Nick Szabo: Money, Blockchain, and Social Scalability (Part 1)

Introduction Currently, blockchain is in the spotlight. The largest and longest-running blockchain system is called Bitcoin. To this day, throughout its eight-year history (editor's note: the original text was written in February 2017), Bitcoin's value has risen from 10,000 coins for one pizza (before exchanges priced Bitcoin in traditional currency) to over 1,000 USD per Bitcoin. At the time of writing this article, Bitcoin's market capitalization had exceeded 16 billion USD.