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.

The term moral hazard comes from economics. Moral hazard is a situation where an economic agent has an incentive to increase its risk exposure because it does not bear the total costs of that risk. For example, mortgage brokers and securitizing institutions are agents that get paid upfront on commission or year-end bonuses and offload risk on unsuspecting investors. Government bailouts incentivize this behavior by not letting the agents or their institutions suffer the consequences of their actions.

But if we didn’t bail them out, the public would suffer immensely more. That is basically what happened in the US in the 1930s. The banks were allowed to fail, and the lender of last resort, the Fed, stood by and let capitalism work its consequences. Millions suffered, and the capitalist system’s viability was profoundly questioned and challenged by alternatives like fascism and communism.

The riddle was how to move money (value) peer-to-peer without a centralized trusted intermediary. Satoshi solved the riddle and published the white paper on Halloween 2008.

Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system in his seminal white paper. The white paper laid out the idea of cryptocurrency and the underlying technology of blockchain.

You can read the original OG bitcoin white paper online. It is a relatively short paper, nine pages, for its incredible impact.

Check it out, and don’t be intimidated by the technical details. Just read the abstract at the beginning of the paper which summarizes its goals.

There is a statue of Satoshi in a park in Budapest. Notice the vague features.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, is now the 15th wealthiest person in the world. Nakamoto’s net worth is estimated to be up to $73 billion, with crypto holdings in the region of 750,000 to 1.1 million BTC.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin’s original implementation. Nakamoto also devised the first practical blockchain database application as part of the implementation.

Blockchain was co-invented in the early 1990s by Stuart Haber at Bell Labs. Bell Labs has been at the forefront of technological invention throughout the 20th century.

Another powerful part of this story is that this original computer code and implementation has been successfully changed and updated for the past more than a decade. These represent relatively slight course corrections as flaws were uncovered and this has allowed for the astronomic growth and scaling of the bitcoin network. As a result, Bitcoin has been running flawlessly as it has expanded both in the number of coins issued, buying and selling transactions, and the value of each coin. There are estimates that this system will run for hundreds of years.

Crypto is the smartest people in the world exiting into their own economy. — Naval Ravikant

These are monumental accomplishments that many brilliant people have adopted, expanded, refined, and invested in to bring manifest the vast implications. Some brilliant investors consider Bitcoin the apex asset, better than stocks, bonds, real estate, and gold.

It seems like something out of a science fiction fantasy story. But this is the amazing reality. A store of value created from computer code and hardware. It is alchemy and Satoshi is a true alchemist.

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