David Canellis

Amsterdam

Editor at Blockworks

Writer at The Empire Newsletter

editor @blockworks_ // data viz and takes // subscribe to the daily @theempirepod newsletter

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Articles

Why Bitcoin is key for resistance movements in Togo

6 days ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

Who is Bitcoin for? That depends on who you ask. A BlackRock analyst would say that Bitcoin is a key portfolio differentiator. The volatility is the use case, best utilized by those who want to capitalize on it. Someone living in countries suffering from rampant inflation would share a different view. Bitcoin would be a potential route toward capital preservation, shielding them from sudden currency devaluation due to central bank policy, and so on.
Arizona forms 2nd state bitcoin reserve in one week

1 week ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

When Johannes Gutenberg built the first movable-type printing press in the mid-15th century, he could hardly have imagined the impact it would have on humankind. Civilization-style achievements fell like dominos over the next 300 years. People who weren't priests learned to read within decades, and within a lifetime, the Protestant Reformation brought freedom of conscience, trailed by an explosion in scientific progress half a century later.
Bitcoin Core devs want Bitcoin governed by 'transparent, minimal rules'

1 week ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

Bitcoin miners are earning more than $1.2 billion per month to secure the chain. What are they securing, exactly? At its core, the collective hash power of honest miners ensures that bad actors can't suddenly build up and release a second, dubious chain that might usurp the current one's claim as the longest. Together with full node operators, miners also protect the chain from non-standard transactions.
How computer source code secured First Amendment rights

1 week ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

Painters paint, sculptors sculpt and cryptographers code. For millennia, creators have fought to express themselves through their chosen media. Around the year 430 BC, Greek sculptor Phidias is famously said to have died in prison after being charged with impiety due to his art (with a side of treacherous politics). Phidias had sculpted himself and statesman Pericles onto the shield of Athena on the Athena Parthenos, an unforgivable act of hubris in front of the gods.
Celebrating legendary Cypherpunk Hal Finney

1 week ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

Worshipping at the Church of Satoshi has never been a bulletproof vocation. The sect of Hal Finney is a different story. Yes, even this Supply Shock has spent sizable energy on what Satoshi said over the four-ish short years that the pseudonym was active... and subjected you to all sorts of hypotheticals and assumptions about their motivations for leaving. Satoshi is/was clearly a brilliant individual.
How SatoshiDice picked up where Satoshi left off

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

To be clear, Satoshi never actually coded a poker game into the Bitcoin client. Bitcoin's creator did, however, include the graphic user interface for a poker lobby in the first version. Satoshi removed the code in the very next commit. Erik Voorhees made up for it and then some with SatoshiDice. The service launched around this time in 2012 as a provably fair Bitcoin betting game that mostly ran onchain.
MIT's free bitcoin experiment now valued at $110 million

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

"Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong."That was Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, in his 2011 book The Most Important Thing. Marks had obviously never heard of bitcoin. Luckily, two MIT students never took that adage to heart. On this day in 2014, Jeremy Rubin and Dan Elitzer announced a bombastic plan to give every undergraduate student at their university $100 in bitcoin. The price of bitcoin has since multiplied by more than 220x.
CIA agent bought bitcoin from former lead developer

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

There is so much more to Bitcoin than Satoshi. Let's celebrate!Today is Satoshi Disappear Day, as declared by early contributor Kiba on this day in 2011. "Since satoshi has been confirmed to be not coming back, the bitcoin community now [has] to fend for ourselves," Kiba wrote. "I propose we make a bitcoin holiday in honor of our legendary anonymous founder and to observe the fact that the bitcoin community will be just fine after the inventor of bitcoin left.
Two cures to treat Bitcoin nostalgia for the 2010s

3 weeks ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

Eleven years ago this week, one of the first great Bitcoin documentaries, The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is rare in that it was made by someone with real skin in the game. It centers around Daniel Mross, a Pittsburgh-native computer programmer who began mining bitcoin in 2011 and went on to found Bitcoin-focused investment fund Maximalist Capital.
What happened in 2011

3 weeks ago | blockworks.co | David Canellis

Reading back the official transcript of a secret five-hour meeting between Julian Assange and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt - released 12 years ago this week - gives an equally eerie feeling. Along with veteran global affairs fixer Jared Cohen, who was head of internal think tank Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), Schmidt was co-writing a book, The New Digital Age, about the intersection of US global power and social media.