hammock on his vegetable farm in Japan.
So, even though his boss at the university offered him another two-year contract along with a hefty raise, his heart was set on bitcoin.
&#8220;I was like &#8216;No I&#8217;m going back to America to do a Ph.D. I want to learn more about cryptography. I want to work on bitcoin,'&#8221; he said.
That didn&#8217;t exactly go as planned – he tried for a Ph.D. for a year in Virginia but quit the program because his professors didn&#8217;t take his interest in bitcoin seriously. But it was soon after in 2013 that Dryja got the confidence boost he needed.
That’s when the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/senate-bitcoin-hearing-2013-11">U.S. Senate held its first hearings on bitcoin</a>, which were live-streamed on C-SPAN. Dryja happened to catch the video, which included members of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (Fincen), the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service – talking openly (and largely positively) about the technology.
Not only was no one present in handcuffs, the officials compared bitcoin to other technologies, like the internet and credit cards, that were mainstream and looked at as beneficial.
&#8220;All these government people … what was striking to me is there were sort of all okay with it. I was like, ‘Oh, everything&#8217;s okay, I guess it&#8217;s okay to work on this,’” he said.
So, Dryja went all in, working on the technology full time. In 2013, he moved to San Francisco to be in the mix of all the entrepreneurs and builders, working for a time on the much-hyped startup Mirror.
&#8220;It completely changed the direction of what I worked on. I did computers and stuff before, but I wasn&#8217;t as interested in cryptography and didn&#8217;t know as much about it,&#8221; he said, adding:
<blockquote>&#8220;It sort of took over my life.&#8221;</blockquote>
And although, he admits that he probably would have made more money sticking with regular computer programming jobs (Dryja didn&#8217;t buy bitcoin when it was only a couple dollars a coin), he doesn&#8217;t regret jumping into bitcoin at all.
&#8220;It&#8217;s sort of weird because it&#8217;s, you know, bitcoin is money, but in a lot of ways it&#8217;s not really about the money,&#8221; he said.
<h2>&#8216;Lightning&#8217; is Born</h2>
Dryja was the most interested in bitcoin&#8217;s limitations, namely the scaling hurdles that keep the protocol from supporting thousands of transactions per second, to compete with today&#8217;s traditional payments providers.
&#8220;Even a few days after reading about bitcoin, I realized its limitations, and was struck by the huge gap between what it could do, and what people thought it could do. This can&#8217;t do micropayments at all!,&#8221; he said, adding:
<blockquote>&#8220;But maybe there are other ways&#8230;&#8221;</blockquote>
Other bitcoin developers had long been aware of what issues this could bring about in the future and were brainstorming ways to solve the problem.
For instance, blockchain consultant and former Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd described a vague solution back in 2013 <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3238.msg1451606#msg1451606">on the forum Bitcoin Talk</a>: &#8220;How about you wait until we come up with an overlay network on top of bitcoin with instant transactions? It&#8217;ll happen eventually.&#8221;
And sure enough, Dryja and fellow bitcoin researcher Joseph Poon, took the initiative, turning that vague idea into a concrete proposal after meeting up at a bitcoin meetup in San Francisco.
&#8220;Joseph&#8217;s idea of using hash preimages instead of signatures seemed like an &#8216;aha!&#8217; discovery,&#8221; Dryja said.
The duo worked together for six months to a year, Dryja said, thinking about how a second layer, made up of connected payment channels, could be added to bitcoin. They gathered in &#8220;cheap Chinese restaurants&#8221; and cafes around San Francisco. They whiteboarded. They took notes. They wrote.
And this back and forth resulted in the <a href="https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf">lightning network white paper</a> released in February 2015, describing for the first time the technology now widely seen as the future of bitcoin transactions. According to the paper, by adding this kind of second layer to bitcoin, the protocol would be able to support millions of transactions per second.
