Bitcoin's Earliest Moments And How It Could Have Failed

Researcher Alex Waltz joins early Bitcoin developer Martti Malmi and author Aaron van Wirdum to reconstruct a version of Bitcoin’s origin story that is easy to forget in hindsight: not the birth of a trillion-dollar monetary network, but a fragile piece of experimental software that could have quietly disappeared before almost anyone noticed. Drawing on Waltz’s forensic research into Bitcoin’s first days, Malmi’s firsthand experience joining the project soon after, and van Wirdum's "Genesis Book" leading up to the creation of Bitcoin, this conversation explores what it was actually like to run, mine, debug, and build Bitcoin before anyone knew whether it would survive.