To The Moon

In the genesis episode of TO THE MOON, Max and Stacy ask: “What is bitcoin? What was the actual beginning? Was it the genesis block on January 3, 2009? Or the Bitcoin White Paper published on October 31, 2008? Or were the seeds first planted in the early digital currencies created by the cypherpunks a decade earlier?”TO THE MOON also asks: “What did Satoshi want?” Early bitcoin contributor, Amir Taaki, believes Satoshi’s genesis block message was very political, that the decision to publish the Times front page headline, “Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks” was not random but rather signals intent. Jimmy Song says Satoshi wanted money that wasn’t controlled by a centralized authority and the best store of value ever created. Giacomo Zucco believes he wanted a monetary policy revolution.

In this episode of TO THE MOON, Max and Stacy look at some of the early adopters of bitcoin and the exchanges, derivatives contracts and pizza sales that erupted in the first days of crypto. On May 22, 2010, some pizzas were bought for 10,000 BTC, thus generating the first known purchase and real exchange value for the new magical internet money. TO THE MOON also takes a look at all the things Satoshi Nakamoto got wrong with bitcoin code, mistakes users still live with today. In 2010, we also saw bitcoin very first obituary, though hundreds more would follow over the years. Max and Stacy discuss the game theory of the bitcoin protocol with Francis Pouliot, nature's law with digital historian Nozomi Hayase, and economic freedom and sovereignty with Hartej Sawhney of Hosho.io. TO THE MOON also travels into the archives of Keiser Report where we find some of the earliest known television reports about bitcoin, including interviews with early adopters, Jon Matonis, and Amir Taaki.

In this episode of TO THE MOON, Max and Stacy remain in 2011, a year when bitcoin was still ‘magical internet money’. In terms of the ‘permissionless’ nature of bitcoin, TO THE MOON flashes back to archival footage of an interview with John Perry Barlow, author of ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, in which Max asks him “what happened to the internet?”TO THE MOON then talks to Nozomi Hayase about ‘natural law’ and how that governs bitcoin, while Rodolfo Novak notes that Satoshi remained anonymous because it is important for a permissionless system to not have somebody who rules it or who has too much authority over it. The episode then takes us into 2012 when QE3 already began and markets were soaring on freshly printed money and yet central banks started to worry about bitcoin as Tuur Demeester notes from the Keiser Report archives.