Eric Scrivner on Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

This month Eric Scrivner (@etscrivner (https://twitter.com/etscrivner)) will present Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

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Bitcoin is many things - a critique, a currency, a protocol, and perhaps even acontemporary industrial revolution. More immediately, however, bitcoin and theoriginal paper that spawned it are of interest to the working programmer as astudy in the design of fault-tolerant, decentralized systems. Beginning fromthe crtique of trusted third parties we will see how bitcoin provides novelstarting points for system architecture in the age of increasingly cheap andubiquitous computing power, as well as speculate about what all this mightentail for the future.

Additional Reading / Context For The Paper:

• Shelling Out -- The Origin of Money (Nick Szabo)

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

• Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes (Nick Szabo)

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ttps.html

• Bitcoin isn't money, it's the internet of money (Eli Dourado)

https://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money/

• The Byzantine General's Problem (Lamport, Shostak, and Pease)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf

• bmoney

http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

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Huge thanks to Dollar Shave Club (https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/) for sponsoring us this month.

Dinner and drinks will be provided.