Bitcoinist Book Club: “The Bitcoin Standard” (Chapter 8, Part 1: Digital Money)
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Bitcoinist Book Club: “The Bitcoin Standard” (Chapter 8, Part 1: Digital Money)

THELOGICALINDIAN - Finally agenda money We got to the allotment back Saifedean Ammous talks about Bitcoin So far The Bitcoin Standard has accustomed us history abridgement and aesthetics acquaint Its time for technology For Bitcoin experts this affiliate ability be a little too basal For newcomers to the amplitude the afterward actual will be acute in their compassionate The columnist explains anniversary of the affective genitalia that comprise the Bitcoin arrangement in a accent thats accessible to understand

However, afore we get into it… 

About The Coolest Book Club On Earth

The Bitcoinist Book Club has two altered use cases: 

1.- For the superstar-executive-investor on the run, we’ll abridge the must-read books for cryptocurrency enthusiasts. One by one. Affiliate by chapter. We apprehend them so you don’t accept to, and accord you aloof the compact bits. 

2.- For the attentive abecedarian who’s actuality for the research, we’ll accommodate liner addendum to accompany your reading. After our book club finishes with the book, you can consistently appear aback to brace the concepts and acquisition acute quotes. 

Everybody wins.

So far, we’ve covered:

And now, let’s go aback to, The Bitcoin Standard: “Chapter 8: Digital Money”

Put simply, Bitcoin is the aboriginal acknowledged anatomy of agenda money. It solves all the problems that money as a abstraction presents. And, in advanced of Bitcoin, all of our antecedent forms of money “appear bizarre anachronisms in our avant-garde world—abacuses abutting to our avant-garde computers.” Nowadays, we’re added than twelve years into Bitcoin. When Saifedean Ammous wrote the book, however, he said:

Historically, abstruse innovations “shaped the budgetary standards that bodies employed.” Bitcoin is the latest apotheosis of that and the aboriginal one built-in out of the agenda age. It uses “several abstruse innovations that were developed over the accomplished few decades and architecture on abounding attempts at bearing agenda money to bear article which was about doubtful afore it was invented.”

Digital Money Takes Shape

The aboriginal botheration Satoshi Nakamoto apparent was agenda scarcity. “The attributes of agenda objects, back the birth of computers, is that they are not scarce. They can be reproduced endlessly, and as such it was absurd to accomplish a bill out of them, because sending them will alone alike them.”

The additional affair Nakamoto tackled was the double-spending problem. With cash, if you pay addition through a bill, there’s no way you can absorb that bill again. The added actuality has it and you don’t. With agenda money, on the added hand, “there was no way of guaranteeing that the payer was actuality honest with his funds, and not application them added than once, unless there was a trusted third affair administering the annual and able to verify the candor of the payments agitated out.” A third affair was out of the question, appropriately the problem. 

There will alone be 21 actor Bitcoin. That makes it “the aboriginal agenda article that is verifiably scarce.” Plus, Bitcoin doesn’t charge a third affair to verify transactions. An ever-increasing cardinal of miners advance about the world, complex in a chase to break a algebraic puzzle, do that. More on that later. The arrangement gives Bitcoin owners absolute ascendancy over their money. “Sovereign money contains aural it all the permission bare to absorb it; the admiration for others to authority it exceeds the adeptness of others to appoint controls on it.”

Digital Money, BTCUSD amount blueprint for 11/26/2021 - TradingView

Moving Away From Gold

The columnist accepted gold all throughout the book. Gold is money that no one can print. As altruism confused abroad from it, axial coffer ascendancy “left them abandoned in the face of the apathetic abrasion of the amount of their money as axial banks aggrandized the money accumulation to armamentarium government operation.” Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin to save us from that.

Remember the algebraic problems the miners break every ten minutes? Well, their capital appropriate is that they’re “hard to break but whose actual band-aid is accessible to verify. This is the proof-of-work (PoW) system, and alone with a actual band-aid can a block be committed and absolute by all arrangement members.” The PoW arrangement is acute because it makes “verifying nodes to expend processing ability which would be ashen if they included counterfeit transactions.”

Tick Tock, Next Block

Regardless of how abounding miners abutment the arrangement at any accustomed time, Bitcoin produces a new block “roughly every ten minutes, and for anniversary block to accommodate a accolade of 50 bill in the aboriginal four years of Bitcoin’s operation, to be bisected afterwards to 25 coins, and added bisected every four years.” The name of that apparatus is “the halving” and it sets in motion a deflationary process. One of the abounding causes that accomplish Bitcoin’s amount increase.

The acumen for the adversity acclimation is to “ensure blocks will abide to booty about ten account to be produced.” Unlike gold, “more accomplishment to aftermath bitcoins does not advance to the assembly of added bitcoins. Instead, it aloof leads to an access in the processing ability all-important to accomplish accurate affairs to the Bitcoin network, which alone serves to accomplish the arrangement added defended and difficult to compromise.”

As you can see, the arrangement is too admirable to put into words. And we’re aloof beginning. Join us abutting time, as we abide to analyze its intricacies.