Keys & Phrases

The moment you start talking and thinking about Bitcoin, it brings up a very difficult question: what is money? Most of us have no idea how money works. It’s one of those ancient technologies that is so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become completely invisible to us. At its very basic level, money isn’t value. You use money to get things of value like products or services, but there is no value in the money itself. Money is a language that human beings created to express value to each other. As a language, it’s one of the fundamental constructs of civilization that allows us to exceed what’s known as the Dunbar number. Money is also, ironically, a system of control. Controlling money confers great power to those who control it. As a result, kings and governments have always held a very tight control over money. Now that has changed. On January 3rd 2009, the world changed because some person(s) created a peer-to-peer protocol: a flat network with no central servers— all clients, that is able to express money as a content type. Money that is expressed purely as data, transmitted using any communication medium that can convey information. Pure information on a network that is simultaneously uncensorable, open to anyone, neutral, and global. There are no borders on this new technology, just like there are no borders on the internet. The real exciting thing about this technology is not the blockchain, which is a database artifact created out of this protocol, but the ability to achieve distributed consensus among parties that don’t trust each other, across great distances, without any central party, authority or intermediary. The world is now connected. Finance is now an application and money is a content type. Words of Andreas Antonopoulos.