Scrolling through the old bitcointalk forums, you can read history unfold, one confused newbie at a time. There are posts by Satoshi Nakamoto still archived. It's so cool to experience slices of life on these old boards.
One of the oldest threads is someone trying to troubleshoot one of the very first instances of the bitcoin client. Can you imagine if you had a question and Satoshi chimed in to help?
Then, it was just a fun little computer thing that sounded like it was designed well by a very intelligent individual. Now, it's among national currencies, integrated with Twitter, and accepted for payment in movie theaters.
Yesterday's dream becomes tomorrow's mundanity. In another ten years, it may be taken for granted that, of course, you can pay with crypto here, why wouldn't you be able to?
Visible is how the community developed. You can scroll pages of threads, noticing that each one represents smaller and smaller windows of time as more and more were being created. The network was growing.
Especially interesting are the black swan events.
Here, we can see some of the first detection of the fraudulent activity being conducted by the site operator for one of the very first exchanges, Mt. Gox.
Something fishy this way swims
At the time, the understanding was that there was a hacker or group thereof that was able to access user accounts.
The response by tito13kfm here made me laugh really hard, so I had to find a way to work this in. Achieving a moment of connection with someone not even of a different place, but a different time. How wild is that?
Behind the scenes, however, the webmaster had been exploiting a backend vulnerability in the site. It was rudimentary in its design; the buying and selling were all handled by the web API and not done on the blockchain, so with a bit of data manipulation using his admin status, he was able to create a dummy trading account that the exchange recognized as having funds available to spend, despite none having been deposited for it. Huge run ups in price had been observed followed by immediate sell off. The webmaster would use the "ghost dollars" to buy up bitcoins which he would immediately sell, laundering the changed float values into real US dollars.
This place will become a resource for any curious newcomers to cryptocurrency in the future. You are adding to a pile of information and shared experiences that may fascinate someone years from now. Happy time travels, everyone.
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