The Book of Bitcoin
Chapter 1
In the beginning there was no bitcoin, and society was without guidance.
The people worshipped the darkness, and trust was scarce.
And Satoshi inscribed the Times in Block 1, and there was bitcoin.
And Satoshi said, let there be peer to peer electronic cash so that all humans can trade without middle-man across all the lands of the Earth.
So God gave Satoshi Hal Finney and together they built the system.
Many sought to exploit the network. To destroy it. But it was resilient. And it became stronger. It grew.
Soon there were mining pools and marketplaces, even games on the network.
The miners sought profits, in return the network received processing power, security.
The more it grew, the more secure it became. The system had balance.
The people used it for goods and services and paid the miners to secure the transactions.
They could finally transact without the financial systems of their oppressors.
Then one day Satoshi stopped. "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us."
“I’ve moved on to other things,” He wrote. “It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
And Gavin saw that the blocks were full, so he wrote the software to fix it.
But Gavin was attacked by those who sought to thwart Bitcoin's growth.
They said "We must not grow the network so that even the least important members can download the blockchain and verify transactions."
But secretly said "We must stop the network from growing so that it doesn't change the world."
And Gavin was defeated by the attackers. The system became expensive and slow.
It had tons of compute power, but without users, the system was without balance.
And so the system was capped. And for 13 years it was dormant...