Money has evolved since it’s invention to help people transfer value. For centuries it has taken physical form, most money today is information and with the growth in technology, globalisation and the internet this has laid the foundations for the ‘internet of money’. Blockchain technology and Bitcoin have emerged as part of the information revolution to serve as a way for us to transfer and store value digitally. The cypherpunks were instrumental in the build up to Bitcoin being invented. Their drive for personal privacy from government and corporations led them to develop through cryptography their own mailing list for private communication in 1991. At their foundation was pseudonymity and the release of the whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto introduced a groundbreaking peer to peer electronic cash system called Bitcoin. Cryptography forms the basis of digital information and served as the building blocks for blockchain technology. Cryptography’s two main purposes are security against interception and data manipulation when information is sent. The use of the public-private key cryptography for encryption and decryption has been adopted by blockchain technology to store and transfer digital value. Bitcoin was designed to be decentralised and acts as a peer to peer network without the need for a central authority. It is an open source software project and developed by volunteers. It uses the proof of work consensus mechanism to keep the network secure and functioning. Presently blockchains face the challenge of the scalability trilemma as a consensus mechanism can only satisfy two out of three network features: security, scalability and decentralisation. When building a blockchain you must consider which two are the most important to the project.