Summary of Paul Vigna & Michael J. Casey's The Truth Machine

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The most subversive, anti-authoritarian idea in finance is a ledger. Bitcoin, released in 2009 by a person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was designed to be an end-around to the banks and governments that have for centuries been the guardians of our financial systems.
#2 Ledgers are record-keeping devices that help deal with the problems of complexity and trust. They help us keep track of all the multiple exchanges that make up society. Without them, the giant, teeming cities of twenty-first-century society would not exist.
#3 The blockchain is a digital ledger that is decentralized, and it is this feature that allows peer-to-peer transactions to take place. The distributed nature of the blockchain ledger makes it virtually impossible for anyone to change the historical record once it has been accepted.
#4 The breakdown of trust in the banking sector, and the subsequent financial crisis, was a result of a vast manipulation of ledgers. The recorded value of the assets those ledgers were supposed to track turned out to be largely vapor.

Sujets

• Blockchain
• Computers
• Informatique

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822548862
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Paul Vigna & Michael J. Casey's The Truth Machine
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The most subversive, anti-authoritarian idea in finance is a ledger. Bitcoin, released in 2009 by a person or persons using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, was designed to be an end-around to the banks and governments that have for centuries been the guardians of our financial systems.

#2

Ledgers are record-keeping devices that help deal with the problems of complexity and trust. They help us keep track of all the multiple exchanges that make up society. Without them, the giant, teeming cities of twenty-first-century society would not exist.

#3

The blockchain is a digital ledger that is decentralized, and it is this feature that allows peer-to-peer transactions to take place. The distributed nature of the blockchain ledger makes it virtually impossible for anyone to change the historical record once it has been accepted.

#4

The breakdown of trust in the banking sector, and the subsequent financial crisis, was a result of a vast manipulation of ledgers. The recorded value of the assets those ledgers were supposed to track turned out to be largely vapor.

#5

Trust, particularly in our institutions, is a vital social resource. When it works, we take it for granted. But when trust is lacking, things really break down.

#6

The rise of bookkeeping to the level of truth itself happened over many centuries, and began with the hostility European Christendom had to lending. The ancients were fine with debt, while the Judeo-Christian tradition had a deep anti-usury culture.

#7

Around the 12th century, Europeans began trading with the East, and they encountered the mathematics that had developed in the Arab world and Asia. Fibonacci’s new numbering system became a hit with the merchant class, and his Liber Abaci, a book filled with integers and fractions, square roots and algebra, showed how this new math had commercial applications.

#8

The merchant class was able to make loans acceptable by connecting them to the Bible, which allowed them to make double-entry bookkeeping. This led to the Renaissance and modern capitalism.

#9

The problem with the 2008 financial crisis was that our trust in a system of accounting, which was ingrained in us since childhood, made us vulnerable to fraud. Can a blockchain, which is continuously open to public inspection and guaranteed not by a single bank but by a series of mathematically secured entries into a ledger, help us rebuild our lost social capital.

#10

Nakamoto combined several elements to come up with Bitcoin. He wasn’t the only person working on the idea of leveraging the technology of the day to create better systems. In 2005, a computer expert named Ian Grigg, working at a company called Systemics, introduced a trial system he called triple-entry bookkeeping.

#11

The 1990s saw the emergence of another visionary who saw the potential of a digital ledger. Nick Szabo developed some of the concepts that underlie Bitcoin, which is one reason why some suspect he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

#12

The truth-discovery process in communities is best left to a distributed approach, with no single entity having control over it. This way, the process is not vulnerable to corruption, attack, or error.

#13

A consensus on facts is what is needed to function society, and blockchain technology has the potential to push back against the erosion of institutions that establish those facts.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The for-profit company Uber is the gatekeeper of every deal that gets made between drivers and passengers. It takes 25 percent of each transaction, and it is far from the only for-profit company that makes money the new-fashioned way: by controlling data.

#2

These companies have become monopolies, the new incumbent powers of the digital age, and they control what news we see. They also have unprecedented control over the most important socially influential data that flies across the Web.

#3

The choice between private companies controlling our data and governments controlling them and invading our privacy is a false one, because it stems from a mismatch between the centralized way we process and store information and the decentralizing tendencies of a global sharing economy.

#4

The risks of these contradictory trends were made clear in the October 2016 attack on Dyn, a DNS provider, which was carried out when hackers figured out that users of mini computing systems such as game consoles and laptops weren’t downloading security patches.

#5

The link between privacy and data security is clear. When individuals’ privacy is invaded, it can lead to identity theft, blackmail, and even suicide. Companies and institutions lose out as well, as they are constantly attacked by hackers.

#6

The potential power of this concept is demonstrated by the example of Bitcoin. Even though that particular blockchain may not provide the ultimate solution in this use case, it's worth remembering that without any of the classic, centrally deployed cybersecurity tools, Bitcoin's core ledger has so far proven to be unhackable.

#7

Another reason Bitcoin has survived is because it leaves hackers nothing to hack. The public ledger contains no identifying information about the system’s users, and no one owns or controls it.

#8

The current model for protecting information is the shared-secret model, in which a service provider and a customer agree on a secret password to access the data. This still leaves all the vital data sitting on the company’s servers, which can be hacked. With a permissionless blockchain, control over the data stays with the customer, making it more susceptible to attack.