Perhaps understating the importance of Poon and his work, Dryja said, &#8220;So, that was fun.&#8221;
<h2>Like Gavin Andresen?</h2>
Now, more than three years after the release of the lightning white paper, the technology is live and being utilized by enthusiasts (albeit the technology is still a bit clunky and unsafe).
More than <a href="https://1ml.com/statistics">$2 million worth of bitcoin</a> is currently sitting in the lightning network.
And developers have been gathering at hackdays around the world <a href="/bitcoins-open-secret-lightning-is-making-better-online-payments-possible">to share prototypes of projects</a> using the payment system, everything from the fun-loving like a lightning accepting <a href="https://twitter.com/davidknezic/status/1006291869477883906">candy dispenser</a> to the more serious like a lightning powered gambling app.
Watching lightning rapidly evolve outside of academia, Dryja finds exciting, and sure enough, he&#8217;s still researching lightning in his position at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative (he also teaches a class on cryptocurrency at MIT).
Though, Dryja likened himself to Gavin Andresen, who formerly led bitcoin development but was all but <a href="/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-exile-of-bitcoins-former-face">pushed out of the community</a> after taking the side of the &#8220;big blockers&#8221; during the scaling debate and concluding that controversial Australian computer scientist Craig Wright was bitcoin&#8217;s pseudonymous creator.
Dryja isn&#8217;t in control of the way lightning is being envisioned and developed anymore, with a new group of savvy developers taking the reins.
&#8220;I think it can be very difficult to, you know, be sort of in charge of a project which then you can&#8217;t be in charge of anymore,&#8221; he told CoinDesk, adding:
<blockquote>&#8220;I&#8217;ve sort of felt the same way with lightning. There are all these things going on, and sometimes I&#8217;m like &#8220;Wait, no, don&#8217;t do it that way!'&#8221;</blockquote>
As such, even though he&#8217;s still keeping an eye on lightning, he&#8217;s also working on a stealthy project called <a href="https://dci.mit.edu/research/2018/11/28/utreexo-a-dynamic-accumulator-for-bitcoin-state-a-description-of-research-by-thaddeus-dryja">Utreexo</a>, which has a similar goal as lightning.
Developers have long wanted to make bitcoin full nodes – which currently comprise of 200 gigabytes of data – easier to run so all users can take advantage of the security benefits of doing so.
While there are a variety of solutions being tested, Utreexo uses cryptographic proofs to bring the storage required to run a full node down to just a few kilobytes, roughly the size of an image file. There are certain drawbacks to this approach, but if Utreexo works, it could be a massive innovation for the bitcoin community – along the same lines as lightning has become.
<h2>Three possible scenarios</h2>
Even though Dryja has dedicated his life to bitcoin, he&#8217;s not quick to say it will revolutionize the world.
&#8220;The biggest tricky part for me is I don&#8217;t know what, like, normal people know about it,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s sometimes hard to get perspective on how much impact is this really having on the world and how much do people actually know about it.&#8221;
And as such, he wonders, will it ever really impact everyday people? Sure, he thinks bitcoin will still be around in another decade and even beyond that, but he thinks there&#8217;s three scenarios that could be its legacy.
The &#8220;worst case scenario&#8221; is that bitcoin goes the route of PGP, the encryption technology used to scramble up and hide the contents of emails so that no one but the sender and receiver can read the contents.
While PGP &#8220;technically works&#8221; and is used by privacy enthusiasts and sometimes journalists talking to at-risk sources, &#8220;almost nobody uses it,&#8221; Dryja said.
The second scenario is that bitcoin goes the way of BitTorrent, a technology used by millions of people to share and download all sorts of files on the internet. It&#8217;s perhaps best-known for fueling illegal downloads of free music and movies.
While not everyone uses or even knows what BitTorrent is, the technology still has an impact (not least of which according to Dryja is it provides needed competition to streaming services).
