II What Does It Mean?

Bitcoin was a genuine technological accomplishment. But it's not even close to the whole story. There's much more to understand: Ethereum, yes, and web3, sure. And expensive pictures of monkeys.

So, huh, that's neat. OK, then. I've described in some detail the workings of the thing, Bitcoin, that Satoshi Nakamoto invented. But let's take a step back: What exactly is it that he invented?

The simplest answer is that he invented Bitcoin.

At its peak, the total value of Bitcoin in the world was more than $1 trillion. There are thousands of articles about it; it has lots of investors and fans and believers. Some of these people are called “Bitcoin maximalists”; they believe that the only really interesting and valuable thing in the world of crypto is Bitcoin. Those people could stop here, I guess. There it is, Bitcoin.

Here, though, I want to keep going. I want to talk about different ways that you might generalize Satoshi’s invention. There are different ways to interpret what Satoshi was up to and what he accomplished, and each interpretation points you to a different direction for crypto. A minimal generalization of Bitcoin is something like: Satoshi invented a technology for people to send numbers to one another. That’s not anything. Before Satoshi, I could’ve written you an email that said “132.51,” but you’d have no way of knowing whether I had the 132.51 on my computer or whether I’d already sent the 132.51 to someone else, and you’d have no way of proving to other people that you now had the 132.51 on your computer and could send it to them.