The Double Spend Problem, and Why Every Earlier Attempt Needed a Referee
A file can be copied perfectly and for free, which is exactly the property you do not want in money.
Explainer
05pieces published
Fifteen years, piece by piece.
Grouped by era rather than by date, because a list ordered by when the writer got to a subject tells you nothing about the subject.
Timeline
what happened, in order, with dates that can be checked
Postmortem
something failed, and what the record shows about why
Explainer
a mechanism, explained so it is still true in three years
Primary source
one document, read closely and located
Profile
a person or an organisation, and what they actually did
01roughly 2008 to 2011
Origins
A paper, a mailing list and a client nobody was using yet. Almost everything from this period survives as a document, which is why it is the best documented era and the one most often misquoted.
Half of the Whitepaper's Bibliography Is About Timestamping Documents
The reference list is the least read page of the most read document in the subject, and it points somewhere other than money.
Primary source
The Bitcoin whitepaper does not contain the words everyone quotes from it
Open the file, search it, and most of the vocabulary that the last fifteen years attached to it is simply absent.
Primary source
02roughly 2011 to 2014
Early exchange
The first places to buy the thing, and the first places to lose it. Custody arrived years before anybody had worked out what custody meant.
Mt. Gox: the coins were already gone before the story was told
The exchange said a bug in Bitcoin took 850,000 coins in February. The chain says at most a few hundred could have gone that way.
Postmortem
03roughly 2019 to 2021
On-chain finance
Market structure rebuilt as public code: pools instead of books, incentives instead of intermediaries, and a new class of failure that nobody had a name for yet.
The constant product formula is not an equation, and k does not stay constant
The invariant everybody quotes is an equality. The one the code enforces is not, and the difference is where the money comes from.
Explainer