Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

Bobby recognized that Chinese people would have little interest in the libertarian ideas of American Bitcoiners—decades of state-sponsored communism had killed most interest in ideologies.

But he was able to cogently explain his vision of how the blockchain technology could make it easier for poor immigrants to transfer money back home and allow people with no access to a bank account or credit card to take part in the Internet economy.

These experiences gave Wences insights into the nature of money that most people in the world learn only from textbooks.

But many of them did fly to Austin just as the conference was ending, to attend another conference, SXSW, the storied public gathering where Silicon Valley mingled with celebrities. On the first day of SXSW, in a marquee session with Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Google’s “director of ideas,” Jared Cohen, responded to a question about Bitcoin with

“We don’t use gold because it’s pretty—that was a stupid assumption of mine and many other people,” Wences would tell anyone who would listen during these days when he was totally immersed in the history. “No, we use it in jewelry because it’s very expensive. It’s

The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since;

A week before New York Tech Day, the Canadian government announced the launch of a new digital currency effort, called Mint Chip, that it hoped would spur innovation in payments.

Although many expressed anger that Mark was violating one of the fundamental tenets of Bitcoin—the irreversibility of Bitcoin transactions—Mark could do so because trades on Mt. Gox happened only within the company’s system, not on the actual blockchain (Mt. Gox interacted with the blockchain only when coins moved into and out of the company).

a laugh: “Look at Bitcoin Jesus.” It was a nickname that would stick.