Bitcoin: cutting through the bullshit
When you create an asset that appreciates in price exponentially for a whole decade, you’re going to have plenty of charlatans, no small amount of bullshit, and swathes of market hysteria, all of which you need to cut through.
Bitcoin is no exception. It can be frustrating as a Bitcoin proponent seeing nonsensical arguments being made both for and against the Bitcoin network, every hour of every day.
To understand B itcoin beyond “we can all store value and pay each other”, you have to have a basic understanding of peer-to-peer systems, cryptographic hashing and signing, and game-theory.
I won’t go as far as saying Bitcoin is ‘simple’ to understand, but to demonstrate the core concepts, I recently gave a talk at the JS@PayPal conference demonstrating how you can actually build a Bitcoin-analogue in JavaScript in about 20 minutes. So it’s not that complex.
Here’s the long-form version of that talk. If you’re interested in coding or JavaScript, take a look. The talk explains concepts like creating blocks, signing transactions, and dealing with ‘proof of work’.