&#8220;BitTorrent&#8217;s big enough that it affects the rest of the world,&#8221; he told CoinDesk. &#8220;We might not have Netflix if it weren&#8217;t for BitTorrent or we might not have all these kinds of streaming services because they&#8217;re competing in some sense with BitTorrent enabling people to download the movies for free. So, it&#8217;s still sort of neat.&#8221;
Bitcoin could have a similar positive impact, whereby it acts as an alternative that can be used by people in dire situations and makes it so more mainstream providers have to innovate.
The third scenario – what most bitcoin enthusiasts probably pray for – is that bitcoin becomes truly ubiquitous. It replaces traditional payment systems and takes power away from third-party incumbents who have extracted fees from users for years.
Of the scenarios, though, Dryja puts the most stake in the BitTorrent model.
And even though that&#8217;s not the most ambitious of end goals, Dryja is OK with that, saying:
<blockquote>&#8220;It&#8217;s still pretty cool if it reaches millions of people, but not billions of people.&#8221;</blockquote>

From Fearing Bitcoin To Fixing Its Worst Problem: Tadge Dryja

Magic Internet money? It sounds so easy.
If only you had known, you might say, watching the bitcoin price boom and fall, you might have bought. If only you had spent more time on Reddit, more time on Wikileaks, if only you had been early, you might be famous, you might be rich.
You might also be Martien Van Steenbergen.
His story is the same as yours – with one big exception. The 60-year-old Dutch man, who now only follows bitcoin and all things crypto casually, was early. Really early. $0.008 cents early.
So early, in fact, he was the first person to use the bitcoin hashtag, since used X times, on Twitter to extoll his praise for the then-unknown digital money project.
&#8220;Love #bitcoin true p2p currency,&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/Martien/status/10416789962">he tweeted</a> on March 13, 2010.
You might be thinking there’s some mistake. Some plot twist to come. Maybe the tweet linked to a heavy dose of FUD? Not so.
The link attached would have made a pretty good bitcoin argument for you, sending you to The Monetary Future, a blog run by one of the first and most vocal bitcoin supporters, Jon Matonis. A former senior derivatives and money market trader, Matonis had the background necessary to understand why bitcoin was a revolution.
And in <a href="http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2010/03/bitcoin-peer-to-peer-electronic-cash.html">this blog post</a>, he shortly and sweetly introduced bitcoin by way of the white paper and the Wikipedia page, two years before he started talking to every journalist he could about bitcoin&#8217;s potential for cheaper, faster, better payments.
You could argue Van Steenbergen himself was even primed to hear a bullish argument for bitcoin.
After all, he had been keeping close tabs on all developments in the peer-to-peer and what he calls &#8220;free money&#8221; (meaning free from centralized management) space. He had subscribed to a number of relevant RSS feeds, and on that day, Matonis’ article floated by.
At that time in early 2010, he was finding his way down the same rabbit hole as Matonis.
&#8220;I was very much into alternative currency to replace the current monetary system and bitcoin just emerged at that time,&#8221; Van Steenbergen says. &#8220;So I dived into it a little bit and even contacted the original developer or author.&#8221;
That’s right. In early 2010, bitcoin&#8217;s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was still accessible by email, if not well-known enough to be a holy grail for every reporter on the planet.
It was also possible at that point to buy bitcoin online.
A month before the tweet, the first official exchange, Bitcoin Market, had launched, meaning you didn&#8217;t only have to mine to acquire coins. And shortly after the tweet, on July 11 to be exact, the cryptocurrency was mentioned on Slashdot.org, a site billing itself as &#8220;news for nerds,&#8221; to which the price jumped from that measly fraction of a cent to eight whole cents.
From then on, bitcoin has continued to be a death-defying tsunami of attention whoring.
So, how did Van Steenbergen not see the potential?
