I love how whenever a new technology comes out the amount of applications are never fully apparent.
When I first heard of bitcoin back in 2010 I thought it was a cool concept, but sending money to unknown people across the world? That never crossed my mind.
Now that I think about it, we do it all the time in the forms of charities. Tsunami victims on the other side of the world, a fund is set up to help them out, and most people might say, I'll chip in a dollar, but I can't be fucked to find out how, and sending a dollar is hard anyway. Then mobile phone operators started offering SMS payments, and people had a simple solution.
With cryptocurrency this solution is even easier. It wasn't until it actually happened that this clicked for me.
Consider telephone for example, initially it was used to talk to other people over a long distance, but it was thanks to that concept of sending information down a wire that made it possible today to eg. look at a live webcam on the other side of the world right now.
Imagine telling someone 200 years ago that you could talk/see a person on the other side of the world in real time. Remember, phones didn't exist, motion picture was unheard of etc.
They would think you are mad.
It would be as unbelievable as saying today you can use buy a Rolex watch made in Europe online and it would be teleported to your desk.
But who knows, maybe this will be possible in the future.
And maybe in retrospect it would have been obvious.
When I first heard of bitcoin back in 2010 I thought it was a cool concept, but sending money to unknown people across the world? That never crossed my mind.
Now that I think about it, we do it all the time in the forms of charities. Tsunami victims on the other side of the world, a fund is set up to help them out, and most people might say, I'll chip in a dollar, but I can't be fucked to find out how, and sending a dollar is hard anyway. Then mobile phone operators started offering SMS payments, and people had a simple solution.
With cryptocurrency this solution is even easier. It wasn't until it actually happened that this clicked for me.
Consider telephone for example, initially it was used to talk to other people over a long distance, but it was thanks to that concept of sending information down a wire that made it possible today to eg. look at a live webcam on the other side of the world right now.
Imagine telling someone 200 years ago that you could talk/see a person on the other side of the world in real time. Remember, phones didn't exist, motion picture was unheard of etc.
They would think you are mad.
It would be as unbelievable as saying today you can use buy a Rolex watch made in Europe online and it would be teleported to your desk.
But who knows, maybe this will be possible in the future.
And maybe in retrospect it would have been obvious.