Andreas M. Antonopoulos > Quotes

“At the end of the day, bitcoin is programmable money. When you have programmable money, the possibilities are truly endless. We can take many of the basic concepts of the current system that depend on legal contracts, and we can convert these into algorithmic contracts, into mathematical transactions that can be enforced on the bitcoin network. As I’ve said, there is no third party, there is no counterparty. If I choose to send value from one part of the network to another, it is peer-to-peer with no one in between. If I invent a new form of money, I can deploy it to the entire world and invite others to come and join me. Bitcoin is not just money for the internet. Yes, it’s perfect money for the internet. It’s instant, it’s safe, it’s free. Yes, it is money for the internet, but it’s so much more. Bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is only the first application. If you grasp that, you can look beyond the price, you can look beyond the volatility, you can look beyond the fad. At its core, bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that will change the world forever. Join”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“One of my favorite words is a French word: sousveillance. It is the opposite of surveillance. Surveillance means to look from above; sousveillance means to look from below. In their dream of nation-states controlling all of our financial futures, they made one major miscalculation. It’s a hell of a lot harder for a few hundred thousand people to watch 7 1/2 billion. But what do you think happens when 7 1/2 billion of us stare back? When the panopticon turns around? When our financial systems, our communication systems, are private, and secrecy is an illusion that can’t be sustained? When crimes committed in the names of states and powerful corporations are vulnerable to hackers and whistleblowers and leakers? When everything eventually comes out? We have a great advantage because the natural balance of the system is one in which individuals can have privacy but the powerful cannot have secrecy anymore.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Code talks. Talk walks.”
― Andreas Antonopoulos

“There are almost 200 currencies of the world, but there’s only one international currency. There are almost 200 currencies controlled by central banks and governments, but there is only one mathematical currency today, and that is bitcoin. We are going to build more of them. Cryptographic currencies are going to be a mainstay of our financial future. They are going to be a part of the future of this planet because they have been invented. It’s as simple as that. You cannot un-invent this technology. You cannot turn this omelette back into eggs.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“This isn’t about nation-states anymore. This isn’t about who adopts bitcoin first or who adopts cryptocurrencies first, because the internet is adopting cryptocurrencies, and the internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“There are a billion people, right now, with access to the internet and feature phones who could use bitcoin as an international wire-transfer service.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care.​ It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the devices and you can build an application. You don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate. ​ ​Write the app, launch it on your endpoint, and bitcoin will route it, because bitcoin is a dumb network. That is the power of innovation on the internet. It’s innovation without permission. It’s innovation without central approval. It’s innovation without a broad network upgrade. And that means bitcoin is not a specific financial network. It’s not a financial network for large transactions or small transactions, fast transactions or slow transactions. It’s whatever you want to use it for, based upon what you choose to do at the endpoint.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin isn’t a digital currency. It’s a cryptocurrency. It’s a network-centric money. I really like the idea of a network-centric money. A network that allows you to replace trust in institutions, trust in hierarchies, with trust on the network. ​The network acting as a massively diffuse arbiter of truth, resolving any disagreements about transactions and security in a way where no one has control. ​ ​”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls. Where your money is yours. You control it absolutely through the application of digital signatures, and no one can censor it, no one can seize it, no one can freeze it. No one can tell you what to do or what not to do with your money. It is a system of money that is simultaneously, absolutely transnational and borderless. We’ve never had a system of money like that.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“As the adage of the entire internet once went, “I just replaced your entire industry with 100 lines of Python code,” that’s exactly what we’re doing with bitcoin.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Bitcoin experts argue that deflation is not bad per se. Rather, deflation is associated with a collapse in demand because that is the only example of deflation we have to study.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies

“By the time you look a few hundred feet down, you are looking at a snapshot of the past that has remained undisturbed for millions of years. In the blockchain, the most recent few blocks might be revised if there is a chain recalculation due to a fork. The top six blocks are like a few inches of topsoil. But once you go more deeply into the blockchain, beyond six blocks, blocks are less and less likely to change.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies

“Bitcoin consists of: A decentralized peer-to-peer network (the bitcoin protocol) A public transaction ledger (the blockchain) A set of rules for independent transaction validation and currency issuance (consensus rules) A mechanism for reaching global decentralized consensus on the valid blockchain (Proof-of-Work algorithm)”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“Six and a half billion people on this planet have no connection to the world of money. They operate in cash-based societies with very little access to international resources. ​ ​They don’t need banks.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Currency is the email of blockchains. Payments are the fundamental infrastructure that will enable density of adoption. It’s very, very enticing to say, "This is about more than money!" It absolutely is, in the long term. The vision of this technology is far beyond money, but you can’t build that unless you first build the money part. That’s what creates the security. That’s what creates the velocity, the liquidity, the infrastructure. That’s what funds the entire ecosystem. In the end, when we do deliver these services to people, it won’t be so they can open a bank account. This isn’t about banking the unbanked; it’s about unbanking all of us.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“Bitcoin is often mistakenly characterized as “anonymous” currency. In fact, it is relatively easy to connect identities to bitcoin addresses and, using big-data analytics, connect addresses to each other to form a comprehensive picture of someone’s bitcoin spending habits.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies

