You are about to read a half-fiction witty story based on Stuart Hylton’s review of “the making of Modern Britain” and my interpretation of the blockchain’s impact on today’s world.
I found it fascinating how the description of the industrial age front-runner technology resembled the awe and fear of blockchain in modern times. Some quotes are so relevant that changing the “railroad company” to “blockchain protocol” would give the same shilling.
After several “bubbles” (actually eight so far) and some huge announcements — remember Libra and TON? — I figured it was a good time to coin (pun intended) the history of the emerging technology that could be the biggest innovation in the last 500 years.
Why bother? From a distance of two centuries, it is difficult to grasp or even believe the impact that the development of the railways must have had at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In a similar manner, the common observer is stuck between a Bitcoin (BTC) evangelist preaching the dollar’s Doomsday and a big bank’s crypto skeptic. In fact, there is no clear trend of what to expect from distributed ledger technology in the next few decades.
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The physical impact of railways was dramatic: “great mechanical horses, breathing fire and smoke and drawing impossibly heavy trains at unimaginable speeds, across a landscape transformed by the embankments and cuttings, viaducts and tunnels their passage demanded.”
Stuart Hylton depicts the powerful role that emerging industry, often scary and speculative, has had on Britain, a selected case for a thorough review.
The author engaged me in informative and entertaining storytelling, which seemed almost a parallelled retrospective into the blockchain industry. Railways “transformed the way war was conducted and peace was maintained,” so can blockchain disrupt authoritarian regimes and propaganda machines.
Early trains proved to be among the key drivers of the “dramatic industrial growth of the nineteenth century,” so can blockchain revolutionize finance which is the main artery pumping blood into the current economy.
Railways forced “the state to think again about the policy of laissez-faire that was its default position,” whereas blockchain has yet to become the leading force in liberating people across the world and returning them their assets.
Electronic currency and triple-entry accounting have preceded Bitcoin. The blockchain property of a recent block linking to the previous one using hashing dates back at least to 1995.
Then, academics Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta envisioned a way to timestamp digital documents for resolving intellectual property rights. They invented a chronological chain of hashed data to verify its authenticity in 1991, used in The New York Times issues four years later.
While the cryptographers didn’t intend to create an ambitious project, a series of discoveries inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to launch the Bitcoin protocol as a response to unfair and untransparent global banking.
As Burniske and Tatar highlight in their book Cryptoassets, crypto gradually captured the minds of various people, from the cyberpunks to dealers and traders, until some journalist postulated an interesting question: What is this proof-of-work (PoW) anyway?
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Ironically, Satoshi never mentioned “blockchain” in his white paper of 2008. It was the Bank of England that argued in 2014 about a “distributed ledger” being the “[t]he key innovation of digital currencies.”
The following year two popular financial magazines raised awareness of the concept when Bloomberg Markets released an article entitled “Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything” and The Economist published “The Trust Machine.” - Cointelegraph.
