title: The End of Money: The story of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain revolution
author:  New Scientist 
description: Since the first magazine was published in 1956, New Scientist has established a world-beating reputation for exploring and uncovering the latest developments and discoveries in science and technology, placing them in context and exploring what they mean for the future. Each week through a variety of different channels, including print, online, social media and more, New Scientist reaches over four million highly engaged readers - over a million readers for the print magazine alone.
zlib_text: The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the 
  Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
  This was downloaded from http://www.thoughtmatters.co and printed to PDF. If you like this, 
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  by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
  March 25, 2016 
  One
  FROM BABYLON TO BITCOIN
  The eye has never seen, nor the hand touched a dollar.
  —Alfred Mitchell Innes
  For any currency to be viable, be it a decentralized cryptocurrency issued by a computer 
  program or a traditional “fiat” currency issued by a government, it must win the trust of the 
  community using it. For cryptocurrency advocates, as we’ll learn in the chapters ahead, the 
  whole point is to offer an alternative model for that trust. They tout a system of payments in 
  which the payee no longer has to trust “third-party” institutions such as banks or governments 
  to assure that the payer can deliver the agreed-upon funds. Instead, cryptocurrency systems 
  imbue trust in an inviolable, 