Ben McKenzie

People are so angry at the banks, like even more than usual.

And what the white paper proposes, wouldn't it be cool if we could avoid these fuckers who have screwed us and just transact directly?

Why can't I just send something of value to DAX and he sends it back to me and sounds like a good idea?

And it's built on this new technology, blockchain.

Well, that's what's interesting is it's new-ish, but it's not really that new.

Like, blockchain goes back to 1991.

There were these guys, we're going to get real dorky here.

We can do this, right?

Let's go dorky.

So blockchain, I would say, started with Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta at Bell Labs building off the work of cryptographers like David Chom, who I interviewed for the book.

There had been this idea of trying to do encrypted money, money that would ultimately be very useful to be able to transact online.

And so they were building off a thing called public key encryption, which basically allows us to buy stuff online without our credit cards being hacked, right?

It sort of encrypts the data.

The data's got to travel from me and my computer to the bank.

To the bank and then to the merchant.

There needs to be a record of this, but we also don't want it to be public so that people can rip you off.

So public key encryption is actually vital to our modern economy.

But blockchain had been around since 1991 and the Bitcoin white paper didn't come out until 2008.

So it had been sitting there for 17 years and no one had really done that much with it.

And even Bitcoin, when it came out, it was an obscure mailing list.