BITCOIN IS A BOOK About five thousand years ago, people invented writing to keep track of their dealings with each other. This started on clay tablets, and eventually moved onto paper bound into books. In accounting speak, such books have a technical name – ledgers. With the advent of money came cash books, or cash ledgers. Just think of them as private diaries for money. Businesses today still maintain their own proprietary cash books. It may be on a computer rather than paper, but the purpose of a modern multinational’s cash ledger hasn’t changed since the paper cash books of old: to record and keep track of payments, receipts, balances and dates. What’s this got to do with Bitcoin? Everything. Because even though it’s public rather than private, that’s essentially what Bitcoin is: a cash ledger, or cash book. Bitcoin is a book.

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BITCOIN IS MONEY Money can be one of two things. It can be a tangible object: I can pay you by handing you a coin or a banknote which we both agree is money. But if I send money from my bank account to yours, our banks don’t pass each other coins or banknotes or any other physical objects. So how does the money move? Well, nothing really moves at all. Our banks simply make entries in their ledgers, and we accept these book entries as money. Most money is this second type: ledger money. As we’ve already seen, Bitcoin is a ledger. And just like a bank’s books, Bitcoin is a ledger which people all around the world agree is money. Bitcoin is money.