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Crypto Genesis
The amazing tale of how cryptocurrency began.
Futurist Alvin Toffler once said,
“The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Events are moving so rapidly in the crypto space that legacy expertise is outpaced by innovation. This creates an environment where opportunities abound, but it also is an environment where learning, unlearning, and relearning reign. Its exciting and challenging (and lucrative) to keep current and dive deeper as things evolve.
But how did all this begin?
A mysterious anonymous figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto started the whole crypto blockchain phenomenon in 2008. It is interesting to note that Apple unveiled the iPhone in June 2007and the smartphone and mobile revolution exploded.
Mobile adoption happened incredibly rapidly, and now almost everyone has a connected smartphone.
Blockchain and its applications, including cryptocurrency, have been slower to reach mainstream adoption because it’s not intuitively or immediately relevant to everyday life. It represents a paradigm shift in how we think about money, banking, and governments. These are big concepts and our entrenched beliefs surrounding these institutions don’t change quickly.
It started a revolution built slowly among visionaries that could comprehend the implications and is now poised to transform how the world is organized and how value is created and stored.
Now blockchains, while still seminal, have matured enough to represent a revolution potentially more significant than the mobile revolution, and think about how that has changed our world.
The big event that happened in 2008 that precipitated the idea of cryptocurrency as a response was the Global financial meltdown. We experienced the fragility of centralized systems in finance like banks and insurance companies and were distraught by the concept of “too big to fail” and the bailouts. But what was the alternative? There wasn’t one, and we felt trapped in a flawed system that ultimately rewarded reckless risk-taking and Moral Hazard.