“If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s. It is a haven for pedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers, and criminals. How many of you in this room have bitcoin? How many of you in this room are terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers or criminals? Audience laughs You see the thing about bitcoin is while they push this story, every now and then someone who has never heard of bitcoin notices an important thing: it’s still not dead, which is always surprising because every two or three months there is an article that says it’s dead. That’s great marketing. Because every time someone hears it’s dead and three months later they hear it’s still not dead, they think, "Huh, this thing really tends to survive." I call bitcoin "the internet of money,” but perhaps we should call it “the zombie of currencies.” It is the currency that is the undead. The”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Paper wallets can be generated easily using a tool such as the client-side JavaScript generator at bitaddress.org. This page contains all the code necessary to generate keys and paper wallets, even while completely disconnected from the internet. To use it, save the HTML page on your local drive or on an external USB flash drive. Disconnect from the internet and open the file in a browser. Even better, boot your computer using a pristine operating system, such as a CD-ROM bootable Linux OS. Any keys generated with this tool while offline can be printed on a local printer over a USB cable (not wirelessly), thereby creating paper wallets whose keys exist only on the paper and have never been stored on any online system. Put these paper wallets in a fireproof safe and “send” bitcoin to their bitcoin address, to implement a simple yet highly effective “cold storage” solution. Figure 4-8 shows a paper wallet generated from the bitaddress.org site.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“Bitcoin creates digital assets that have intrinsic value and can be stolen and diverted to new owners instantly and irrevocably. This creates a massive incentive for hackers.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies

“The concept of a balance is created by the wallet application. The wallet calculates the user’s balance by scanning the blockchain and aggregating the value of any UTXO the wallet can spend with the keys it controls. Most”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“There are 2 billion people who have no bank accounts at all. There are another 4 billion people who have very limited access to banking. ​ Banking without international currencies, banking without international markets, banking without liquidity. Bitcoin isn’t about the 1 billion. Bitcoin is all about the other 6 1/2. The people who are currently cut off from international banking. What do you think happens when you suddenly are able to turn a simple text-messaging phone in the middle of a rural area in Nigeria, connected to a solar panel, into a bank terminal? Into a Western Union remittance terminal? ​Into an international loan-origination system? A stock market? An IPO engine? At first, nothing, but give it a few years.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Today, I want to talk about dumb networks. I want to talk about smart networks. I want to talk about the value of open source when it meets finance. And I want to talk about the festival of the commons. ​ Bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin is a network. Bitcoin is a technology. And you can’t separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on currency does not work without the currency. ​You can’t just do the blockchain without a valuable currency behind it, and the currency doesn’t work without the network. Bitcoin is both. It is the convergence of a participatory consensus network and a global, borderless currency that is fungible, fast, and secure.

 Today, I want to talk a bit about the bitcoin network and focus on one concept that has some parallels to the early internet.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

“Transaction fees are calculated based on the size of the transaction in kilobytes, not the value of the transaction in bitcoin. Overall,”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“Do not underestimate this. Do not listen to the people who tell you that bitcoin is just for pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers, and gamblers. Remember that they said the exact same thing about the internet. But when 2 or 3 million people got online, we found out that they are not interested in those things—they are interested in sharing cat videos, and now we have an internet of a billion cat videos.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“​4.1.1. The Blockchain and Proof-of-Work Why is bitcoin immutable? What gives bitcoin the characteristics of immutability? ​ ​What is it that makes it unchangeable? The first answer that comes to mind for most people is "the blockchain." The blockchain makes bitcoin immutable because every block depends on its predecessor, creating an unbreakable chain back to the genesis block, and if you change something it would be noticed. Therefore, it’s unchangeable. That is the wrong answer, because it’s not really "the blockchain" that gives bitcoin its immutability. That’s a really important nuance to understand. The blockchain makes sure that you can’t change something without anyone noticing. In security we call that "tamper-evident": if you change it, it is evident. ​ ​ You cannot tamper with it without leaving evidence of your tampering. But there’s a higher standard in security. We call it "tamper-proof": something that cannot be tampered with. ​ ​ Not just “will be visible if it’s tampered with,” but “cannot be tampered with.” Immutable. The characteristic that gives bitcoin its tamper-proof capability is not "the blockchain”; it’s proof-of-work.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“smart contracts use three technologies in bitcoin. One is multisignature technology. Another is timelock: CheckLockTimeVerify and CheckSequenceVerify—mostly CheckSequenceVerify, which is relative time from the previous transaction. And finally a new invention called Hashed Timelock Contracts or HTLC, which is a way to forward a promise that can only be unlocked by a secret. These are smart contracts using bitcoin.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money Volume Two

“The purpose of mining is not the creation of new bitcoin. That’s the incentive system. Mining is the mechanism by which bitcoin’s security is decentralized.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“Elliptic curve multiplication is a type of function that cryptographers call a “trap door” function: it is easy to do in one direction (multiplication) and impossible to do in the reverse direction (division). The owner of the private key can easily create the public key and then share it with the world knowing that no one can reverse the function and calculate the private key from the public key. This mathematical trick becomes the basis for unforgeable and secure digital signatures that prove ownership of bitcoin funds.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“The higher fee is not because Eugenia is spending more money, but because her transaction is more complex and larger in size — the fee is independent of the transaction’s bitcoin value.”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

“The genesis block contains a hidden message within it. The coinbase transaction input contains the text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” This”
― Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies