Sublime

Bitreserve, Halsey Minor’s in-house system in which account holders can send digital dollars, yen, or euros to each other at no cost.

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

That’s roughly 3 million times faster than the fastest CPU could perform the same task when Nakamoto mined the first bitcoins in January of 2009.

computational power required to solve problems ratchets up as the hashing power of the network grows. It’s as if a country managed its gold standard by randomly destroying gold mines every time a more efficient mining process was invented.

What’s interesting about blockchain instead is that it enables “frictionless binding contracts,” to use the language of economics.

the network, which was then producing 88,000 trillion hashes every second, had a computing power six thousand times the combined power of the world’s top five hundred supercomputers—

Then one day in February, someone—not Sam, who was frantically trading—noticed the missing Ripple. Four million dollars’ worth of it had vanished. In fairness, it was not then clear whether it was gone forever. Sam and his traders, using the system Gary had built, were making a quarter of a million trades each day. So much Ripple and Bitcoin was fl