Digital Gold Book Review.
What Is This Book About?
A New York Times technology and business reporter chronologically documents the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age.
The author, Nathaniel Popper, takes you through various accounts and behind the scenes relationships with key players in the rise of Bitcoin starting from January 10, 2009 through March 21, 2014.
Popper describes bitcoin as “a tale of a group invention” that taps into the many themes of our time: our anger at the governments and wall street, the battles of the Silicon Valley and the Financial Industry, and the hopes we have placed in technology to save us from our own human flaws.
Each of the people discussed in this book has their own reason for pursuing this new idea. While reading the book, we are able to gain insight into each of their lives being shaped by the ambitions, greed, ideals, and human weaknesses that have elevated bitcoin from an academic white paper to a billion dollar industry.
While Bitcoin will not replace the US Dollar in the next 5 years, we get a glimpse into what our future world could look like with a viable digital currency. The book is made up of 3 parts, 31 chapters total. Each chapter introduces you to a featured pioneer in the early stages of Bitcoin.
In this review, we will share highlights from some of the featured Bitcoin technology pioneers identified in the book. We will also tell you our thoughts on the concept of digital currency after reading the book, our overall summary of the book, and of course where to buy Digital Gold
Featured Bitcoin Technology Pioneers
Erik Tristan Voorhees
From homeless to multimillionaire, Erik Voorhees is an American startup founder. He is co-founder of the bitcoin company Coinapult, served as Director of Marketing at BitInstant, and was founder and part owner of the bitcoin gambling website Satoshi Dice.
He was fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an unregistered stock offering related to SatoshiDice. His story covers a range of successes as well as a case to learn from regarding evolving regulation pertaining to the bitcoin technology space. Erik Voorhees is instrumental in many meetings, which you will find in reading Digital Gold
Harold Thomas Finney II
“When he returned from dinner, he received 50 bitcoins…”
Hal Finney is a computer scientist who received the first bitcoin transaction. He was also the second person (after Satoshi Nakamoto) to use Bitcoin. Who was the person who dreamed of creating a new kind of money? One fateful day, Hal received a group e-mail with a link to www.bitcoin.org, which would change his life forever.
E-cash and digital money is something he had experimented with for a long time. When he first received the e-mail from Satoshi Nakamoto, he was certainly skeptical of its feasibility due to his own history of experimenting in the space. However, what caught Hal’s attention was that Satoshi promised a cash that didn’t need a bank or any third party to manage it. It would live in the computing memory of all the people who used it. Everyone could own and trade it without offering any personal information to central authorities. Digital Gold guides us through Hal Finney’s journey with the origins of bitcoin via a .exe file with the original bitcoin code.
Instead of being motivated by self-interest, his work seemed to be driven by an intellectual curiosity that expressed itself in the e-mail communications he wrote to his colleagues. He also had a strong sense for what he believed that other people deserve.
“The work we are doing here, broadly speaking, is dedicated to this goal of making big brother obsolete. It’s important work. If things work out well, we may be able to look back and see that it was the most important work we have ever done.” —Hal Finney
From cryogenesis, cypherpunk manifesto, encryption, privacy, public key cryptography, to digital currency, we learn more about the late Hal Finney and what it was like when was first introduced to Bitcoin. Read more in Chapter 2
Ross William Ulbright
Ross Ulbricht (aka “Dead Pirate Roberts”) is an American former drug trafficker and darknet market operator. He studied physics and material science at Penn State University and is best known for creating and running the Silk Road website from 2011 to 2013. He was eventually arrested in 2013 and accused of being the “mastermind” behind the Silk Road website.
In 2015, he was charged and convicted of computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic narcotics, conspiracy to traffic fake identity documents, and money laundering. He is now serving a life sentence without parole.
His LinkedIn profile description read:
“Creating an economic simulation to give people a first hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.” —Ross Ulbright
We learn that “Underground Brokers” would later be called “Silk Road,” starting with psychedelic mushrooms and drugs as their first products on sale. Here we are taken through the his journey of accomplishing the goal to find a way to sell and deliver these drugs online without being discovered by the authorities.
