Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology started its roller coaster of a journey with a small group of cypherpunks, who believed in cryptography as means to promote privacy… …it had a rough beginning as we saw with the failed DigiCash…
… but now we’ve ended up here at JP Morgan Chase, one of the largest American multinational financial services firms.
The history of Bitcoin and Blockchain is a story of rapid transformation.
Originating as a fledgling technology founded on libertarian ideals, Bitcoin had its beginnings in an industry full of scandals and activity.
As bitcoin began to rise in value and attract attention from a wider and wider audience, there was a shift in focus away from Bitcoin itself and more into the other innovations made possible by the underlying technology, the blockchain.
Where exactly do people discuss bitcoin and blockchain technology? There are a few different forums that people use.
There’s Reddit’s r/bitcoin, online discussion boards like Bitcointalk.org, Bitcoin meetups and conferences, and Bitcoin specific IRC Channels.
There are also organizations like us (Blockchain at Berkeley), that are dedicated to discussing and pushing forward blockchain technology.
We have a Slack channel with over 2000 members that people use to discuss news and developments in the blockchain space.
We also host many public events, workshops, and meetups, teach multiple classes on the UC Berkeley campus, and also this one online.
And this all done to foster and develop the blockchain community.
But within the community, there’s always some internal political debate going on.
For example, there’s a lot of the internal politics that occurs between miners, who want higher transaction fees, and merchants, who want lower transaction fees.
There’s also politics regarding the scalability debate in Bitcoin, the Ethereum split, and many other issues in the space.
Most of the core Bitcoin community can be very libertarian, as we’ve seen with the roots of Bitcoin and the cypherpunks.
And oftentimes, people’s political views influence how they feel towards technological debates as well.
It’s a common sentiment that getting die hard libertarians to agree is a very hard problem.
Many libertarians think that implementing blockchain into the government is a good way to hold governments accountable.
On the other hand, libertarians also think that people should be able to do what they want.
The flag on this slide is the Gadsen flag, which has strong Libertarian roots.
It’s used as a libertarian symbol because the porcupine is the “quiet”, unassuming warrior of the forest, which doesn’t attack so long as you leave it alone.
The United States government tries to best represent its citizens opinions and interests through a representative democracy.
In the blockchain community, there are different ways of coming to consensus about the changes that happen, and the process isn’t always smooth.
For example, in a previous section, we talked about Bitcoin Improvement Proposals.
Some controversial topics in the blockchain space have been surrounding problems like blocksize (specifically segwit2x), confirmation times, and centralization in third party companies (Intel’s SGX).
In this course, we explain these issues in an objective fashion, and let you form your own opinion on these debates.