Giacomo Zucco

Bitcoin & the Hopf Cycle of the Internet

“Hard times make strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Discovering Bitcoin Part 7 – Missing Pieces

“As we conclude our “Discovering Bitcoin” series, we will build on the use of digital signatures and of the CoinJoin paradigm to explore concepts of unique chronology, mining fees and off-chain transactions.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Discovering Bitcoin Part 6 – Digital Contracts

“In Part 6 of this “Discovering Bitcoin” series, we will build on the idea of using digital puzzles as a way to reproduce scarcity, and on the importance of a supply-control mechanism to grant some hardness to digital money, to explore concepts of proving ownership through signatures and scripts, and the technique known as CoinJoin.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Discovering Bitcoin Part 5 – Digital Scarcity

Continuing the excellent series of Discovering Bitcoin, moving into the digital age, we have lost the most fundamental element of our money, it’s “hardness.” By what means can we get it back? Can we make a scarce money in the digital world, that has no authority, no ruler? Can we restore the freedom of decentralized money? Find out about the brilliant use of difficult puzzles, to achieve digital hardness, in part #5 of Giacomo’s excellent series, “Digital Scarcity.”

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Discovering Bitcoin Part 4 – A Wrong Turn & A New Plan

“While it was pretty difficult for him to take over the very decentralized process of people exchanging gold nuggets, there are now a few big, public, trusted, vulnerable entities he can easily seize control of.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Discovering Bitcoin Part 3 Introducing Money

“The goods that fare better in hardness, scaleness and darkness will compete, and the first one to reach a critical mass will start swallowing the others, as far as monetary uses are concerned.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Discovering Bitcoin Part 2 – About People

“it clearly involves moral, political and ethical aspects, like the importance of privacy as a human right. I will use the term “darkness” to address this attribute.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Discovering Bitcoin – From Cavemen to Lightning, Into & Part 1 – About Time

“In order to be useful for this kind of process, a good must possess a good “hardness”: Any unit of said good should not significantly lose its ability to provide utility if stored over some period of time.” – Giacomo Zucco

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A Match Made in the Whitepaper – Treatise on Bitcoin & Privacy, Part 1

“Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin as a tool for privacy. The entire cypherpunk quest, which Satoshi was an active part of and which the Bitcoin experiment is the coronation of, was all about personal and financial privacy.” – Giacomo Zucco

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Dont be Misled by Red Herrings – Treatise on Bitcoin & Privacy Part 2

“It is the digital equivalent of your physical bank sending private investigators to follow your every move for days after you withdraw cash at the ATM, and then freezing or confiscating your bank account entirely if that PI comes back with a report that says that “you may have,” with some probability, engaged in controversial actions with that cash.”  – Giacomo Zucco

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