&#8220;That&#8217;s one of my, how do you say &#8230; I&#8217;m always too early with stuff, so I&#8217;m often ahead of the curve and then as it starts picking up I start to lose interest and then the people who pick up after that they get rich and I move on to the next thing that I won&#8217;t make any money at,&#8221; Van Steenbergen says, adding in what seems at least somewhat playful:
<blockquote>&#8220;That&#8217;s a story of my life.&#8221;</blockquote>
<h2>Van Steenbergen and Satoshi</h2>
In case you’re sympathetic, Van Steenbergen doesn&#8217;t seem particularly chaffed about missing out on a big opportunity.
He&#8217;s doing fine as an independent consultant – or as his LinkedIn states &#8220;a master agile and lean trainer, coach&#8221; – at a company he founded himself called AardRock.
While it sounds like someone that&#8217;s teaching martial arts and helping bodybuilders stay fit in their off months, agile and lean have come to be adapted to the business setting, meaning a company that responds quickly to market changes and adds greater value with fewer resources.
And before that, he worked on hardware at Sun Microsystems (which was acquired by Oracle) and on software at a handful of companies.
His interest in alternative currencies bubbled up in 2008, after the financial crisis. As he watched the banks get bailed out by governments – in effect getting bailed out by their own citizens – he decided the traditional financial system just wasn&#8217;t working.
Sound familiar?
&#8220;The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” Satoshi wrote.
That’s the text in bitcoin&#8217;s genesis block; the text that pushed the narrative of the corrupt, rent-seeking financial system and of bitcoin&#8217;s mission to eliminate it.
And this is exactly what Van Steenbergen wrote Satoshi about.
Turns out that less than a year before, he had designed and implemented a simulation called the <a href="http://aardbron.nl/serious-funny-money-game/">Serious Funny Money Game</a>, which immersed people into a world with two currencies – one, state-controlled, the other, more localized – in an effort to show people how each of those affects human behavior
At the, time he stumbled on bitcoin, Steenbergen was developing a project called Pekunia.
In the <a href="http://wiki.aardrock.com/Pekunio">project&#8217;s kickoff documents</a>, dated January 11, 2008, he wrote: &#8220;Pekunio is a smart and simple distributed peer-to-peer software application … that enables the easy set up and use of open private ecosystems using a local currency.&#8221;
And later, &#8220;Pekunio has the potential to catalyze an alternative monetary system for thriving marketplaces trading goods, services and ideas, fueling innovation as it matures.&#8221;
It would seem Van Steenbergen and Satoshi had a lot in common, and according to Van Steenbergen they exchanged a few emails.
But in the end, Pekunia ended up just an idea. Van Steenbergen couldn&#8217;t find investors to fund the project or college students to code it up, so he eventually dropped it.
And because of a mail system crash without a good backup, Van Steenbergen lost the emails with the dietized Satoshi Nakamoto. Like the rest of us, he’s left with only claims.
<h2>Not a HODLer</h2>
Despite the overlap, Van Steenbergen doesn’t feel that he’s missing all that much with bitcoin today. Sure, initially he thought bitcoin was a &#8220;perfect&#8221; peer-to-peer system, the intentions of which were &#8220;pure and egalitarian.&#8221; Now, not so much.
&#8220;The implementation and current use does not reflect that,&#8221; he says.
&#8220;Over the years, [bitcoin] seemed to suffer from the same flaws as the current monetary system in that it still divides poor and rich. There are some people who have been mining bitcoins like crazy who tend to grow very rich and the other people, say the majority of people, still do not benefit from it,&#8221; he says. &#8220;So, I think that&#8217;s … it missed its point in that.&#8221;
While people used to give bitcoin away freely – think core developer Gavin Andresen&#8217;s bitcoin faucet or the Reddit giveaways bitcoiners would hold – it hasn&#8217;t been a free money currency in years.
&#8220;With the current monetary system, people want to keep a hold of their money,&#8221; Van Steenbergen continues. Change &#8220;current monetary system&#8221; to &#8220;bitcoin&#8221; and the sentence still works.
Still, Van Steenbergen watches what&#8217;s happening to a certain extent – although, it&#8217;s easy to tell that he stopped following as closely before the ICO boom and the explosion of new blockchains.
