Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
36 entries / 4 threads
On August 15, 1971, Nixon suspended the dollar's gold convertibility "temporarily" and told Americans their dollar would be worth as much tomorrow as today. Convertibility never came back.
Satoshi sized the 21 million cap so amounts would land between 0.01 and 1000. The cent ran through his code, his fees and more than two years of his writing. The yen does not appear even once.
Wei Dai called Bitcoin's fixed supply a failure in 2013. His own 1998 b-money design needed the same real-world value figure Satoshi said software has no way to know.
A curated way in: questions about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin history, each pointing to the page that answers it in full.
Institutions built a $300B stake; governments turned seized coins into reserves. Two Nobel economists, asked years later, still weren't persuaded. What actually changed, checked against the record.
Dogecoin has no whitepaper, no company, and no cap on its supply — a decade-old test of whether Bitcoin's scarcity is what a market actually pays for.
No supply cap, a fee burn that can push issuance negative, and a 2022 switch from mining to staking — Ethereum's own design documents, read against Bitcoin's fixed 21 million.
Monero forked away from a currency whose founders had quietly mined 82 percent of its supply, then built a ledger that hides what Bitcoin's discloses and an emission with no final block.
A relay chain coordinating parachains, nominated proof-of-stake, and the 2025 vote that capped a supply that had never had a ceiling -- Polkadot's design, read against Bitcoin's fixed 21 million.
A fiat-collateralized design that CENTRE's own whitepaper called a trade-off, a reserve that broke the dollar peg for two days in 2023, and a governing consortium later folded into one company.
The whitepaper's title names a payment system; section 6's gold is an analogy for issuance. Bitcoin is scarce like gold and spends like cash, and its scarcity later earned it the name digital gold.
Adam Back reposts the full text of Wei Dai's b-money proposal to the Cypherpunks list, with comments to follow — the message that opened the December 1998 b-money design discussion.
Hayek's 1976 case for competing currencies, the Extropians' imaginary 'Hayeks' currency of 1995, and Bitcoin, money no state issues: one line of thought, linked by ideas rather than proven influence.
Bitcoin's 'digital gold' status rests on two layers of decentralization — system and people/organization — and six structural features no later cryptocurrency combines to the same degree.
How Bitcoin's 21 million cap emerges from a geometric halving series, how block rewards transition from subsidy to fees, and how the incentive model sustains honest mining.
Bitcoin chose a hard 21M cap; b-money (1998) proposed elastic supply; fiat runs central-bank discretion. The cypherpunk debate, Wei Dai's 2013 regret, and 15 years of cryptocurrency variants.
Steenbergen asks whether Bitcoin resembles David Chaum's anonymous digital money and whether the system has a managed limited money supply or creates money at the moment of transaction.
Joerg Baach defends Chaumian e-cash, then asks how Bitcoin can serve as currency if anyone can create coins, and why a central issuer would be trusted when a central double-spending database is not.
What Satoshi's design assumed about a fee-only future, and the documented debate over whether transaction fees alone can sustain proof-of-work security after the block subsidy ends around 2140.
Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, pitched as a stopgap until digicash spread or a fallback if it failed.
Adam Back replies to Wei Dai on Cypherpunks, identifying seven monetary-design issues in b-money and proposing Hashcash as the minting mechanism — a substantive analysis ten years before Bitcoin.
Wei Dai announces b-money on the Cypherpunks list as a secondary item alongside PipeNet 1.1, his primary focus. The proposal later cited in Bitcoin appears in a single sentence at the end of the post.
Wei Dai replies to Adam Back on Cypherpunks, conceding b-money would be at most a niche mechanism and revealing his shift toward viewing the government monopoly of force as a net benefit.
In LessWrong comments, Wei Dai argued Bitcoin's monetary policy had failed due to volatility, and regretted never commenting on Satoshi's 2008 draft: he might have talked him out of the fixed supply.
Dutch agile coach and AardRock founder whose questions on the P2P Research list prompted Satoshi to reconfirm the 21,000,000-coin supply cap he had first stated publicly five weeks earlier.
Computer scientist and cryptographer who created b-money (1998), one of the earliest digital currency proposals, and the Crypto++ library. Satoshi emailed him before publishing the Bitcoin paper.
Mike Hearn asks about the origin of the 21 million coin limit, the 10-minute block target, and the 500KB block size limit while working on a Java SPV implementation for Android.
Satoshi explains Bitcoin's scalability, the transition to transaction fees, the choice of 21 million coins, and 64-bit integer values with 8 decimal places.