Foreword
Foreword
BITCOIN HAS CHANGED EVERYTHING. Its importance as an evolution in money and banking cannot be overstated. Notice I don’t use the word “revolution” here because I consider Bitcoin to be a complete “evolution” from the anachronistic money and banking systems that humanity has been using—and been forced by government dictate to use—for at least the last hundred years.
One of the biggest issues that newcomers to Bitcoin have is that it is “shrouded in mystery”.
This is not totally true, as this important book shows. While the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto may never be known for certain— despite those like Dorian Nakamoto, whom the mainstream media say is Satoshi—what we do know, in very prolific and historical detail, are the underpinnings and design of Bitcoin from its earliest days.
Very detailed conversations were held between top cryptographic and programming experts since the very first day Bitcoin was introduced… a day that may go down in history and possibly be celebrated by generations to come. November 1, 2008.
The first words posted by Satoshi Nakamoto were eloquent in their simplicity as he announced his creation, which would go on to change the world, “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”
He then put a link to a white paper he had written on the subject. The rest, as they say, is history.
These discussions, taking place publicly on the bitcointalk.org forum, went on until December 12th, 2010. After that, Satoshi went dark.
Amongst the Bitcoin community, these posts are well known, but your average person would need hours to scour through it all and make sense of it. In this important book, Phil Champagne has gone through each post and identified the most important ones… and given the context for the time of the post as to why it is important. This creates a logical timeline of Bitcoin’s evolution straight from the keyboard of Satoshi Nakamoto and could be described as Bitcoin’s autobiography.
As I write, in March 2014, Bitcoin’s future is unknowable. It could go on to change the world dramatically, freeing us from the oppression of central banks and the gargantuan governments that feed off their free money. Or, it could go down in smoke and flames due to any number of possible events.
No matter what happens from here, however, the impact of Bitcoin is knowable. Its most core concept has and will change how we think about contracts, trust, and transactions no matter what happens to Bitcoin itself. Already thousands of applications have been built off the platform, and these have expanded it outside the world of financial transactions.
Phil Champagne has put into an easy-to-read format the fomenting of one of the most important technological innovations of our time… a completely decentralized platform to perform payment transaction without the need for a trusted third party. Its importance is only surpassed by the Internet itself as an evolution in communications. Chapter 2 provides readers unfamiliar with Bitcoin a great overview of its technological and philosophical foundation and of how it operates.
Decades from now many will look back at this innovation the way we currently look back at the Internet or the Gutenberg press as being epochal moments in the history of civilization. And this collection of Satoshi’s posts and correspondences forms a logical timeline and will be one of the easiest ways for future historians to understand just how it began and evolved.
Jeff Berwick,
Editor in chief, The Dollar Vigilante
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