Top Highlights

• It was 2:16 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on the first day of November and he was telling everyone on the mailing list that he had figured out how to do for money what the Internet had already done for information – set it free as bits and bytes, without gatekeepers, making financial transactions as painless as email. He wanted his peers to know befor...
• Until the invention of Bitcoin, nobody had managed to overcome without a trusted third party the central stumbling block of electronic cash, which was known as the ‘double-spending problem’.
• Satoshi Nakamoto devised a way for people to spend digital cash permanently, and for everyone else to be able to check the validity of each transaction. Each bitcoin, as it passes from one person to another, is digitally signed by the person transmitting it. A coin therefore becomes, in Satoshi’s phrase, ‘a chain of digital signatures’ – a record o...
• Processing and verifying transactions requires tremendously difficult computer calculations, analogous to factoring prime numbers. To reward those dedicating computer resources to the difficult process of verifying transactions, Satoshi decided that whoever solved the complex math problems required should be given new bitcoins. It would be a winner...
• But where gold miners use manual labor and heavy equipment, with Bitcoin miners, wrote Satoshi, ‘it is CPU time and…