To appreciate why Bitcoin is such a great innovation, you have to understand a great number of different variables, including economics, politics, history, and technology. Although I have a decent background in all of these areas, it took me a long time to appreciate the full genius of Satoshi and potential of Bitcoin. What follows is my own story from skeptic to believer.
My initial appraisal of Bitoin was that it was a fascinating technical innovatoin that would forever be accessible only to a very small segment of the population that salivates over cryptography.
Ironically, it was in the process of creating a startup that in many ways was the polar opposite of Bitcoin that I started to appreciate the core innovations of Bitcoin. My own platform, Evergreen, contained it's own blockchain optimized for high velocity micropayments, with a unit of account weighted to a basket of currencies and commodities. In many senses, it was a reflection of an international monetary system as I would have designed it, fa