Bitcoin Origin Story: Was Bitcoin created by the CIA or the NSA? Is it some occult project by the elites to somehow enslave us with the kind of money that big banks, governments, and corporations can’t control? Read about Bitcoin’s cypherpunk and libertarian tradition in “Calling Bitcoin a CIA/NSA Project Is Disrespectful to Cypherpunks“.
Who Invented Bitcoin? Philosophically and technically speaking, Bitcoin is the invention of the cypherpunk culture. The likes of David Chaum, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, Adam Back, Tim May, and Hal Finney share their merits of paving the way for Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation.
Since the 1980s, cypherpunks have been very interested in digital money and privacy. Learn more about this movement from this podcast interview with Donald McIntyre.
Does it matter who Satoshi Nakamoto is? No, not at all. Bitcoin is a scarce digital commodity whose source code and circulation are open and transparent. Creating a cult around the creator defeats the invention’s purpose.
Why Bitcoin? Bitcoin is provably-scarce and transparent non-governmental money – so why use it? Just like US dollars, gold, or stocks, Bitcoin can be used to transact, store value, and/or invest.
But thanks to its unique properties, Bitcoin can protect you from wealth confiscation, defend your financial privacy, and also help you cross borders with nothing but a hardware wallet in your luggage or 12 words written on a piece of paper (that you can also memorize) .
Essentially, it’s an instrument to protect the fundamental human rights that your government sometimes purposely chooses to ignore (see article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
Learn more about how Bitcoin protects your human rights from this presentation by Alex Gladstein (Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation).
Bitcoin and Austrian Economics: It’s no secret that Bitcoin has strong ties with the Austrian school of economics. The decentralized cryptocurrency has a limited supply and improves on some inconveniences of gold (which is heavy, and hard to verify, store, and transfer). To learn more about the topic, listen to this interview with Libbitcoin developer Eric Voskuil and read his free book “Cryptoeconomics“.
How Many Bitcoins Exist? Currently, about 18.5 million. But there will only be 21 million and they’re going to be distributed as mining rewards until the year 2140. One of the most important features of Bitcoin is that you can always verify the supply.
Bitcoins vs Satoshis: Just like 1 US dollar has subunits named cents, Bitcoin has satoshis. 1 bitcoin = 100.000.000 satoshis. These small units make it easy to account for microtransactions and seem to become the more popular unit of account as the price of BTC increases over the years.
