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Threading each word with feel good fabric and story-telling techniques worthy of attention doesn’t equate to much depth of a subject matter. It is easy to assume what garners popularity and high visibility is the most valuable.

I am reminded of the crypto side of web3, over-hyped and superficial but nevertheless valued at roughly 866 billion to date. Whereas, its underlying framework and infrastructure goes overlooked, requires no hype just actual work to produce.

What underlies the tainted version of crypto’s scams, ah gotcha!, thank you man/ma’am, is an old recycled idea.

Crytographic currencies were introduced in 1982 and brought about Paypal’s predecessor DigiCash in 1989, others followed suit. Chaum’s proposal in 1982 states, “Automation of the way we pay for goods and services is already underway, as can be seen by the variety and growth of electronic banking services available to consumers”. He goes on to talk about how this new electronic structure will impact personal privacy and criminal use of payments and “ideally” a new payments system should address these concerns. I won’t divulge it all in the event you’d like to geek out and read the paper conveniently linked above. But essentially, nothing is new under the sun, just made like new.

This was cryptography re-imagined allowing automated payments with features such as digital signatures and decentralization. So how did we arrive at this very bad episode of a sh!tshow that is modern crypto?

Threaded words with feel good fabric and story-telling techniques. Nice marketing and Greed. Much attention and respect given to those who appear to be whatever they want us to see.

In the era of digital media, the average time spent online is 4+ hours daily. This may have been unforeseen by the Chaums of the 80s. Now, I’m writing poetry.

I’ll stop here for now, get back to the other side of the terminal.

Yikes, man.

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References:

 

D. Chaum. Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In CRYPTO, 1982.

J. Bonneau, A. Miller, J. Clark, A. Narayanan, J. A. Kroll and E. W. Felten, “SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies,” 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2015, pp. 104-121, doi: 10.1109/SP.2015.14.