If you look at any innovation that we currently use and take for granted, you will be amazed at how much progress humanity has made. Sir John Harrington invented the flushing toilet for use in the Queen's palace in 1596. In the 1600s, electricity was discovered by a persistent experimental odyssey started by William Gilbert, and improved by the likes of Thomas Browne, Benjamin Franklin, and Allesandro Volta.
Closer to our times, and with electricity now a basic need, telephones, the internet, and mobile phones are all innovations that have made our lives easy.
Can you imagine a world without electricity? What about smart devices and the internet?
We have incrementally changed how we communicate with each other through the internet, email, and the modes of communication thereof. However, one area of our lives that has been lagging behind in innovation is our concept of money.
Before the blockchain invention, we only used to talk about money in the context of where it is minted, widely used and controlled. Think of the US Dollar, the Canadian Dollar, and the British Pound just to mention a few.
This association between money and the powers that be used to firmly put the money minting and control debate at the hands of governments. And the reason is simple. Control the money, and you run the world.
Anyone who tried to mint money before would be crushed by the system. And examples abound, as with the case of e-Gold Ltd in the US in the early 2000s.
That is until the Bitcoin was born, and its inventor, in his wisdom, built a decentralized system of creating the coin, and in the process spark one of the greatest innovations of our times.