https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQx3E3F8Kz4

Governance and and the market share of Bitcoin. It drops in a cyclical way when people become temporarily disillusioned and overwhelm other altcoins with exuberant attention they weren't really prepared for. When the spotlight shifts onto you, that's when you can't stumble. The adversarial attitude between cryptocurrencies. They all benefit from specialising to niches of trade-offs and design decisions in the ecosystem. Even failed experiments help evolution and teach us something. Being resistant to change is a differential feature, because it makes it robust against takeover. Even Bitcoin's own developers and miners can't force change from the inside. Bitcoin was designed to say 'unless everyone agrees, we're not changing a thing.' Political propaganda, economic, electrical, network-based attacks are always coming when it becomes this important to the world. "Unstoppable code" is for something that someone is trying to stop. "The only things worth printing are what somebody is trying to suppress; everything else is advertising / public relations." Silk Road, black market. PR disaster to Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, who will start saying "the technology behind Ethereum: smart contracts!" just as they did with Bitcoin. Trial by fire. Bitcoin is surviving because it can't be changed, because it is the unstoppable code.

This is part of a talk which took place at the Silicon Valley Bitcoin meetup on April 11th 2017 at the Plug and Play Tech Center (@PlugandPlayTC) in Sunnyvale, California: https://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley...

Watch the full talk here: https://youtu.be/i_wOEL6dprg

The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.

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Nakamoto's genius, then, wasn't any of the individual components of bitcoin, but rather the intricate way in which they fit together to breathe life into the system. The timestamping and Byzantine agreement researchers didn't hit upon the idea of incentivizing nodes to be honest, nor, until 2005, of using proof of work to do away with identities. Conversely, the authors of hashcash, b-money, and bit gold didn't incorporate the idea of a consensus algorithm to prevent double spending. In bitcoin, a secure ledger is necessary to prevent double spending and thus ensure that the currency has value. A valuable currency is necessary to reward miners. In turn, strength of mining power is necessary to secure the ledger. Without it, an adversary could amass more than 50 percent of the global mining power and thereby be able to generate blocks faster than the rest of the network, double-spend transactions, and effectively rewrite history, overrunning the system. Thus, bitcoin is bootstrapped, with a circular dependence among these three components. Nakamoto's challenge was not just the design, but also convincing the initial community of users and miners to take a leap together into the unknown—back when a pizza cost 10,000 bitcoins and the network's mining power was less than a trillionth of what it is today.

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Full article here

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559