this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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Bitcoin was made inevitable by the Great Financial Crisis, not by hardware advancement. Its proof-of-work is based on hashcash from the 1990s. The computing power spent is arbitrary, a consequence of its creator underestimating how quickly Bitcoin would catch on.
Well I think it was the hardware crypto implementation that allowed it, as you could check cryptographic keys far faster, which is what creates the gate.
But thats the easy part! It's expensive to produce and cheap to verify.
Its cheap to verify due to dedicated cryptographic hardware baked into modern CPU.
IIRC those weren't widespread until after Bitcoin was invented.