Along with railroads, cryptocurrencies were one of the world's top innovations of the millennium

Based on Stuart Hylton's commentary on "the making of Modern Britain" and my interpretation of blockchain's impact on today's world, this article presents readers with a semi-fictional witty story. I find it interesting how the depiction of leading-edge technology in the industrial age parallels the modern awe and fear of blockchain. Some terms are so relevant that changing "railway company" to "blockchain protocol" is not at all inconsistent.

After several "bubbles" (actually 8 so far) and some big announcements - remember Libra and TON? - I think now is a good time to shape the history of emerging technologies, it may be the past 500 years greatest innovation ever.

interesting comparison

From the distance of two centuries, it is difficult to understand or even believe in the impact of the development of the railway in the early 19th century. Likewise, the casual observer is caught between Bitcoin (BTC) preaching the end of the dollar and the crypto skeptics of the big banks. In fact, it is still impossible to see any obvious development trend of distributed ledger technology in the next few decades.

The physical impact of the railways was dramatic: "Great mechanical horses, belching fire and smoke, hauled incredibly heavy trains at unimaginable speeds, across landscapes transformed by the embankments, cuttings, viaducts, and tunnels required for their passage. landscape." Stuart Hylton describes the power of new industries, often dire and speculative, over Britain.

From these informative and interesting storytelling, I see almost like a retrospective of the blockchain industry. Railroads "changed the way wars are fought and the peace is kept," and blockchain can disrupt authoritarian regimes and propaganda machines, too. While early trains proved to be one of the key drivers of the "dramatic industrial growth of the 19th century," blockchain could also revolutionize finance, the main artery that feeds the current economy. Railroads have forced “the state to reconsider its laissez-faire policy, which is its default position,” while blockchain has not yet become the leading force to liberate people all over the world and return their assets.

The following summarizes what encryption does for us, using the railroad analogy.

Shock and the originator of cryptocurrencies

Electronic money and triple entry bookkeeping predate Bitcoin. Blockchain properties of the most recent block linked to the previous block using hashing go back to at least 1995. Then, academics Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta envisioned a way to time-stamp digital files to solve the intellectual property problem. In 1991, they created a chronological chain of hashed data to verify its authenticity and used it four years later when it was published in The New York Times.

While the cryptographers didn't set out to create an ambitious project, a series of discoveries inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to launch the Bitcoin protocol as a response to the unfair and opaque global banking industry. As Burniske and Tatar highlight in their book Cryptoassets, crypto gradually attracted the attention of everyone from cyberpunks to dealers and traders, until a reporter asked an interesting question: the workload What exactly is Proof of Work (PoW)?

Ironically, Satoshi never mentioned "blockchain" in his 2008 white paper. Rather, the Bank of England proposed in 2014 that "distributed ledgers" were "a key innovation for digital currencies". The following year, two popular financial magazines drew attention to the concept when Bloomberg Markets published an article titled “Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything” and The Economist published "The Trust Machine".

“What could be more absurd than a train traveling at twice the speed of a stagecoach?” wrote the British Conservative magazine, the Quarterly Review, in 1825.

Likewise, people didn't know the point of blockchain in the first place. Some hail this as the premise of bitcoin, placing more emphasis on the cryptographic aspects of the technology. Others found reasons why it wouldn't work. Interestingly, the banks themselves have been ignoring and later actively opposing the idea of sharing their ledgers with other parties. It didn't take long before they fully embraced the idea and started joining many affiliates like We.Trade and R3.

"We see that in this magnificent creation (referring to the railway) is a source of intellectual, moral and political interest, which transcends all measures and costs." When the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, the "Quarterly Review" stood at its own opposite.

The earliest railways existed long before George Stephenson and were mainly used for the movement of goods, such as coal from mines. When the steam engine opened up new power, even then railways were considered a cumbersome, incomplete, and even dangerous "solution to no problem" when there was already a well-established network of canals. The steam locomotive had to pass the Rainhill trials of 1829 to pave the way for its future. It reminds me of blockchain proponents trying to convince VISA and SWIFT that their time is coming to an end, or Andreas Antonopoulos winning consensus before the Canadian Senate.

"High-speed rail travel is impossible because the passengers cannot breathe and would suffocate," said Dionysius Lardner in his 1824 book Familiar Explanation and Diagram of the Steam Engine.

In 1864, King William I of Prussia said: "No one wants to pay a lot of money to go from Berlin to Potsdam in an hour if he can ride a horse for free in a day."

Despite enormous skepticism, railroads continued to improve because few risk-takers could have foreseen such enormous potential and bet their money and their careers on new technology. Suddenly, the railroad challenged time and space: those localized by the speed of the horse-drawn carriage had access to a wider continent. Today, in the middle of the third industrial revolution, blockchain promises to counter the whole idea of value exchange and humanity by offering a brave new world. This is inevitable.

So, what happens next?