Nathaniel Popper > Quotes

“Wences had first learned about Bitcoin in late 2011 from a friend back in Argentina who thought it might give Wences a quicker and cheaper way to send money back home. Wences’s background in financial technology gave him a natural appreciation for the concept. After quietly watching and playing with it for some time, Wences gave $100,000 of his own money to two high-level hackers he knew in eastern Europe and asked them to do their best to hack the Bitcoin protocol. He was especially curious about whether they could counterfeit Bitcoins or spend the coins held in other people’s wallets—the most damaging possible flaw. At the end of the summer, the hackers asked Wences for more time and money. Wences ended up giving them $150,000 more, sent in Bitcoins. In October they concluded that the basic Bitcoin protocol was unbreakable, even if some of the big companies holding Bitcoins were not. By”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“It’s either going to change everything, or nothing,”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“DE4E FCA3 E1AB 9E41 CE96 CECB 18C0 9E86 5EC9 48A1.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Decentralized technology was a rather natural fit for Gavin, who had little in the way of an ego. Despite going to Princeton, he had been happy serving as something of a journeyman programmer, working on 3-D graphics at one point, and Internet telephony software at another. For Gavin, the jobs had always been about what he found interesting, not what promised the most money or success.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“He did not know C++, the programming language that Satoshi had written Bitcoin in, so Martti began teaching himself.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi, disappeared back in 2011, leaving behind open source software that the users of Bitcoin could update and improve. Five years later, it was estimated that only 15 percent of the basic Bitcoin computer code was the same as what Satoshi had written.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Hoffman had finally gotten a satisfying answer to this at a dinner with Wences and David Marcus and a few other Valley power players late in 2013. Wences agreed with Hoffman that Bitcoin was unlikely to catch on as a payment method anytime soon. But for now, Wences believed that Bitcoin would first gain popularity as a globally available asset, similar to gold. Like gold, which was also not used in everyday transactions, Bitcoin’s value was as a digital asset where people could store wealth.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Economists who had taken note of Bitcoin also pointed out that the virtual currency actually had built-in incentives discouraging people from using it. The cap on the number of Bitcoins that could ever be created—21 million—meant that the currency was expected to become more valuable over time. This situation, which is known as deflation, encouraged people to hold on to their Bitcoins rather than spend them. The notion of Bitcoiners around the world sitting on their private keys and waiting to become rich begged the question of the intrinsic value of these digital files. What were all these locked-up virtual coins really worth if no one was doing anything with them? What was backing up all the value the coins seemed to have on paper?”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The weakness of the existing system had been evident during the financial crisis when the Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley needed a $9 billion infusion from a Japanese firm. The agreement was reached on a Sunday, but the money could not be sent because the wire network was down for the weekend and the next day was Columbus Day. It turned out that even banks couldn’t send each other money on holidays. In order to get around this, the Japanese bank cut an absurd $9 billion paper”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“I was mentally taxed, and now I felt extremely vulnerable and scared,” he wrote in his journal. “The US govt, my main enemy was aware of me and some of its members were calling for my destruction. This is the biggest force wielding organization on the planet.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“The reason gold itself had been used as money was not that it was valuable; it had become valuable because it was used as money.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Ross himself had gained the expertise to build his government-eluding site after attending one of the best-funded public high schools in Texas and two public universities.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“From the beginning, Satoshi envisioned a digital analog to old-fashioned gold: a new kind of universal money that could be owned by everyone and spent anywhere. Like gold, these new digital coins were worth only what someone was willing to pay for them—initially nothing. But the system was set up so that, like gold, Bitcoins would always be scarce—only 21 million of them would ever be released—and hard to counterfeit. As with gold, it required work to release new ones from their source, computational work in the case of Bitcoins.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Bitcoins are the most important invention since the internet itself. They will change the way the entire world does business.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“You don’t have to try to vote your way into changing the world,”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“the conceptual advances made by Bitcoin weren’t just clever; they were useful in ways that could influence the future financial system.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“But this argument ignored the fact that the United States government promised to always take dollars for tax bills, which was a real value no matter how much people disliked paying taxes.