Bitcoin wasn't formed in a vacuum. There's a rich history of cypherpunks, privacy activists, and free-market libertarians who contributed to the preceding culture and technologies. In this unit, we will contrast Bitcoin with predecessor technologies and businesses, such as BitGold, b-money, HashCash, and e-gold. Bitcoin has also faced various tests in terms of social attacks that have forced a response from the Bitcoin community to defend or strengthen Bitcoin. One interesting case is SegWit2X, where large Bitcoin businesses and miners attempted a hostile takeover of Bitcoin that was repelled by Bitcoin users.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.
Watch this series on the cypherpunks. Who are the cypherpunks? What motivated them? Who were some of their influences? What technologies did they invent, promote, and defend?
Bitcoin was not formed in a vacuum. It has a deep history of predecessor technologies, ideas, and research that combined to make Bitcoin possible. Take a look at this diagram and see which elements were referred to in the video series you just watched on the cypherpunks.
Read this series, which documents some prior technologies that culminated in the creation of Bitcoin in 2009. What were the key features of each? What did they contribute to Bitcoin?
Read the Bitcoin white paper for context on how this all started. Pay attention to the initial design of peer to peer cash. Why was Bitcoin built to minimize trust, and how did it go about doing so?
SegWit2x was a pivotal and instructional moment in Bitcoin's history. There was an upgrade to Bitcoin's protocol that would fix bugs (like transaction malleability) and more easily enable higher layer function on top of Bitcoin, such as the lightning network. However, while implementing this upgrade, there was a kind of "deadlock" among the parties in the Bitcoin world. In this time, Bitcoin's different stakeholders learned new things about how Bitcoin's network truly operates. The question was: do miners control Bitcoin? Or, do users and nodes control Bitcoin? What is the role of developers? Read this article and watch the accompanying video to learn more.
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.