in 1776. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, fourteen words that did, in fact, change the world.

the impasse had reached a potentially destructive breaking point: Andresen and developer Mike Hearn had released a competing version of the bitcoin software, called Bitcoin XT,

“Probably ten thousand of the best developers in the world are working on this project,”

Rossiello sees bitcoin as a way to spark not just a financial revolution in Kenya, but a technological one as well. The idea is that cryptocurrency fosters innovation, as we’ve seen in San Francisco and other places. She has started a meetup culture and teaches coding to schoolchildren.

The integrity of the blockchain itself was not compromised, since both the transaction malleability feature and the bug resided on the supplemental wallet software,

Vitalik Buterin

a glitch that had occurred when his colleagues on the core development team introduced the new version 0.8. Its reconstituted database was supposed to reconcile with the database records of version 0.7 but wasn’t doing so.

Jouke Hofman (log-in: jouke) in the Netherlands

more or less every ten minutes.