Sublime

Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties.

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

hundreds of millions of people who aren’t Maximalists already believe in Bitcoin. And it’s on track to be billions by 2030.

on October 31, a person or group named Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that described how people could bypass banks and use the internet to send each other money.

The developers working on an address format for segwit found solutions for each of these problems in a new address format called bech32 (pronounced with a soft “ch”, as in “besh thirty-two”).

The essence of temporal salability is soundness; the essence of spatial salability is portability. Prior to Bitcoin, the two were in inescapable tension; economic development induces a market demand for money to be increasingly purely informational, as commerce itself becomes more complex than movement of specie can efficiently support. But informa