Sublime

But in October 2009, an Internet exchange2 sold 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02, at a price of $1 for 1,006 bitcoins, to register the first purchase of a bitcoin with money.3 The price was calculated by measuring the value of the electricity needed to produce a bitcoin. In economic terms, this seminal moment was arguably the most significant in Bitcoin's

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.

That does lead to a related point: with an estimated 300M cryptocurrency holders worldwide at the time of writing, hundreds of millions of people who aren’t Maximalists already believe in Bitcoin. And it’s on track to be billions by 2030.

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

The future use of Bitcoin for small payments will likely not be carried out over the distributed ledger, as explained in the discussion on scaling in Chapter 10, but through second layers. Bitcoin can be seen as the new emerging reserve currency for online transactions, where the online equivalent of banks will issue Bitcoin‐backed tokens to users

Bitcoin is the newest technology to serve the function of money—an invention leveraging the technological possibilities of the digital age to solve a problem that has persisted for all of humanity's existence: how to move economic value across time and space.