The Book Of Satoshi

Kindle Highlights

• “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”
• Miners looking for the solution must usually calculate the hash millions of times to find the right pattern, but only a single hash calculation by other miners is necessary to validate it once it is found.
• Would be cheaters can try and simultaneously double-spend all they want, and all they accomplish is that within a few blocks, one of the spends becomes valid and the others become invalid.
• The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.
• It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.
• For greater privacy, it’s best to use bitcoin addresses only once.
• I think it’s essential for a program of this nature to be open source.
• Before the creation of the Federal Reserve in the USA in 1913, the majority of purchases were done in cash, even for houses.
• 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.
• I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea.
• Fortunately, so far all the issues raised have been things I previously considered and planned for.
• If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.
• Institutional momentum is to stick with the last decision.
• think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.
• Bitcoin generation should end up where it’s cheapest. Maybe that will be in cold climates where there’s electric heat, where it would be essentially free.
• Despite later losing their ties to direct commodity value through state interference, paper currency retained status as money because of memory of previous money prices.
• It could get started in a closed system or narrow niche like reward points, donation tokens, currency for a game or micropayments for adult sites.