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On October 31, 2008 — one month after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt — a shadowy avatar called Satoshi Nakamoto uploaded a white paper that read as a response to the crisis devastating global financial markets. The paper described Bitcoin, the world’s first peer-to-peer digital currency.

The white paper that launched a thousand Bitcoin miners

For a piece of technical writing, it had a rather lofty vision: You, the user, mint digital money with your computer, then use it to trade and store wealth like a collection of mp3's. In doing so, help build an alternative to the Federal Reserve, the banking system, and maybe the idea of financial trust itself — in other words, an alternative to the edifice that had just collapsed.

As Barack Obama figured out where to inject the second half of TARP bailout funds in early 2009, Nakamoto released some software and taught the world how to mine Bitcoin, deputizing millions of un-central bankers.

If this video’s cartoony cheer served only to taunt your lack of understanding, you’re not alone. Digital currencies can be complicated!

Remember macroeconomics class? The Federal Reserve System.

Bitcoin may only seem so complicated, though, because we don’t think much about the way Janet Yellen makes money. The system we have, with centralized currencies zooming around a system of fractional-reserve lending, is another complex affair. It’s also the beast that brought you the Depression, the dot-com crash, the credit crunch, and most of The Way Things Are.

It seems Satoshi Nakamoto was responding to that history and to his or her troubled times. Look at the Genesis Block of code that the founder mined to get the moneyball rolling, and you’ll get an idea of the scope of the ambition. Buried in the hexadecimal below is January 3, 2009's Times of London headline: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”