While individual miners owned the physical hardware, the "pool operator" directed all their combined computing power. When the pool won, the operator split the rewards. But this accidentally created a massive central point of failure. ...

In Satoshi’s whitepaper, the "51% Attack" (where a single entity gains enough computing power to rewrite the blockchain and double-spend coins) was a purely theoretical math concept.In May of 2011, it became a terrifying reality to Bitcoin: https://t.co/zo4YXap7sQ ...

Raise a glass to @halfin!Today would have been Hal’s 70th birthday.Hal Finney is one of the most important cypherpunks in the history of Bitcoin. When the whitepaper was published, most people ignored it. Hal Finney was the one of the few cryptographers who believed in it. https://t.co/szmKD4LjEp ...

On this day 14 years ago, a forum user sold $60 of iTunes gift cards for 1 bitcoin. The first comment, “too good to be true…” because a bitcoin was worth $5. https://t.co/v5FfBGFgbH ...