15 Quotes by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

The higher fee is not because Eugenia is spending more money, but because her transaction is more complex and larger in size – the fee is independent of the transaction’s bitcoin value.

The digital keys in a user’s wallet are completely independent of the bitcoin protocol and can be generated and managed by the user’s wallet software without reference to the blockchain or access to the Internet.

This isn’t about nation-states anymore. This isn’t about who adopts bitcoin first or who adopts cryptocurrencies first, because the internet is adopting cryptocurrencies, and the internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency.

What bitcoin gives us is a hard promise: the program will execute exactly as specified.

The concept of a balance is created by the wallet application. The wallet calculates the user’s balance by scanning the blockchain and aggregating the value of any UTXO the wallet can spend with the keys it controls. Most.

By the time you look a few hundred feet down, you are looking at a snapshot of the past that has remained undisturbed for millions of years. In the blockchain, the most recent few blocks might be revised if there is a chain recalculation due to a fork. The top six blocks are like a few inches of topsoil. But once you go more deeply into the blockchain, beyond six blocks, blocks are less and less likely to change.

The purpose of mining is not the creation of new bitcoin. That’s the incentive system. Mining is the mechanism by which bitcoin’s security is decentralized.

Bitcoin is often mistakenly characterized as “anonymous” currency. In fact, it is relatively easy to connect identities to bitcoin addresses and, using big-data analytics, connect addresses to each other to form a comprehensive picture of someone’s bitcoin spending habits.

There are a billion people, right now, with access to the internet and feature phones who could use bitcoin as an international wire-transfer service.