Popper explains Ulbright’s use of Tor and Bitcoin to accomplish his scheme. Tor is a way to browse information without getting tracked, originally developed by United States Naval intelligence for the purpose of allowing their spies to communicate online. Therefore, Tor websites can only be accessed by using a Tor web browser. With the advent of Bitcoin, we learn that its use within the Silk Road ecosystem would allow customers to buy without being tracked online or via monetary exchange. To read more, you will find this in Chapters 6 & 7 of Digital Gold
Roger Ver
Roger Ver is an early investor in bitcoin related startups. He grew up with a comfortable life in the Silicon Valley, lives in Japan. He is a prominent supporter of bitcoin adoption and sees bitcoin as a way to promote economic freedom.
He learned about Bitcoin from a Freetalk Live podcast April 2011. Popper takes us through Roger’s experience learning about Bitcoin and making his initial investment in Bitcoin through the Mt. Gox exchange with $25,000. We learn how his actions over the course of three days dominated the market at the time helping push the price of bitcoin up almost 75% — from $1.89 to $3.30. As an early adopter, he announced that his computer hardware company Memory Dealers would accept payments in Bitcoin. Not long after, he began advertising their acceptance of Bitcoin across billboards and other medias as much as possible. So we are able to gain valuable insights from his story on examples of investing dollars as well as investing into the adoption of Bitcoin in business.
Charles Shrem
Charles “Charlie” Shrem IV is an American entrepreneur and bitcoin advocate. In 2011 he co-founded the now-defunct startup company BitInstant. He was also a founding memory of the Bitcoin Foundation, formerly serving as vice chairman. We learn about his experience deciding between working with Roger Ver, Erik Voorhees, Barry Silbert, and the Winklevoss twins as investors in BitInstant. We are taken through his rapid growth in Bitcoin and also his downfall, having opted to knowingly get involved with customers participating in illegal activities.
Shrem had knowingly facilitated transactions to a re-seller named Robert Faiella, whose customers were using the Silk Road, an underground bitcoin-only marketplace where people bought and sold illegal drugs. Read more in Chapters 12 – 15 in Digital Gold
Wences Casares
Wences Casares is an Argentinian millionaire and technology entrepreneur specializing in technology and financial ventures around the world. He is an advocate of bitcoin and believes that bitcoin will be “bigger than the Internet.” He was interested in potential risks of bitcoin and US monetary policy.
“Bitcoin forced me to realize that I didn’t understand money.” —Wences Casares
Being born to an aristocratic family that belonged to a branch that at some point lost everything, he grew up on a rural farm. He eventually moved to the Silicon Valley to become the founder and CEO of Xapo, a bitcoin wallet startup headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
We learn about his journey learning about Bitcoin in 2011 and his interest in its as a way to send money back home. To vet the technology, he gave $100,000 to some high level hackers to attempt to hack the bitcoin protocol. The hackers requested more time and money, which Casares paid $150,000 more in bitcoins. The hackers concluded that the protocol was “unbreakable.” With this information, Casares became engrossed with learning everything he could about this new technology. Argentina has historically has had a challenging financial climate which shaped Casares’s perspectives on money. In Argentina, holding on to money was equal to losing it because the peso was so volatile. As part of Wences’s journey, there was an allure to Bitcoin’s potential to help the people of his home country who would regularly lose everything due to the drastic drops in the value of the Argentinian peso. This government is one that asked PayPal to cut off payments between their own people in order to slow the transfer of pesos into other currencies. To read more about multimillionaire Wences Casares and the financial issues faced by Argentinians, see Chapter 15
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are the twins who famously won a $65 million settlement from a lawsuit against Facebook in 2011. They claim to have used some of that money to purchase $11 million worth of Bitcoin in 2013. Around that time, it was approximately 1% of all Bitcoin in circulation.
Satoshi Nakamoto
The elusive founder of Bitcoin. He disappeared around the time of mass media exposure to December 2011, leaving the development to Gavin Andresen, Martti Malmi, and Mike Hearn.
Other Notable People
Adam Back — A British cryptographer and crypto-hacker. He is the inventor of hashcash, the proof-of-work system used by several anti-spam systems.
Lazlow Hnayecz — Paid for Pizza with Bitcoin Story
Asked if anyone would bake or buy him a pizza delivered in exchange for bitcoins. He had 70k bitcoin. Lazlow offered 10k bitcoin to someone who would deliver him pizza to prove that it had value. On May 22, 2010 (now subsequently known as Bitcoin Pizza Day), someone in California offered to call Lazlow’s local Papa John’s, which was delivered to his suburban home in Jacksonville, Florida.
