I had to take notes watching the interview between Lyn Alden and Max DeMarco. This is from ~ the first four minutes.
I really liked how she describes human history through the lens of the history of money, and also the history of technology. Specifically, the technology of information transfer + communication technologies, like the telegraph (!) and how that ties in with how people could exchange money in different types of transactions. I never thought about the ‘settlement’ part of it. I just thought, okay transaction is done, and done.
But it is important to separate out the ‘settlement’ part of transactions, because … that is where the centralized authorities come in (mainly banks, but also, governments). And in this case, American centralized authorities having this … big influence over developing countries. And a lot of unfair things have happened.
And so, following the 2008 global(?) financial crisis, Bitcoin was invented in 2009. The first time that not only are digital transactions possible due to internet encryption, but now also, digital settlements.
So, digital transactions are the digital paperwork and records that are sent between people. Digital settlements are … actual digital money (composed of open source software code). This was a big problem because if not for this code, you’d just be sending pictures of money, which means every time you send that picture, you just copied and pasted that money amount.
So I think that’s the gist of it. It took watching the video a 2nd time, played at .75x speed, and frequent pausing in the first four minutes to take notes… and also reading certain chapters of
#Bitcoin #lynalden #maxdemarco