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“After running away from the United States government to pursue his antigovernment vision, Roger Ver had chosen to live in a place that was uniquely unreceptive to his brand of antiauthoritarian politics. Japan was a country that was still deeply wedded to traditional hierarchies with an educational system that taught its citizens from a young age to obey authority. This was evident in the country’s rigid business traditions—the bowing and exchanging of cards—and in the spiky-haired punks in Tokyo, who waited patiently for walk signals, even when there were no cars in sight. Roger had picked Japan, not because it would allow him to be around other like-minded people, but because he liked the orderliness of Japanese culture—and the women. He had met his longtime Japanese girlfriend at a gathering in California and even she had almost no interest in politics. As Roger discovered, the deferential culture made Japanese people uniquely skeptical about a project like Bitcoin that aimed to challenge government currencies. Japan was the only place Roger had encountered where people’s response, when he described Bitcoin, was to call it scary—rather than interesting or silly. This was due, Roger believed, to the way in which the virtual currency broke from the government’s mandates about how money should work. One of the only people with whom Roger had gotten any traction in Japan was a local pornography tycoon.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“For these Silicon Valley power brokers, there was an absurdity to the old-school Bitcoiners who crowed to each other about being the leaders of a new global movement and getting rich in the process. The convention center happened to be hosting the Big Wow! ComicFest at the same time as the Bitcoin conference, and it was sometimes hard to tell who among the long-haired nerds were there for the comics and who for the virtual currency.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Wences took notice as the big names showed their faces: Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo; LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman; Rupert Murdoch’s son, James; and perhaps the most recognizable venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen, an enormous man with a shiny bald head.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“March 2012, a month before Charlie found his investors, the Federal Reserve had held a daylong conference about consumer-payment systems at which there was a lot of grousing about the fact that despite all the technological innovation going on in the world, the infrastructure for moving money around the country was still based on technology from the 1960s and 1970s. The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since; this helped explain why bank transfers took at least a day to go through. For most Americans, the easiest and fastest way to send money to a friend or family member was still the old-fashioned paper check. This problem was not just in the United States. A week before New York Tech Day, the Canadian government announced the launch of a new digital currency effort, called Mint Chip, that it hoped would spur innovation in payments.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Perhaps the most famous, if flawed, oracle of the Federal Reserve, former chairman Alan Greenspan, knew that money was something that not only central bankers could create. In a speech in 1996, just as the Cypherpunks were pushing forward with their experiments, Greenspan said that he imagined that the technological revolution could bring back the potential for private money and that it might actually be a good thing: “We could envisage proposals in the near future for issuers of electronic payment obligations, such as stored-value cards or ‘digital cash,’ to set up specialized issuing corporations with strong balance sheets and public credit ratings.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“For many technology experts at banks, the most valuable potential use of the blockchain was not small payments but very large ones, which are responsible for the vast majority of the money moving between banks each day.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“As was typical in this community, Satoshi gave no information about his own identity and background, and no one asked. What mattered was the idea, not the person.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“they all had to be designed at the beginning to make sure they would be possible later.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Like Argentina, China had incredibly restrictive rules about moving money into and out of the country. But in China, unlike Argentina, these rules were not a response to runaway inflation, but instead part of the government’s effort to keep tight control over the exchange rate of the yuan, in order to promote the export economy. The authoritarian government also wanted to keep a close check on what its citizens were doing. Each Chinese citizen could move only the equivalent of $50,000 out of the country each year. As a result, it became difficult for wealthy people, including government officials, to get their riches out of China and into more secure foreign bank accounts.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Briger was a big gruff man, who was known for his bold bets on distressed debt—the troubled bonds and loans that everyone else was too afraid to touch, and that gave Briger and his firm arm-twisting leverage over large companies and occasionally small countries. He sometimes called himself a “financial garbage collector” and he looked the part.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“situation, which is known as deflation, encouraged people to hold on to their Bitcoins rather than spend them.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

“Tor network that served as a backbone of Silk Road had been created by the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
― Nathaniel Popper, Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money