I think the first time I heard the word Bitcoin was around 2011, though I honestly didn’t pay much attention. Some random person online was offering something in exchange for “crypto”—I didn’t really get what they meant. It sounded made up, like something from a sci-fi game or a Reddit joke.

Turns out, it was neither.

What I didn’t know back then was that this whole idea of digital money had been floating around for decades. Not just since Bitcoin. Way before that. You’d have to go all the way back to the 70s and 80s, when people were already thinking about how trust could work without banks—or governments, for that matter.

Guys like David Chaum were already talking about anonymous digital cash in the early '80s. Later, others like Nick Szabo and Wei Dai started putting more pieces together. These weren’t big companies or institutions—it was mostly individuals, posting on cryptography forums and obscure mailing lists, imagining what a decentralized world could look like.

Then 2008 happened. The markets crashed. Banks got bailed out. A lot of people lost everything. And in the middle of all that, this figure named Satoshi Nakamoto dropped a whitepaper online that laid out a completely different way to move value. No banks. No middlemen. Just math, code, and a bunch of strangers agreeing on the rules.

And there was this detail—super easy to miss—in the first Bitcoin block. It included a headline from The Times: “03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” Not a coincidence. That message was the context. Or maybe the spark.

After that, things moved fast. Other coins appeared, new platforms, smart contracts, tokens, you name it. And now here we are—somewhere between a revolution and a mess. Some people are in it for the tech, others for the money, some just want to challenge the system. Honestly, it’s probably all of those things at once.

I don’t really know where it’s all heading. Maybe it changes everything. Maybe it fades. But I do think there’s something worth holding onto here: the fact that a bunch of people, years before any of this went mainstream, sat down and imagined a world where power didn’t have to come from the top.

And yeah… that still sticks with me.