David Chaum — An American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is known for developing ecash, an electronic cash application that aims to preserve a user’s anonymity.
Martti Malmi — College Student and second person after Satoshi Nakamoto to make edits to the Bitcoin code. Satoshi Nakamoto’s final communication was sent to Martti. Satoshi transferred the site to Martti, and asked him to take full ownership of the bitcoin.org website.
Gavin Andresen — Lead developer on the Bitcoin project. Third person to make a change in the Bitcoin code, after Satoshi and Martti.
“I hope that by talking to them [the CIA], and more importantly listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do: As a just plain better, more efficient, less subject-to political whims money. —Gavin Andresen
Mike Hearn — Former Bitcoin Core developer, fourth after Satoshi, Martti, and Gavin.
Jed McCaleb — US programmer and founder of Mt. Gox (founded in 2010). He also founded Ripple. Mt. Gox was later purchased by French developer and bitcoin enthusiast Mark Karpelés in March 2011.
Mark Karpelès — Former CEO of now defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox
Jeff Garzik — Founder of Bloq and one of a handful of key developers who helped build the underlying software for Bitcoin that is known as blockchain.
Mike Caldwell — Also known by his alias “Casacius,” he is the Creator of Casascius physical bitcoins. These coins contain an embedded piece of paper with digital Bitcoin value, covered by a tamper-resistant hologram. He created these coins from his home in Sandy, Utah until Nov 26, 2013.
Barry Silbert — Barry Silbert is the Founder & CEO of Digital Currency Group, a company helping to build the foundation of the digital currency and blockchain technology industry.
Digital Money
It’s about finding a more trustworthy and uniform way of valuing the things around us. Good money is durable, portable, divisible, uniform, and scarce. Besides these things, consider that money always requires something intangible: the faith of people using it. Successful money that lasts thru time isn’t based on who issues it, but the number of people willing to use it.
We learn about the history of the U.S. Dollar and how it came be accepted as a standardized form of payment in the early days. We also learn that the word “money” comes from the Greek Goddess Juno Moneta, whose temple was where coins were minted.
Benefits and Potential
Besides the more idealized vision for decentralized banking, the concept of digital money through the invention of Bitcoin and its pioneers offers everyone in the world an option for a better way to exchange and pay for goods while growing personal wealth.
A digital currency does not require a bank or physical location, which increases the opportunity for more people on earth the opportunity to participate in the financial economy. For example, anyone in developing countries with access to the internet with a smart phone or laptop can now participate in a form of exchange in value for their goods or services offered—whereas previously, they were not able to at all. While this does not address people who do not live in an area with internet service, the opportunity and growth is still imminent.
While the public ledger maintains transparency, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or other situation requiring the information.
Concerns
As likened to the introduction of the internet, Bitcoin and idea of an “anonymous” digital currency can be used for malicious intentions as well. We have seen examples such as those cases involving alleged money laundering and trafficking of narcotics. The use of Bitcoin also places the responsibility of your money 100% in its owner’s hands. Where we can currently reverse transactions and have some protection from our banking system for fraudulent activity, Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.
Regarding the conversation of privacy, effort is still required to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network. This means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. At the same time, the identity of the user behind an address remains undisclosed unless the information is revealed during a purchase or situation requiring the information. In other words, this brings us back to it being the responsibility of the owner of the Bitcoin wallet to adopt good practices in order to protect privacy.
Lastly, the price of Bitcoin is still volatile. Therefore, there will be rapid changes in the price as well as the public policies structured around it.
Summary
We thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It provides a genuine “insider’s” perspective on the complete history of Bitcoin. This engaging book will leave you feeling like you’ve been behind the scenes of the beginnings of Bitcoin. Popper starts by showing us how Bitcoin initially started with Satoshi Nakamoto and the original programmers involved with developing Bitcoin Core. He then moves on to describing a multitude of companies and founders in the space who come into play in chronological order, describing how these events would impact others along the way.
After reading the book from cover to cover, we have gained a better sense for who the pioneers in the industry are and feel that we were actually “there.” Digital Gold
Where To Buy Digital Gold
The book is available in e-book format as well as print at Amazon.com. You can buy a copy of the book and take a look at more reader reviews here
We also recommend going to some local libraries to find out if they have a copy to check out for free. It is also available on Audible.com in audio format
Digital Gold Nathaniel Popper – Bitcoin Books
