Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Part I
WHAT

Chapter 1
Bitcoin and the Financial
Crisis of 2008
In 2008, Bitcoin rose like a phoenix from the ashes of near
Wall Street collapse. In the four months of August to October
2008, an unprecedented series of changes occurred:
Bitcoin.org was registered, Lehman Brothers filed for the
largest bankruptcy in American history, Bank of America
bought Merrill Lynch for $50 billion, the U.S. government
established the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program
(TARP), and Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper that
founded Bitcoin and the basis of blockchain technology.
The entwinement of the financial collapse on the one hand
and the rise of Bitcoin on the other is hard to ignore. The
financial crisis cost the global economy trillions of dollars and
burned bridges of trust between financial titans and the
public. Meanwhile, Bitcoin provided a system of
decentralized trust for value transfer, relying not on the ethics
of humankind but on the cold calculation of computers and
laying the foundation potentially to obviate the need for much
of Wall Street.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar