f you’re stupid enough to buy [Bitcoin], you’ll pay the price for it one day.”
– Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, 2017
On March 10, 1876, a new invention sent an invisible electrical signal through a pair of copper wires. On the other end of those wires, the signal was converted to sound waves and Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant heard the now-famous words: “Watson – come here – I want to see you.”
Later that same year, across the Atlantic, the chief engineer at the British Post Office boldly claimed that “The Americans have need for the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
Meanwhile, over in America, the President of the Western Union Telegraph Company asserted that “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”
New ways of doing things have a natural tendency to obfuscate the old ways.
Today, given the prominence of the telephone in our everyday lives, these assertions, made by some of the top executives and experts in the field of communication, seem remarkably absurd. And yet, at the time, they didn’t sound so ridiculous.
History is replete with entrepreneurs and inventors who have pushed the envelope of innovation and invention to the very edge of human imagination and maybe a little beyond. But new ways of doing things have a natural tendency to obfuscate the old ways, and there are always individuals and groups that benefit from the status quo who are quick to dismiss, and sometimes even condemn, new contraptions and revolutionary ideas.
The Birth of Bitcoin
On January 3, 2009, an anonymous developer known as Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first 50 bitcoin and created the Bitcoin Genesis Block. Since then, Bitcoin has provided the basic blueprint for hundreds of other currencies and platforms and has inspired the creation of an uncountable number of blockchain-based solutions to real-world problems.
