Andreas Antonopoulos, a British citizen of Greek background, wrote a book called “The Internet of Money”. In this book, he tried to bring people somewhat closer to the concept of Bitcoin than they already were. He had a serious history with Bitcoin because he was involved with this cryptocurrency since the start of the 2010s.
Today, he is one of the most respected people in this community. Furthermore, he became some kind of professor that people turn to when they want to learn about bitcoin. He collected all of the talks he gave between 2013 and 2016 and turned them into a book.
Also, all of those talks can be found online in terms of text and videos. As we said, his book is very popular among bitcoin communities, both with newbies or veterans. There are some very interesting communities within the overall world Bitcoin community like BitcoinAussieSystem. You should definitely check them out. The first volume of this book featured 11 talks. However, we decided that three of them are crucial for understanding this cryptocurrency as a concept. So, we are going to present you with three talks from “The Internet of Money” in order to help you get a better grasp of Bitcoin and all its controversies.
Bitcoin Design Principles
We are going to be brutally honest with our first talk and say that Bitcoin is extremely difficult to understand for a majority of people. Antonopoulos said that some past choices made Bitcoin very hard to understand, but he hopes that the future choices would make some new cryptocurrencies to go mainstream more easily.
He says that the designers need to develop two trends in order to have a clearer situation about this cryptocurrency. First is making it more user-friendly. After making it more user-friendly, the second one is that perks will be more obvious and easier to handle.
Infrastructure Inversion
Andreas Antonopoulos stated that all of the innovative technologies are always struggling within the first few years after the invention was made in terms of being understandable to people. However, he argues that all of those inventions have a strange infrastructure but they will be understood within a reasonable amount of time. He gives an example of how people were laughed at when they invented cars. Usually, the change in the infrastructure will make it more usable for a huge amount of people.
Scaling Bitcoin
The last talk on this shortlist of ours we are going to talk about “Scaling Bitcoin” that tells the story that debunks probably the strongest arguments against bitcoin. In the late 20th century when the internet was much slower than it is today, people had big problems with sending emails. It was so slow that Antonopoulos predicted then that the internet will end in a few years.
Back then, he said that he predicts that the speed of the internet will only decline and that we would need 26 hours to transmit the message from one day. However, connections improved a few years later. This is an important lesson because there are some contradictions with Bitcoin. That doesn’t mean that we will see the decline of this cryptocurrency.
Kim Marks 