In January 2009 Hal Finney leaves a stranger's program running on his home computer until the fan noise annoys him. He has just received the first bitcoin payment ever made. That summer he is told he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and he goes on writing code with his eyes. Around him: a nine-page paper by an author nobody has found, a ledger everyone holds, a lottery whose tickets cost electricity, and a contract that did exactly what its code said until its owners voted to overrule it.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Hal Finney, Satoshi Nakamoto, Stuart Haber, Scott Stornetta, Adam Back, Laszlo Hanyecz, Vitalik Buterin, Sam Bankman-Fried, John J. Ray III
- The idea it builds
- A ledger everyone holds, each page sealed with the last page's fingerprint, and a lottery of guessed numbers deciding who writes the next.