Summary

Part one of my two part conversation with Nicolas Dorier on bitcoin and NBitcoin.

Details

what a bitcoin is; why Nicolas became interested in bitcoin; decentralized currency; distributed ledger; escrow; mining, variance problem, computing power needed, mining pools, democracy, 51% problem, changing rules; mining as way of making money; commission on payments, loss of value of bitcoin; storage of bitcoins, MtGox, cold wallets; bitcoin for subscription services; scalability, transaction processing limitations and solutions, memory requirements of block chain and loss of decentralization; anonymity; more on the 51% problem, distributed decision making, voting, 51% attack – cancelling blocks of miners, code changes; hard limit on number of bitcoins, decreasing speed of mining; hoarding of bitcoins and deflationary currencies, Friedman vs Keynes.