Bitcoin and Blockchain: Poised to Be As Monumental as Printing Press

From Crypto.IQ

The expression “everything old is new again” rings true for most people because evidence of it is everywhere. The seasons return each year. The markets move through up and down cycles. People die in the same buildings where babies are born.

History, literature, fashion, and science reveal that the nature of everything is cyclic, and it made us wonder how blockchain fits with that paradigm.

Uses for blockchain emerge daily, but we know each relies on the technology’s enabling of information sharing, its role as a trust machine. At its core, blockchain is a peer-to-peer way to communicate about anything and create an immutable record of that communication, all without the need for trust between parties.

It can take some mental extrapolation to understand the full impact of making these capabilities available to anyone. At Crypto.IQ, we believe it’s a leap in personal and popular sovereignty that humanity hasn’t seen in almost six centuries.

Charlie Shrem, principle at Crypto.IQ said the potential for change has an analog in history, Johannes Gutenberg’s 1439 invention of the movable type printing press. It changed not only the way people kept and shared information, it also changed who could do the sharing.

“Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and blockchain technology is as important as the invention of the Printing Press because here you have the ability to decentralize information and decentralize financial systems,” he said.

Prior to its advent, information and the ability to share it through reading, writing and hand printing books was left to the powerful few: popes, kings, the nobility. After Gutenberg though, information poured out to the masses, leading to a flowering of human thought and creativity over the ensuing centuries.

The printing press helped launch the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Essentially, it was the first step to what would become our modern, knowledge-based society.

Unfortunately, there’s another, less positive parallel to Gutenberg’s time. His printing press gave rise to a techno-panic that had people worrying about, among other things, the press putting scribe monks out of work and in danger of going to Hell.

Fueled by bank-inspired FUD, blockchain has seen its own techno-panic related to scam coins, fears of digital assets eventually being worthless, and security concerns in the face of relentless attacks, some of them from the governments and banking institutions that would happily see blockchain go down in flames.

Over the centuries, information gradually became easier to access, but that trend began a reversal over the last 100 years that led to an erosion in people’s access to it. The powerful have created and kept a stranglehold on society through theft of personal data, media conglomeration, and attacks on developments they see as threats to their hegemony. But blockchain challenges the powerful on each of those fronts and wins handily at each encounter, evolving in response to each attack. So in light of blockchain’s resilience in the face of these attacks and its increasingly stable place in modern life, we couldn’t help wondering one thing: How big will blockchain’s impact be on future generations if the printing press led to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment?