8 THE WEB OF EVERYTHING

On January 3, 2009, the first bitcoin block was mined, marking the creation of the first cryptocurrency. It was time-stamped by its creator, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto,
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who appended in the source code a curious comment: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout of banks.” By including in the “genesis block” of bitcoin the headline of that day's edition of The Times newspaper Nakamoto was making a political statement: that this new technology—to be henceforth known as “blockchain”—was a direct challenge to the undemocratic powers of central banks. As the apotheosis of the cypherpunk movement,
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bitcoin was raising the flag of digital anarchism, launching a techno-political revolution fueled by the outrage of the Great Recession. An alternative path to money, one that circumvented the money-printing monopoly of central banks, was now possible. Nakamoto was opening this path to the world by having solved the so-called double-spending problem for a digital currency.