A trip to Greenland, a chance encounter with Coolio, and the end of the world. (This summer we’re publishing some of our favorite episodes from our previous series, Crypto Island.) Support the show over at searchengine.show! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First, the bad news.
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Okay, this week, our story for you, it's really one of my favorite pieces I have worked on. What had happened was we made this entire series about cryptocurrency. And one of the questions that a lot of people kept asking, but which I felt a little under-equipped to answer was, what about the environment? What about cryptocurrency's effect on climate? Stories about climate are really hard to tell.
Pretty much everybody worries about climate change, but the promise of a story is that you might feel differently when it's over. And climate change stories, it's like all they can promise is either you'll feel dreadful, you'll feel confused by science, or I guess depending on which website you're on these days, maybe you'll be convinced it isn't real.
So we wanted to try to find a way to tell a story about the planet that captured what it feels like to try to look at the problem, like really look at it, but with humor and feeling and history and just whatever elements we didn't think you would expect to find in a story like this. So this is it, the finale of our Crypto Island series.
One of the pieces I've gotten to work on that I'm most proud of. I hope you like it. Act one, diversions. August 12th, 2022. I was sitting at the airport, delayed flight, a red eye getting redder. I was thinking, as I so often do, about the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the white paper where he'd laid out how Bitcoin would work.
I was at the airport because of that white paper, actually because of what I considered to be a pretty crucial flaw in it. A flaw that, like a bad piece of code, had replicated itself over and over, helping cause some real-world destruction, which I was about to go witness up close. The flaw had come about while Satoshi was actually designing Bitcoin.
Satoshi had had to decide how new Bitcoins would be issued to the public over time. With normal money, a government has a central bank that can release more currency. But Bitcoin wasn't normal. There was no central bank. So what to do? In 2008, Satoshi decides computers on the network will compete to guess at the answers to complicated puzzles.
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