Van Steenbergen now says he believes the most interesting thing about bitcoin is the blockchain technology that powers it.
&#8220;That&#8217;s more interesting because that solves a lot of problems for humanity,&#8221; he says. &#8220;And what I see is small and large companies adopting the blockchain technology to embed that in their applications and their infrastructures, even big banks are working on that right now.&#8221;
But as if he&#8217;s gone too far with that line of thinking, he backpedals:
<blockquote>&#8220;I&#8217;m a bit scared about big banks taking this technology because they might kill it. And then we&#8217;re back to square one.&#8221;</blockquote>

The First Person to #Bitcoin Isn’t a Virtual Millionaire – He’s Virtually Unknown

This Bar Didn’t Just Accept Bitcoin – It Wrote Its History

Bitcoin has always been touted as a digital currency – an evolution of the dirty, expensive, state-controlled paper fiat.
Yet, from its early days, bitcoin enthusiasts crafted physical representations, some of which housed actual bitcoin (the public and private key pairs), of the &#8220;coin.&#8221;
From paper bills, scratch cards, gold coins and poker chips, bitcoin has been emblazoned in many different kinds of trinkets that will likely end up in a museum one day.
These so-called &#8220;physicals&#8221; purport to have a range of uses from introducing people to bitcoin in an easier way to securing bitcoin offline, where hackers won&#8217;t be able to get their hands on it. 
But ultimately they’re also just plain fun – a part of bitcoin&#8217;s mostly intangible history that the technology&#8217;s adherents have cherished.
Though most of these projects have been abandoned, here&#8217;s our favorite physical bitcoins over the past decade.
<h2>Bitbills</h2>
<div id="attachment_373714" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><div class="image-container width-600"><img class="wp-image-373714 size-full" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="399" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills.jpg 600w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-176x117.jpg 176w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-90x60.jpg 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-119x79.jpg 119w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-348x231.jpg 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-226x150.jpg 226w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-350x233.jpg 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-419x279.jpg 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-270x180.jpg 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-438x292.jpg 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-282x188.jpg 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-202x134.jpg 202w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-545x362.jpg 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-281x187.jpg 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/bitbills-562x374.jpg 562w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Image from Bitbills website</div></div>
The first-ever physical bitcoin, Bitbill&#8217;s version took bitcoin’s comparisons to cash to heart.
In 2011, Bitbills created a 1 bitcoin, 5 bitcoin and 10 bitcoin note – although the &#8220;bills&#8221; looked more like gift cards. Bitbills co-founder Doug Feigelson&#8217;s original goal for the denominated cards was to make bitcoin easier to use, since people were more familiar with this form of money than bitcoin private keys.
&#8220;Our original goal was to make a super simple, easy to understand way to transact in bitcoin, even when offline,&#8221; Feigelson told CoinDesk.
The &#8220;offline&#8221; part of this is key. Rather than attempt to figure out how to install a wallet for bitcoin on a phone, users could just hand it over to a merchant the Bitbill&#8217;s cards – much like cash.
Yet, in the end, Feigelson found that most people weren&#8217;t really using the cards like that.
&#8220;What we discovered is that the real demand for physical bitcoin was for a super simple, easy to understand way to invest in bitcoin,&#8221; he said.
One possible reason why using these cards for payments didn&#8217;t pan out is because of the unpredictability of bitcoin&#8217;s price. Even over the course of 2011, one bitcoin jumped from $1 to $10 and back.
Plus, while a 1 bitcoin note or a 10 bitcoin note made sense, as bitcoin rose in value, it became less obvious what you could spend 1 bitcoin on (say when it was $6,000 per coin) without needing a significant amount of change back.
As such, this volatility ended up shuttering the project.
&#8220;We stopped producing them because of the big crash in the price of bitcoin at the end of 2011. It was hard to build a business on top of something so unstable, especially because Ben (the other co-founder) and I were both in college at the time and had other demands on our time and a lack of experience operating a company too!&#8221; Feigelson concluded.
