CHAPTER 1
MORE FREE, MORE FAIR
The industry was born in 2008 when Bitcoin’s white paper was
published, along with the creation of Bitcoin. There had been other more
academic or theoretical iterations of the idea of cryptocurrency as early as the
1970s, but this was the first to be actualized and taken seriously.
revolutionary document and the technology behind it were created by the
now-famous Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows if he is a real person, dead or
alive, a group or an individual. There is a lot of mythology around the origins
of Bitcoin. But he, it, she, whatever created this amazing technology. Satoshi
basically posited that the main issue with electronic payments was the need for
trust in a third party to process the transaction, a kind of middleman between
the buyer and the seller. Satoshi proposed a peer-to-peer system based on
cryptographic proof as the solution, and that became the foundation for what
we know today as blockchain. (I was so enthralled with the theory behind
crypto that I wrote my first book, The Satoshi Sequence, on it
But at that time, like most people, my life was on a different track. I was
freshman in high school when the white paper was released and Bitcoin was
created, and I knew nothing about it. Before crypto and blockchain, sports
were my life—football, track, wrestling. I was born and raised in Oregon, but I
dreamed of being the star quarterback for the Cowboys. By the time I got to
high school, I realized that might be a stretch and decided to switch gears. I
thought about going premed and becoming a doctor. I got into a good liberal
arts school, Pitzer College in Claremont, California. Pitzer is part of a
consortium, so I had a broad, comprehensive education. Not many people can
say they took classes at five different premier universities in pursuit of a deg
However, I discovered quickly that the path I was on was more diffic
than I thought. It would mean another ten years of study—going through
medical school and postgrad en route to becoming a neurosurgeon or
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