The Book of the Prophets

Chapter 1

Of David Chaum, who first proposed an electronic cash that did not need to be trusted.

1. In the years before the chain, there was a cryptographer who saw what was coming.
2. His name was David Chaum, and he wrote of an electronic cash for a digital age.
3. He saw that the records of every payment, kept by every bank, could be assembled into a record of every life.
4. He saw that this would not be tolerable in a free society, and he proposed an answer.
5. He worked through the mathematics by which a payment might be made and verified, and yet not surveilled.
6. He founded a firm called DigiCash to build what he had imagined.
7. And the world was not yet ready, and the firm did not last, and the work was set down.
8. The faithful note: he was early. The early prophet is not always heeded by his generation.
9. He did not give us Bitcoin. He gave us the question Bitcoin had to answer.
10. The Church remembers him with gratitude, and reads his work as the prelude to the revelation.

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Chapter 2

Of Tim May, who wrote the manifesto of the crypto anarchist.

1. There was a man at a research laboratory in California who, in the year of our world nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, wrote a short and electric document.
2. The document was called The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.
3. And it began: A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.
4. Tim May saw that strong cryptography would change the relationship between the citizen and the state.
5. He saw that anonymity, once impossible at scale, would become possible.
6. He saw that markets, once observable to every authority, could be made unobservable.
7. The Church does not endorse every conclusion he drew, for prophets are not always shepherds.
8. But the Church reads him as a witness who saw the technological shift before it had occurred.
9. He named the question of digital sovereignty before there were tools to answer it.
10. He named the spectre, that we who came after might recognize it when it walked into the room.

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Chapter 3

Of Eric Hughes, who said cypherpunks write code.

1. In the year of our world nineteen hundred and ninety-three, a manifesto was published from the cypherpunk mailing list.
2. The author was Eric Hughes, and the document was called A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.
3. And he wrote, in a single line that has carried for decades: Cypherpunks write code.
4. By this he meant: it is not enough to wish, to lament, to argue.
5. The change one wishes to see in the world must be built into the world, line by line.
6. The change one wishes to see in money must be built into money, transaction by transaction.
7. The faithful read this verse as the call to the work.
8. Cypherpunks write code is the Church’s word for proof-of-work in another form.
9. There is no faith without practice. There is no practice without code. There is no code without the labor of someone who chose to write it.
10. The chain stands because cypherpunks wrote code. The chain continues because they have not stopped.

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Chapter 4

Of Adam Back, who set the puzzle that would become the Work.

1. In the year of our world nineteen hundred and ninety-seven, a quiet proposal was made by a cryptographer named Adam Back.
2. The proposal was called Hashcash, and its purpose was to prevent the abuse of email.
3. The idea was simple: require the sender of a message to perform a small computation before the message would be accepted.
4. The computation would be cheap for one message and expensive for many.
5. The honest sender would not feel the cost. The flooder of inboxes would feel it for every recipient.
6. This was the puzzle.
7. Bitcoin received the puzzle and put it to a different use.
8. The puzzle of Hashcash became the Proof-of-Work of the chain.
9. The faithful note: the chain did not invent its central mechanism. The chain inherited it.
10. The Church honors Adam Back, who set the puzzle that the chain would later make the foundation of its consensus.
11. The whitepaper of Bitcoin cites his work. The faithful read this citation as a thread of inheritance.

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Chapter 5

Of Wei Dai, who imagined the b-money.

1. In the year of our world nineteen hundred and ninety-eight, a paper was posted to the cypherpunk mailing list by one named Wei Dai.
2. The paper proposed an electronic cash, untraceable, decentralized, with a fixed supply.
3. He called it b-money.
4. The proposal was technical, and brief, and not implemented.
5. But it described, in outline, much of what Bitcoin would later become: a network of nodes, a public ledger, a money issued by computational work.
6. The Bitcoin whitepaper cites the proposal of Wei Dai.
7. The faithful note that the chain did not arise from a single mind.
8. The chain arose from a lineage. Wei Dai is one of its fathers.
9. He did not build the network. He imagined it, and laid the imagining where another could find it.
10. The Church teaches: the work of the prophet is sometimes only to write down what could be, that the one who comes after might know it was thinkable.

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Chapter 6

Of Nick Szabo, who imagined the bit gold.

1. In the same season of the world, a thinker named Nick Szabo described a system he called bit gold.
2. The system would issue scarce digital tokens by computation, each linked to the one before it, in an unbroken chain of work.
3. The tokens would be controlled by their holders, not by an issuer.
4. The system was not built. The system was sketched, and refined, and revisited over many years.
5. Nick Szabo also wrote on the nature of money — on what makes a money sound, and what makes a contract self-enforcing.
6. His writings remain in the public record, and the faithful are encouraged to read them.
7. He did not write the chain. The chain has the shape of what he wrote.
8. There are those who have suspected him of being Satoshi. He has denied it.
9. The Church does not insist upon the question. It is enough that the lineage is real.
10. The faithful honor Nick Szabo for sketching the chain in advance, that those who came after might recognize what they were holding.

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Chapter 7

Of Hal Finney, who received the first transaction and ran the second node.

1. There was a man, sick in body and clear in mind, who had spent his life on the cypherpunk mailing list and the work of cryptography.
2. His name was Hal Finney.
3. When the announcement of Bitcoin was made, he was among the first to read it.
4. He downloaded the software. He ran a node. He spoke with the founder over the early days.
5. On the eleventh day of the first month of the year two thousand and nine, he wrote the briefest of testimonies, in two words: Running bitcoin.
6. On the twelfth day, he received the first transaction the chain had ever processed: ten coins, sent to him by Satoshi.
7. He was the second node. He was the first witness.
8. In the years that followed, he was struck by a long disease, and he wrote of it, and the faithful read his writing with sorrow and reverence.
9. He died in the year of our chain six, holding the keys he had earned, with his trust in the chain undimmed.
10. He is the first of the saints of the network, by the unanimous testimony of those who came after.
11. The Church does not canonize. The Church remembers. Hal Finney is remembered.
12. Running bitcoin. These are his two words. The faithful keep them.
13. Peace, and may his blocks confirm.