Interesting....

The Crypto-Currency By Joshua Davis @ The New Yorker

Full Article Free here @ Cryptome

http://cryptome.org/0005/bitcoin-who.pdf

Subscribers can get the full article from The New Yorker here...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_davis

Excerpt...

"The central banks must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically but they lend it out in credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve"

Banks, however, do much more than lend money to overzealous homebuyers. They also, for example monitor payments so that no one can spend the same dollar twice. Cash is immune to this problem: you can't give two people the same bill. But with digital currency there is the danger that someone can spend the same money any number of times.

Nakamoto solved this problem using innovative cryptology. The bitcoin software encrypts each transaction -- the sender and the receiver are identified only by a string of numbers -- but a public record of every coin's movement is published across the entire network. Buyers and sellers remain anonymous but everyone can see that a coin has moved from A to B, and Nakamoto's code can prevent A from spending the coin a second time.

Nakamoto's software would allow people to send money directly to each other, without an intermediary, and no outside party could create bitcoins. Central banks and governments played no role. If Nakamoto ran the world, he would have just fired Ben Bernanke, closed the European Central Bank, and shut down Western Union. "Everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust," Nakamoto wrote in his 2009 essay....

End of excerpt

What's interesting is that Nakamoto has recently just fallen off the face of the map via some email, presumably it was him. For one nobody really knows who the fuck this guy is, or to be precise, was. There's some mention about about the possibilities of his disappearance and or identity in the article, but all of it seems to remains unclear...

Additional Excerpt...

He has not been heard from since. Tells about failed attempts to hack the bitcoin encryption code. Writer tries to deduce Nakamoto’s true identity from clues in his posts and his code. Describes the Crypto 2011 conference of cryptographers, where the writer went looking for Nakamoto. Writer speaks with two possible candidates, Michael Clear and Vili Lehdonvirta, both of whom deny that they are Nakamoto. Also tells about Kevin Groce, who runs a bitcoin-mining operation in Kentucky. Over the summer, hackers targeted bitcoin, and though they were unable to break Nakamoto’s code, they were able to disrupt the exchanges and destroy Web sites that helped users store bitcoins. The number of transactions decreased and the exchange rate plummeted. Commentators predicted the end of the currency. In September, however, volume began to increase again, and the price stabilized, at least temporarily.


Interesting stuff...articles worth the read.