BITCOIN: Mastering Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies - Mining, Investing and Trading and the Future of Money

By PAT NAKAMOTO

Join the technological revolution that has rocked the financial world. But is Bitcoin really an investor's grab-bag? Mastering Bitcoin is your guide through the outwardly complex world of Bitcoin, providing the knowledge you need to cut your slice in the future of money. Whether you're looking into the next killer venture, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this review by Nakamoto provides essential detail to get you started.

Bitcoin is still in its early stages and yet it has already spawned a multi-billion-dollar global economy and forced the financial world to start thinking of transactions in a completely new way. A lot of us give the capacity of storing money, saving money, sending money to others and receive money electronically for granted because we are part of the 50% lucky of the world, but 2.5 billion adults in the world does not have access to bank accounts. A crypto currency can give to millions of people access to having a bank in their pocket through a cell phone, opening commerce to masses of new entrepreneurs and consumers. 

But, a part from the sociopolitical consequences of the new "currency with wings", if you were to talk about Bitcoin with your grandmother, probably the first thing she would be asking would be "It sounds great up to now …but how can I use it?? I mean, do I just go up to the grocery store and give them a number or code or something?" Your grandma is right; also learning the basics is essential.

This is why Nakamoto's book gives you:

• A broad introduction of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain—ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executives
• An explanation of the technical foundations of Bitcoin and cryptographic currencies
• Details of the Bitcoin decentralized network, on Bictoin mining, investing, transactions and how to choose a secure wallet for your Bitcoin, and how to calculate your net income with Bitcoin
• An overview on other cryptocurrencies: Litecoin, Ripple, Peercoin, Dogecoin and Ethereum
• The limits and risks of the bitcoin system: what does the future holds

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• Language: English
• Publisher: PAT NAKAMOTO
• Release date: Jul 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781978159945

Book preview

Introduction

There’s a revolution going on, and it’s a gold one

Money is just an accounting system. It is a way to know who owns what, and who owes what to whom. That is all money is. A bookkeeping tool.

For hundreds of years, we have been in need of someone who we could recognize as an authority, which could act as the trusted third party in our exchanges of money. That means that the role of this central authority has always been that of guaranteeing that money was real, and of controlling its emission and transactions. For hundreds of years now, we have had Governments issue money, Central Banks govern its price and credit card companies control each and every one of our transactions.

Money was born as an accounting system, and that is what Bitcoin is: it is an accounting system. It is a way of recording transactions and value, digitally, so you and I can send money directly to each other; but for the first time in history, everything is recorded in an open ledger. By monitoring and updating that ledger in a collective consensus based system, you and I do not have the need for a third party to be the repository of all the information and to act as controller of our transactions.

What Bitcoin technology actually does, is it takes that trusted third part function and it automates it. It puts that function online, there for everybody to see and verify.

It is significant that the idea of Bitcoin was launched just a few weeks after the collapse of Lehman brothers, and the crumbling of the sugarcoated façade that was covering up some major flows and failures of our current monetary system.

While we are still distant from abandoning the mainstream monetary system, we surely can say that the 2008 financial crisis left its contradictions naked, for the first time truly there for everybody to see.

Bitcoin has grown a lot since the system became operational in January 2009. With a peak price back in late 2013, sometimes the growth has been gradual, and sometimes there have been jumps or spurts, often corresponding to newsworthy events. Generally

speaking, the growth has clearly accelerated over time.

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As an internet entrepreneur, I understood the incredible potential of Bitcoin when I discovered that it is not controlled by any central company or central power. I knew at the time that this means that it can not be shut down, and if something cannot be shut down, all it needs is just to do something useful for people, and it will become more and more adopted, while people find more and more uses for it.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is anonymous, and it is easily transferable. Before it was created, if you wanted to transfer something of value through the internet you were compelled to have someone involved. You had to have a credit card company or your bank or even PayPal, involved in the transaction. With Bitcoin you are sending value directly to another party and the Bitcoin network has the function that the bank or PayPal use to have.

This difference is revolutionary: It returns the control back in the hands of the people. Virtually everybody who participates in the system controls how it works.

Chapter 1.  The new digital gold: Bitcoin

Notes to this Chapter

The aim of this Chapter is to give you a photograph of what is Bitcoin’s world, as we know it so far. To realize in depth Bitcoin’s potential, it is important to comprehend what were the ideological roots from which it was born, and how it developed from just an idea to becoming an actual currency. We shall see which are the 6 distinctive features of Bitcoin, and how giant market players are positioning themselves with reference to the Bitcoin’s agenda.

Where it all started: The Cypherpunk movement

Bitcoin is the first concrete example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency. Today, cryptocurrencies have become a global phenomenon known to many people. While still somehow geeky and not understood by all, banks, governments and many companies are aware of its importance. By today, you‘ll have a hard time finding a major bank, a big accounting firm, a prominent software company or a government that did not research cryptocurrencies, publish a paper about it or start a so-called blockchain-project.

The Cypherpunks movement spread the seeds that led to the birth of Cryptocurrencies.  Cypher (secret message) Punks (fringe subculture) was a movement that emerged in the late 1980s, made of activist advocating the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, this informal group aimed to achieve privacy and security through the proactive use of cryptography. The list was discussing questions about privacy, government monitoring, corporate control of information already in the early 1990s, topics that did not become major issues for public interest until ten years or so later.

Some list participants were more radical on these issues than almost anyone else was.

The basic ideas of the movement can be found in the paper "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (Eric Hughes, 1993): "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. ... We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy ... We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. ... Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and ... we're going to write it."

The first mass media discussion of Cypherpunks was in a 1993 Wired article by Steven Levy titled Crypto Rebels:

"The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's informational footprints—everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion—can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but