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Bitcoin Origins

A Realistic Expose

By FPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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Photo from CNN Business

Bitcoin. It’s February 2021 and on the forefront of everyone’s mind as it trades at over $48,000 USD per 1 Bitcoin. My first encounter with Bitcoin was as a young gamer. I was 16, and mildly financially conscious as you’d expect a 16-year-old undergraduate student to be without any real concept of budgeting or money in 2009. At the time, Bitcoin was written off as a joke – a kind of worthless entity only pale nerds and geeky gamers cared about. Monopoly money. A fleeting interest due to the amount of time required to mine Bitcoin – two weeks for 2 Bitcoin for some. I’ll share – I had entered a game that had a bitcoin bonus of 30 Bitcoins associated with it just because, free money. I’m embarrassed to admit that with Bitcoin at its current value, I downloaded a VPN from Norton just to figure out if I could find it. Sadly, it is woefully lost to me – good thing I made it through school and made something of myself. I do enjoy my career, but I’ve long missed gaming.

Anyways, the big question at hand is: what is Bitcoin, and why is it now so valuable? Bitcoin is, simply put, the origins of cryptocurrency. Digital money that unlike the dollar signs in bank accounts, doesn’t incur conversion or wire fees. This currency is unlike any other – it transcends national boundaries. It doesn’t have some dead ruler on it associated with patriarchy, matriarchy, or any of the outdated customs that millennials and Gen-Z populations have been constantly fighting against. Customs and social issues like clothing, tattoos, hair color, piercings, sexual or gender identity, gender, and racial identity that many of the millennial and Gen-Z population are seeking acceptance of. There’s no paper associated making it environmentally friendly – good news for climate change activists and environmentally conscious individuals everywhere. Of course, its subject to the small matter of being unusable without an active internet connection. As internet coverage has grown larger and more reliable, this has become something of a non-issue.

What a wonderful world that is; and I can certainly identify with – to be free to go anywhere, and do anything, without the nuisance of converting, and sacrificing any portion of our value to conversion and transaction fees.

I imagine that the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, had the same line of thinking in 2008 – the desire to create an arena where national origin and race did not matter; where gaming transactions could occur without conversion fees, and everyone could simply enjoy their games. I’ll continue in the same personal nuance as this is my preview piece; and say that I can deeply identify with this sentiment. Reports say that he/they disappeared in 2010 after mining over a million Bitcoin – now worth over USD$48 billion. As a new product development scientist working in a conservative and short-term thinking workplace, I can only imagine the frustration that he/they felt at the lack of enthusiasm over Bitcoin’s abilities to create a more inclusive world at the time.

I hope that he/they can see its growth now – and the creation of many more cryptocurrencies. This kind of invention takes time; and patience. It pushes the frontiers of what society is ready for – and in 2008, many of the world’s population couldn’t envision such a digital world. I remember my Nokia Razr flip phone at that time (and by the way, how is that company doing now?) – and now I can access any of my cloud documents, anywhere, on my phone.

The real mystery is, what has Satoshi Nakamoto been doing the last eleven years? If he/they is a frustrated inventor that ultimately fell to the societal and cultural pressures of providing for a family via a traditional job, it’d be simultaneously pleasurable and mundane – help get the kids ready for school, give the spouse a kiss good-bye, work a day in either information technology or finance, and come home to make dinner, help the kids with homework; do it all over again the next day. Maybe there are no kids, just the spouse and job. Or just the job. Maybe he/they holds out some hope and checks in on their creation every few days, tells others some stories about what they created – either a cautionary tale not to hope for too much, or to be patient and stick with it.

Maybe he/they is a gamer; classic introvert – even in winning the ultimate prize, they want to quietly collect their prize and go back to what’s comfortable. Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is, they haven’t exposed themselves; which means that either the world needs to figure out who owns the largest share of Bitcoin; or like many other Bitcoin miners – they lost their Bitcoin.

In any case, I hope the creators of Bitcoin find it extremely ironic that the extraordinary rise of Bitcoin is at a time when social tensions are at an all time high. As I said it’s February 2021 – the coronavirus is still raging since its debut in China, circa Fall 2019. Media and politics seem to proceed public health and science in several countries on the global landscape. Many countries are pursuing quarantine and mass testing as the primary pandemic control strategy while the masses await a vaccine. Vaccines are another issue entirely – will political and media pressures rush an ineffective and unsafe vaccine to the market, or will science prevail in this matter? I could never assume for those in another country, but as a landlocked American with ties elsewhere, the sanctuary of a cryptocurrency that can transcend this madness is certainly appealing.

While we wait for Satoshi Nakamoto to take the credit for their revolutionary creation that debuted at an inopportune time of the recession created by subprime mortgages in America; I challenge each of us to continue inventing and learning. More so, to support each other in these pursuits, regardless of our origins and differences. It is downright depressing to come up with something revolutionary with the best of intentions and have the entire world crap on it, only to celebrate it eleven years later. I’m not sure that even USD$48 billion could heal the bitterness that would come with that.

Far be it for me to say what the Satoshi Nakamoto story is, but I’d say that this is the story of a young man or group of people who loved gaming and wanted to transcend our national geographic, cultural, and financial barriers. Their invention came before the world was ready for it – before the expansion and availability of software and hardware capabilities related to the world wide web. It’s a story of young persons being tamed by societal and cultural pressures, and introvert(s) being too modest and shy to come forward. Who could blame them? The world collectively shat on their work, so they moved on. Let’s all learn from this story and try to accept and support each other more.

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