On October 31, 2008 — in the wreckage of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression — an anonymous person or group calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page whitepaper to a small cryptography mailing list. The title: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Most readers dismissed it. A handful were curious. Fewer still understood that those nine pages contained the blueprint for the most consequential monetary experiment in five hundred years. Satoshi’s genius was not purely technical. The genesis block — mined on January 3, 2009 — contained a hidden message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 ... (full story)