Bitcoin

I will admit something first. Dogecoin is fun. Dogecoin makes you laugh out of sheer joy, despite yourself. Dogecoin sucks you down into a rabbit hole of memes, parodies, and all things not serious. But is everything a joke? Obviously not. So, in that spirit – let’s get serious. Bitcoin is an idea. A meme, if you will. Like how the original Doge meme is backed by a cute Shiba Inu dog, the Bitcoin meme is based on the idea of what money is. As we know, money is just a made up thing – a meme – which people ascribe value to. Money doesn’t have to be “backed by” anything. All you need is the collective belief of people in the meme of money. To take this comparison further, on the Doge side, the meme goes a bit deeper than just the dog. We have words like: “much”, “wow”, “so”, “amaze”, “many”, etc. that can enhance the context in which the Doge meme is being used. On the Bitcoin side, you have the mythical founder, dead simple cryptography, and a few other powerful ideas that go on to implement a glorified ledger of IOU’s. That ledger is considered legit because of the meme that Bitcoin is set in stone. ...

Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith wrote an article[1]Bloomberg paywall link. about Bitcoin’s energy consumption. “Blogger” Nic Carter wrote a rebuttal to it. Noah Smith wrote a rebuttal to this rebuttal. Noah’s counter-rebuttal calls for its own rebuttal. Eventually, we will see why the following tweet from Nic follows quite naturally. “Proof-of-stake is just a fancy name for “exactly the same system that bitcoin was designed to be an alternative to”. – tweet by Nic Carter. ...

In 1996, a federal mint employee was eating bananas near where US dollar bills were being printed, and a Del Monte sticker on one of the bananas fell into the printing press and got under a transparent layer of a $20 bill. The Del Monte note was created. This particular $20 note is a collectible in some circles and has been auctioned many times before, and most recently for around $400,000. That the serial number of the note is printed over the Del Monte sticker makes this even cooler, and kind of unforgeable, and a fungible token became a non-fungible token. ...

BitMEX Research has published what can be called the first history book on Bitcoin (not all of its history, but just the Blocksize War). It’s written by Jonathan Bier, who surprisingly, has no official online presence that I can find. It could as well be a pseudonym, for all I know. Either way, this book seems like it was written just for me – as in – it’s written for someone who knows Bitcoin well enough from a high level technical, historical, financial, and social context – but does not know the historical details on specifics like how the P2SH war was won[1]Pete Rizzo and Aaron van Wirdum have a nice history-essay about the P2SH war., or how covert ASICBoost works[2]BitMEX Research themselves have written about it in detail., and such. If you are such a clued-in-now, but clueless-about-the-past Bitcoin enthusiast[3]For Ethereum enthusiasts, there is a chapter on the DAO as well., this book is definitely for you. ...

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime – Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin This goes against the more well understood motto of technology startups: “move fast and break things.” Unlike a startup, or even a big company, Bitcoin doesn’t move fast, or break things. Of course, I am not talking about its price as measured in USD or INR. I am talking about the entire Bitcoin system, or Bitcoin, the protocol. Bitcoin is stagnant, ossified, set-in-stone, resistant-to-change, and any number of such synonyms you can look up in a thesaurus. There are a few obvious questions that come out of this: ...