<h2>Crypto Scratch Cards</h2>
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Later in 2011, physical bitcoins began to take on other forms.
Given how bitcoin is often used for gambling online, perhaps it&#8217;s not so surprising that one of the first physical bitcoins was Prypto&#8217;s &#8220;crypto scratch card,&#8221; working just like those you can buy from gas stations.
Users would scratch the surface to reveal a &#8220;code&#8221; – a scrambled mess of letters and numbers, which they could use to redeem for the chosen amount of bitcoin they purchased on Prypto&#8217;s website. Although coming in a different, more fun form, Crypto Scratch Cards had much the same use case as Bitbills.
&#8220;But sometimes you want to physically hold and transfer money. You might want to give it as a gift or put it in your physical wallet,&#8221; the company contends <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u54pBXwxWrQ">in an introductory video</a>.
<h2>Casascius</h2>
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Later in 2011, a bitcoin enthusiast, Mike Caldwell, started Casascius – a project that turned bitcoin into its first physical coin form.
The coin stored bitcoin in a tamper-proof, holographic sticker. Should users want to spend the bitcoin within the coin, they&#8217;d have to peel back the sticker to reveal the private key. After spending the bitcoin, the coin couldn&#8217;t be reloaded with more bitcoin.
Caldwell told CoinDesk he had a similar goal to Bitbills: Casascius was mainly a learning tool – though much prettier this time around.
&#8220;The idea came about because I felt at the time (mid-2011) that bitcoin was an awesome idea that was nearly impossible to explain to everyday people and I wanted to make something tangible to put one in their pocket,&#8221; he said.
Yet, while it might sound like an innocent project, the U.S. government didn&#8217;t think so.
When financial watchdog, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (Fincen), reached out to Caldwell in December 2013, telling him that he was acting as a money transmitter and would need to apply for an expensive license if he wanted to continue, he shut Casascius down.
Nonetheless, the influence of Casascius lives on.
<a href="https://casascius.uberbills.com/">Most Casascius coins</a> have not been &#8220;opened,&#8221; meaning the private key has not been redeemed to extract the bitcoin. While some of these could have been lost over the years, this does seem to point to a significant amount of people &#8220;hodling&#8221; the bitcoin inside.
While Caldwell is mostly happy that others took up the mantle, creating bitcoin physicals, he concludes on a cautious note – one that rings true to the ethos of crypto itself.
&#8220;The only real downside is that whoever makes the coin has to be trusted not to steal the contents or keep the keys,&#8221; he told CoinDesk, adding: &#8220;By now I think the world knows I was honest with my coins, but there have been other coins made by other manufacturers that have inexplicably had their balances disappear.&#8221;
<h2>&#8216;Titan&#8217; coin</h2>
<div id="attachment_373716" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><div class="image-container width-1024"><img class="size-full wp-image-373716" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="512" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin.jpg 1024w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-768x384.jpg 768w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-205x103.jpg 205w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-728x364.jpg 728w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-860x430.jpg 860w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-780x390.jpg 780w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-90x45.jpg 90w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-136x68.jpg 136w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-348x174.jpg 348w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-300x150.jpg 300w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-350x175.jpg 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-419x210.jpg 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-270x135.jpg 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-438x219.jpg 438w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-282x141.jpg 282w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-206x103.jpg 206w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-490x245.jpg 490w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-338x169.jpg 338w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-676x338.jpg 676w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-1014x507.jpg 1014w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-545x273.jpg 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-281x141.jpg 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-562x281.jpg 562w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Titan_coin-843x422.jpg 843w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Image from Titan website</div></div>
As mentioned, many other bitcoin coins sprang up after Casascius closed.
Titan, a coin with a warrior featured on the front, was one of earliest of these, launching in late 2013. Led by president Tim Fillmore, Titan went one step further than Caldwell, creating limited edition coins made out of pure gold – worth thousands of dollars even without the bitcoin inside.
