Hi, I'm PJ Vote. This is the Crypto Island mini-series. In this episode, we take a trip from the very beginning of cryptocurrency and we see where it's strange prophecies have led today.

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A lot of people already know the origin story of Bitcoin, but I'm just going to recite it one more time. It is fall of 2008.

Good evening. This is George W. Bush's president. We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis.

Lehman Brothers is just collapsed.

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On Halloween of that year, 2008, a person claiming to be a Japanese man named Satoshi Nakamoto appears on a cryptography mailing list to announce his new invention, Bitcoin.

He describes his invention in a white paper. It's called Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

This white paper, it's an elegant document. Text runs just eight pages long minus footnotes. In precise academic language, he describes the problem he set out to solve.

Bitcoin appeared a peer-to-peer electronic.

Bitcoin appeared a peer-to-peer electronic cash system abstract.

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

Obviously, we don't know who Satoshi really is, but this is as close as I could get to the voice I hear in my head when I read this.

And when I read it, I don't really try to follow the technical description. I just listen for this voice.

Calm, academics are going to be pretty dry. Nothing about this white paper to me screams impending revolution.

Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double spending.

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