Smoke Signals

Communication. This is what separates us from the monkeys. It isn't an opposable thumb, or our upright walking position, or our hairless faces. No, the major difference between us and the animal kingdom, is our remarkable ability to successfully share information with each other.

Humans are born with an insatiable will to speak our thoughts out loud. To share with others. Our feelings, our wishes, our demands, our ideas about our experience in this world demand to be spoken. We are built with the will to be heard, and understood.

Every healthy child learns to speak the language of their parents, or caretakers, no matter the circumstance. Parents don't "teach" their children to talk. Our brains seem to almost be pre-wired for it. The ability to communicate through speech is built into us, from the start.

Barely 4-5 years from birth, most healthy people have an incredibly high proficiency in communicating their needs and wants with the world. Body language, voice tone, word choice, even nuance of expression are just a short list of the different modalities of expression easily mastered at a very young age.

Our desire to share our thoughts with the world only grows as we mature. It isn't long before our thoughts turn from what is, to what could be. Speaking of our ideas isn't enough. The temporary condition of the spoken word has proven to not be enough to satisfy.

Our singularly desire to communicate is so strong, that the next step is a move to a system of symbols to represent speech. Alphabets, numbers, writing, printing and books. Art, music, mathematics and stories are all part of the mosaic we use to communicate the abstract, in attempt to fulfill the desire to be understood. It is essential to who we are as beings.

Words and symbols are the fiat currency of information. We have spent tens of thousands of years developing, and fine tuning our systems of abstract fiat, as a way to exchange and preserve ideas in order to build on them. Each generation doesn't have to start from scratch, because of our expertise at preserving information in a variety of manageable and retrievable forms.

As complex as these systems of communication are, todays ability for us to leverage the processing power of computers to heighten communication to the next level starts with one simple foundation. Our ability to represent the symbols that we are familiar with using nothing but a series of 1's and 0's.

It can be a bit of a mind bend to think of it.

This binary system of communication has been used for centuries. From smoke signals to the short and long of Morris Code, we have found creative ways to communicate simple ideas with just two symbols before. Technology has taken this system and used it ro build a virtual world.

Tethered to our physical world with a thin strand anchored in the microchips sprinkled throughout every city, this world is something like humanities collective unconscious. It was in this realm that Bit Coin was created.

The virtual world of the interconnected web belongs to us all. BitCoin is a creation of that world. Its value is in its encryption, and its ability to be a one to one transaction. Time, efficiency, and privacy, all have a value, and BitCoin mining is the process of gathering that value, and converting it into a currency.

BitCoin, and other forms of crypto currency are only the logical expression of the new economy of value. Gold was once used as our standard, in the future it will be slices of time gathered by efficient programs that will be the foundational standard of currency.

In other words, BitCoin has its origin in us all. The way that cultures all over the world crafted paper money out of a value standard (usually gold), it was only a matter of time before a system of digital fiat currency emerged.

The minute that we created a system to break down information into the binary, the digital world became possible. The minute the digital world became possible, BitCoin became inevitable.

Binary systems of communication can be traced back at least to the first smoke signals used in China almost 2000 years ago. The semi abstract realm of the digital, and everything that could not exist without it, is dependent on this system of dual symbology. Which is where the true origin of BitCoin can be found. In the smoke symbols of the past.