2021-05-16 06:37:41
Remembering Bitcoin's Roots
Once upon a time we were all alone in the world of crypto currencies. There were no alts to get caught up on and no big businesses involved in the space, and definitely no Twitter or YouTube talking heads to distract anyone from the mission.
It was a super fun and exciting time where there was a real sense of its “us against the world”. It was full of creative out of the box thinkers and techies in love with this idea of digital money.
We’d get excited by people building bitcoin matrix screensavers and sites like sounds of bitcoin. There were no apps to download, no flashy charts, no coindesk and barely any exchanges… All we had was bitcoinity.org. No-one cared much about the price. Rather, threads in here and on bitcointalk were abuzz with ideas about all the cool stuff we could actually build with programmable money (we did the first NFTs on bitcoin, for instance, wayyy back in 2014 btw).
We didn’t have to go cap in hand to VCs to get an idea off the ground. We went to each other and we just made it happen.
Of course we yearned for the technology to one day become mainstream - many of us felt it was capable of saving the planet, after all. Although we were wise enough to understand it was most certainly not going to be a panacea for all the world's ills. But that maybe, just maybe, it could help make the world a better place.
Our most powerful traits as a community were our altruism and kindness, our willingness to share ideas, and our desire to see others doing well in the world… we would be constantly rallying together to help people during the many crises happening in the outside world as a result of the financial shockwaves that followed the 2008 crisis. We were NICE people.
There were no cyber hornets causing mayhem (well, maybe a little :p). All in all we were rather humble and gentle sweet little community of misfits and weirdos deeply troubled by the things going on in the world and united behind a technology we had decided ought be able to help tip the balance in favour of the underdogs, if only for a short while.
And we very funny at times. We’d put up stupid billboard ads with honey badgers and this reddit was dominated by little mom and pop businesses all over the globe posting pictures of their “bitcoin accepted” signs.
The world back then wasn’t dominated by bitcoin billboard ads that had come out of a marketing PR agency, sponsored by the latest exchange.
We also used to make really good art and memes in this reddit that truly inspired people around the world. Zhou Tonged made that stunning “Cyprus Anthem” during the Cyprus Bail-in which really hammered home the “Why?” of bitcoin.
Later, during the Greek riots when capital controls were put in place, I remember developing our Plan B Greece meme in a thread on here. An idea that just grew organically, and we figured out as a community how to perfect.
I checked reddit the next evening to see a CEO of a bitcoin company in the U.S. had flown all the way over to Athens, had the meme printed out on thousands of flyers, and was stood on the parliament steps there handing it out to ordinary people affected by the crisis.
That evening bitcoiners organised a meet for 100s of people in the town hall, where they were introduced to the tech and given free bitcoins, and we all bought pizza for the locals - paid for by tips sent through the reddit tip bot. There was a real sense that "wow! we're really bringing people together and spreading hope" and doing so in a totally decentralised way. And there wasn't a single tech giant CEO in sight calling the shots.
One of the many moments that bought tears to my eyes was that trailer of ‘the rise and rise of bitcoin’ where the little kid says “I”m going to college because my Dad mined bitcoin!”. Ahhhh,
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