The second achievement in their holy grail was electronic cash. That's really what they wanted.

And it was in culture. It was in science fiction in the 80s and 90s, like Neil Stevenson wrote

amazing books about the future and the money actually played off in a significant role in his

storytelling, the type of money that would exist, Digi Cash, Digi Bucks, whatever. Then it also

was there in business. You had David Chom. It was a researcher at Berkeley in the 80s. He

came up with this idea of like blind signatures for payments and later turned it into a company

called Digi Cash, where you would swap your dollars or euros for basically this fully anonymous

currency. Now, Digi Cash failed because it was centralized. So a lot of these cypher punks like

Adam Back and Nick Sabo and others and Nick Sabo actually worked at Digi Cash. They kind of saw

like the promise of Digi Cash and then they saw why it failed and they were like, okay,

so the mint, the thing that creates the money has to be decentralized. Okay, well, how's that

going to work? So it was a tough problem and it took decades, but eventually how Finney had a

little bit of a breakthrough in 2004 with his reusable proof of work. And then 2008, we get Satoshi.

And you know, as I write in my book, like Adam Back gets this email like summer of 2008,

this dude named Satoshi or whoever named Satoshi and they're like, hey, can you look over this

thing? I'm going to publish. And Adam was like, sure, here's some feedback. And you know,

it's crazy. Adam had such a, you know, he was so built for this career given his personal history

and what he had been through PhD and distributed systems and studied economics and he came out with

the hash cash and thought about this way of tying digital work to real world energy. I mean,

he basically pioneered a lot of the stuff that went into Bitcoin. And you know, we talked about

that in the book, but essentially like this was the big breakthrough and we have it now. We have

digital cash, but the cool part is we have something even better. We have digital gold too.

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