Preface

Bitcoin is truly a new kind of money. As an open network of computers, it exists purely on the Internet. Anyone with access to the Internet can send and receive money as easily as sending an e-mail. With this new form of digital cash, we are seeing the beginning of a new world of finance.

Bitcoin was launched in January 2009, just a few months after the financial crisis of 2008. As a true peer-to-peer currency, anyone in the world has access to bitcoin, with the ability to send it to anyone else. Its design insures that nobody can have their funds locked or taken away. The effects of this breakthrough currency are quite impressive. We have already seen the currency rise in price from less than one US cent to over a thousand dollars.

Since ...

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