This post is pretty sparse. I just posted it given that this topic was covered. I do think there are better resources to get a general background that I hope you do look into if you find this general article interesting.
Questions answered in this Post:
- How did Bitcoin get started?
- What was the first forms of digital cash?
- What is some lore about Satoshi Nakamoto?
Precursors of Bitcoin
There are two main precursors that the lecturer touched upon. The first one was the cypherpunk movement. Libertarianism (bare government control) + Strong cryptography -> Cypherpunk. He mentioned with strong online privacy and cryptography, people could protect themselves without interference with government. The cypherpunks also cared about how one would deal with money in this new society. David Chaum’s digital cash work played a pretty big inspiration with anonymity and privacy. New forms of money that were not backed by central government bodies and could be transacted digitally were popular.
Bitcoin White Paper
The bitcoin white paper is pretty famous by now. It came out in 2008, titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. This one white paper speaks about the initial technical design and philosophy. There was also open source code to run this system. It’s author is Satoshi Nakamoto, a modern day legend and mystery.
Satoshi Nakamoto
There are some facts listed about him. The key things are he’s been rarely heard from since 2010 and yet mined quite a bit of the initial coins and thus is incredible rich. His coins have not been used because his use would spark people to find his identity. In addition, his action could cause large spikes in the price given that he can make large market movements. Journalists like making articles about this.
Transactions on the Network
Bitcoin has had exponential growth since its start in 2008. The lecturer showed a graph from 2009 – 2014. Clearly now in 2018, that trend has continued and may even be greater. With the advent of lightning, the bitcoin community understands that they need to scale and that the protocol is quite popular.