Sunday Summary, NOV23

A week in review from the Editor

A quiet suburb in Pretoria,

South Africa, in the mid-1980s. A lanky teenager named Elon Musk walks into a classroom, his mind already racing with ideas pulled from science fiction novels and rudimentary computer code he’s been teaching himself on a Commodore VIC-20.

The teacher glances up, perhaps noting the boy’s intense stare or the way he sometimes zones out, lost in thought. Did anyone to their neighbor and whisper, “That kid’s going to build rockets one day”? Or did they just see another awkward teen who read too much Asimov and argued too fiercely in debates?

His mother, Maye, has spoken of young Elon devouring encyclopedias and correcting adults with unnerving precision. Yet to most neighbors, he was simply the eccentric boy who sold a homemade video game to a magazine for $500.

The world spun on, largely oblivious.

We love origin stories because they promise that destiny can hide in plain sight, but history suggests the real signals are faint, and often drowned out by the noise of ordinary life.

Napoleon was once a Corsican artillery officer mocked for his accent. Gandhi was a timid lawyer who could barely speak in court. Beyoncé was a talented girl from Houston whose early group, Girl’s Tyme, lost on Star Search.

The pattern holds: extraordinary outcomes rarely announce themselves early.

Now, apply the same lens to Bitcoin.

In October 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto posted a whitepaper to an obscure cryptography mailing list, how many people paused? A few hundred subscribers at most.

The title was dry: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” No marketing, no TED Talk, no viral tweet (Twitter barely existed). Just a pseudonymous figure offering a solution to a problem that most of the planet didn’t know existed. To the handful who replied, it was impractical, destined to failure, or flawed in premise. The world kept spinning. Lehman Brothers had just collapsed; people were worried about mortgages, not magic internet money.

For years Bitcoin remained the domain of cypherpunks, libertarians, and a few curious programmers meeting on forums like Bitcointalk. Hal Finney, the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi, tweeted in January 2009: “Running bitcoin.” That was it. No exclamation marks. In 2011, when the price first touched $30, mainstream headlines called it a bubble, a scam, “tulip mania 2.0.” Regulators yawned or smirked.

Central bankers certainly didn’t lose sleep.

But, beneath the ridicule and indifference, something irreversible was coalescing. A network that no government could shut down, no company could co-opt at its root, no single point of failure could kill.

Genius doesn’t always win quickly; it’s that true paradigm shifts often arrive disguised as toys or heresies. They accrue strength in the shadows while the crowd mocks or ignores them. At 16 years old—Bitcoin is no different.

The world has a habit of underestimating that which is early. Greatness, whether in a Pretoria classroom or a cryptography mailing list, rarely introduces itself with trumpets. More often it arrives quietly, persistently, and, when we finally notice, suddenly.

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