035 - On File Sharing, Distributed Technologies, And The Birth Of Bitcoin

Summary

Hey Zengineers! Let me ask you a strange question. How would you feel if you knew that all your hard earned money was just going to be converted into a digital bit stream and saved on some centralized databases maintained by a handful of global businesses? Does this sound like a scary idea? Well, it’s already what’s happening when you deposit your money with any modern bank in the world. The gold standard no longer exists. Physical paper still has value, but exists only ephemerally during small transactions, and if the system makes a mistake, it’s not easy for the individual to do much about it. If this sounds dystopian to you, imagine something even weirder. How about we make every financial transaction public. What if we then distributed all that information to millions of personal computers all around the world? How about we do away entirely with the idea of a centralized authority? This roughly describes BitCoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin and other Cryptocurrencies. This week we d --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/zengineering-podcast/support