&#8220;We are more oriented towards coin collectors in that we use the top artists in the coin production world, people who have worked with the U.S. mint and some of the best sculptors in the world, who actually create large-scale artwork for these coins. That artwork is reduced down to these [coins], so they&#8217;re really limited edition fine artwork pieces,&#8221; Fillmore explained in an interview with now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Coin.Mx.
<h2>Opendime</h2>
Then in 2014, a physical bitcoin straight from science fiction, was born.
The OpenDime project creates bitcoin physical USD sticks with little blinking lights that can be plugged into a computer and loaded with bitcoin.
These physicals bear a striking resemblance to the &#8220;cred-sticks&#8221; of the sci-fi world of Shadowrun, a table top role playing game. In fact, one reviewer calls them &#8220;real life cyberpunk credit sticks.&#8221;
And while Opendime CEO and co-founder Rodolfo Novak can see the similarities, he told CoinDesk he didn&#8217;t intend for it to be that way.
Because the tiny, electronic devices are relatively cheap, users can load them with bitcoin and not feel bad about handing over the whole stick to a merchant or another user.
Novak argues, though, that the main benefit of Opendime isn&#8217;t the sci-fi payments mechanism, but more that the USBs are the most trustless of physical bitcoins made so far.
Like the issue Casascius founder Caldwell pointed out, with most physical bitcoins, the manufacturer has to embed the private key in the device. As such, users have to trust the manufacturer to not steal their bitcoins.
Opendime is different.
&#8220;With Opendime, the key is unknown to all parties, and proveably so,&#8221; Novak said.
The private key isn&#8217;t generated until a user connects the stick to his or her computer. And in order to release the private key to spend the bitcoin, the little device needs to be punctured in just the right spot with a pin.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lev0YrlWu4A" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
From then on, the device flashes red, showing that it has been &#8220;spent&#8221; and the private key is now known by someone, making the device completely tamper-proof.
With that in mind, the Opendime team has grandiose dreams for the little USB stick.
&#8220;Maybe we&#8217;ll see whole new economies based on Opendime spring up. That might be a real godsend in some countries that struggle with limited network infrastructure and corrupt governmental systems,&#8221; the project&#8217;s website <a href="https://opendime.com/">reads</a>.
<h2>More coins and things</h2>
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IjVge23IJRU" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
Still, coins reminiscent of Casascius are still the most popular form of physical bitcoin.
Denarium, which makes a similar product, sprung up in 2015.
&#8220;The idea to launch Denarium truly came when Casascius shut down and we saw a clear gap in the market,&#8221; said Denarium CEO Henry Brade.
For bitcoin&#8217;s 10th anniversary, Denarium is going all in with the gold too, launching an entire two ounce gold bar that can be loaded with bitcoin.
<div class="video-wrapper"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G6zatH2bOIs" width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
Yet, at least one coin manufacturer, Satori, has ditched the expensive gold casing, developing something that looked more like a colorful poker chip.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-373715" src="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori.png" alt="" width="578" height="502" srcset="https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori.png 578w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-135x117.png 135w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-78x68.png 78w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-91x79.png 91w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-299x260.png 299w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-173x150.png 173w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-350x304.png 350w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-419x364.png 419w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-270x234.png 270w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-336x292.png 336w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-230x200.png 230w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-154x134.png 154w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-545x473.png 545w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-281x244.png 281w, https://www.coindesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Satori-562x488.png 562w" sizes="(max-width: 578px) 100vw, 578px" />
Each chip holds just 0.001 bitcoin, worth roughly $3 today.
Named after the Japanese Buddhist term for &#8220;seeing into one&#8217;s true nature,&#8221; the chips are meant to spread knowledge and adoption of bitcoin in Japan, according to Satori president Moto Kan.
And with bitcoin still a niche technology, these bitcoin physicals might just need to stick around a while longer.

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