Humble Beginnings

Sitting at his desk. That is the life that He led. Mundane tasks, day after day, and He yearned for something more. He hated the life that He led. All of the pomp and circumstance bored Him and even enraged Him to just be another rusted part in the commercial machine. The lights of the skyline shone through haze of the drizzling rain ongoing through the window. He knew that He wanted more from this life mundane existence, a provocation to make Him question the reality that swirled around and left Him in a constant fog. A puzzle that He wanted the world to solve. He wanted to make a difference, Something that could challenge not only the way that he saw Himself but also change the way that others could live their everyday lives. A bubbling feeling was rising in His chest and He began to ponder. What was it? What was this idea that was itching just beneath the very surface of His skin? Sitting there as if bile would start spilling from His mouth at any moment, He started to do what He knew best. Staring at the blank screen before Him, He began to code. Line after line, variable after variable. He continued that night until His fingers were going numb. He wanted to make something huge. Something important. Something that would make a difference for those longing for a new way of life. Everyone at the bitterly cold, dark office had already left and as the hypnotic rhythm of the rain descended further into the depths of His consciousness, it took His last bit of will power to pry His eyes away from the monumental task that called out to Him behind the pixels of a screen. Restless sleep came to Him that night, scattered with dreams of continuing His grand design.

He worked tirelessly for days, that turned to weeks and morphed into months on end until He began to see the pieces falling into place. Building blocks started coming together into a much bigger picture than was first imagined. He was developing something that he knew would change the way that the green monster that plagued the planet would be viewed forever. Money, wealth, power, envy… A decentralized currency. That was the key. The seeds had been sewn back in the 90’s with W. Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber’s public ledger process at Bell Communications Research, and He knew of their developments very well. He was just expanding on the idea. To the extreme, in fact. Hal Finneys’ work added another layer to His blueprints and with the implication of RPow algorithm, His vision became clearer than ever. Meticulously piecing together the ideas, He decided to run with it. He had been working towards this goal for too long top stop now. Transactions, using tokens, that He named Bitcoins, that were solely peer-to-peer with no tracking element whatsoever. He wanted to free the people from the iron grip that capitalism had so tightly on our necks. It took out the middle man and gave the power back into the hands of who really matter in all of the nothingness that He had been a part of for too long. Us.

Knowing that this technology could change everything, He knew that He had to stay quiet, sit back and keep working. Hour by hour and day by day, He pushed himself to the very limit of what He thought to be possible until finally, it clicked. Electronic cash was the future. This grand scheme... was the future. By skipping the hardware aspect of the whole process, the digital ledger that He named the blockchain, is what ended up doing all of the work. He put on his suit and tie every morning to get back to work but then it would morph into a technological pickax by the time He sat down at his desk. The computing process was a magical experience that unfolded right before His very eyes.

He began dropping cryptic messages and made the difficult decision to release a paper outlining the process of how Bitcoins came to be and to explain the work that He had completed. And after a few more long months of persistent digging at the chain of digital blocks, it finally happened. On January 3rd, 2009, the first digital block was officially mined and He was awarded a total of 50 Bitcoins. Although He knew that they were monetarily worth nothing at the time of their creation, He had done it. He had achieved the goal that He had set out to do and proved that something on such grand scale could be accomplished. And with all of that in mind, He sent the first peer-to-peer transaction of 10 Bitcoins, just a mere week and a half later, to the man that had the final pieces of the puzzle and helped to push the project forward into the light, to none other than Hal Finney himself.

Then the floodgates opened. It was a continuous stream of digital mining for the next few months and He had the freedom to digitally dig as much as he wanted. It was a seemingly endless supply of the digital tokens that He had created with this new monumental technology. He knew that this would be the game-changer for the monetary advancement of the future. Keeping his identity a secret along the entire journey, He leaned back in his chair and stretched as the sun bowed through the clouds outside of His office window. He took a moment to reflect and smiled to Himself. But then as soon as everything seemed calm, He snapped Himself back, shaking His consciousness back into reality. With a hearty crack of His knuckles, He straightened back up in His chair settled back down to work.