The Times 03/Jan/2009: Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.

Satoshi Nakamoto put that headline in Bitcoin's genesis block on January 3rd, 2009, not as metadata. not as a timestamp. but as a statement. The idea behind Bitcoin was simple: money should not require trust, not trust in a bank, not in a government, not in any institution, and since the first block, Bitcoin has operated exactly as designed which is without permission and without authority. Every participant on the network holds their Bitcoin under their own keys, subject to rules enforced by mathematics rather than policy. However decentralization isn’t free, it comes with a cost, and for Bitcoin that cost was speed.

A new block is found roughly every ten minutes, so a payment waits around that long for its first confirmation, and often longer. To see why, we need to look at what the network actually does. When you send a transaction, it does not go straight through.…