What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]
&gt; But he was wrong about that. The way it bootstrapped was a guy buying a couple of pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins and people taking that leap of faith that it could actually be successful and might be worth a dollar or two at some point in the future<p>No, it was bootstrapped by ransomware companies encrypting your data in order to demand a ransom paid only in Bitcoin. This is how literally all money starts - not as a facilitator of existing economic transactions but as a conduit for imposing coercive taxation. e.g. the US Dollar is money because the US government demands you pay taxes in that currency.<p>The first historical examples of money were invading tyrants and conquerors paying their soldiers in coins they could mint and demanding payment of taxes in the same money. Since the people being subjugated didn&#x27;t have the coins they needed to pay, they had to sell their useful goods and services to soldiers in exchange for worthless discs of metal that indicated that they had sufficiently funded their oppressor&#x27;s further military expansion.<p>Ok, sure, that&#x27;s a nice history fact, but how does that relate to cybercrime? Ransomware vendors can&#x27;t print Bitcoin!<p>They can, in the same way everyone else does: mining it. Except because we&#x27;re already breaking into other people&#x27;s computers to encrypt files, we can also just mine the Bitcoin on their computers that they will later have to buy to pay us. A <i>huge</i> amount of cybercrime is just <i>mining Bitcoin</i>, because you can then sell that Bitcoin - which is free to you - to your victims in exchange for useful goods and services[0].<p>What Satoshi didn&#x27;t know is is not <i>would</i> it bootstrap, but <i>how</i>. Money bootstraps not by being more private, more inflation-resistant, or just by being <i>better money</i>, but by the use of coercive force[1]. Bitcoin is objectively worse money than US dollars - there&#x27;s expensive transaction fees, high confirmation times, price volatility, etc. People use it anyway because they <i>have</i> to - otherwise, the person who broke into their servers is going to either delete or leak all their valuable business data.<p>[0] Ok, yes, US Dollars.<p>[1] This implies the only acceptable economy under the NAP[2] is a barter economy, because barter and payments-in-kind is what people choose to use in contexts where there is no coercion.<p>[2] &quot;Non-aggression principle&quot;, a thing right-libertarians like to talk about as if it&#x27;s so self-evident we don&#x27;t even need to talk about it.