The Bitcoin Way
Lessons From The Grandest Experiment In Pitching A Revolution
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A non-violent revolution is not a program of seizure of power. It is a program of transformation of relationships, ending in a peaceful transfer of power — Mahatma Gandhi
Bitcoin is many things besides an outsize trading profit. This article looks at the history of technologies that merged to give birth to Bitcoin. It also highlights the key people responsible for bringing Bitcoin to the real world. Most importantly, this article provides the key takeaways from one of the grandest experiments in pitching a revolution. A revolution that is a combination of anarchy, distributing power to anyone with a computer globally and peacefully and pure genius that has spawned seismic financial and socio-economic paradigm shifts. Rethinking the status quo is now a process we need to indulge in every nanosecond of our waking lives. Else, we risk being blindsided by a revolutionary idea.
Carbon Dating An Idea
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world — Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk Manifesto
It is very hard to trace the beginning of Bitcoin because Bitcoin is an agglomeration of ideas, technologies and tools that were developed over decades by various people. Some of these people never imagined that their creations would spawn a cryptographic currency.
Early 1970’s: IBM develops Data Encryption Standard-a symmetric key algorithm for encryption of data.
1991: Phil Zimmerman invents Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). An encryption software that uses a serial combination of hashing, data compression, symmetric-key cryptography, and finally public-key cryptography; each step uses one of…
