Readers. Thank you, everyone. Its such a pleasure to be here and ive really enjoyed this opopportunity to talk to you about the by far the most peculiar book ive ever written in a longshot. I hope to share that with you today as well as frame some of the questions and issues that it raises. This is a book of one how and several competing whys. The how is, h would you go about creating a digital equivalent for currency, cash and coin . This is a significant technical challenge. You need to create an object trivial to transact, impossible to forge. It must be easy to verify to prove it is what it claims to be under conditions and con saints for all kinds of people and it must be able to carry the information about what it is and what its worth without generating information about how its used for by whom. And it has to do this on platforms, networks a and machines that generate effectively perfect copies and transaction laws and records in their very functioning. In other words, figuring
Transact but difficult or impossible to forge and duplicate. It must be easy to verify, to prove that it is what it claims to be under all kinds of conditions and constraints for all kinds of people. It must be able to carry the information about what it is and what its worth without generating any information about how its used or by whom. It has to do this on platforms, networks and machines that generate effectively perfect copies and transaction logs and records in their very functioning. In other words, figuring out the how of how to mix things like cash digital is a very tall order indeed. Which raises the question of why you would need to build such a thing. Answering that question will take us from fighting surveillance to building parallel covert societies to libertarian series of economics and money to the pursuit of human immortality. All of these agendas, all of these wise fed into the creation of bitcoin and the crypto currency and block chain landscape today. This isnt ju