Imagine you could send money the same way you send a photo — and still keep your original
That mental model exposes the core problem blockchain set out to solve.
For decades, digital cash failed because information is easy to copy. Early solutions used a central authority to stop duplicates, but that reintroduced control, censorship, and single points of failure. The question was: can a network agree on “what’s true” without trusting any one party?
Enter Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008). It combined three ideas into a working system: a distributed ledger everyone can see, blocks of transactions linked into an immutable chain, and economic incentives to secure the network. The result: a scarce, censorship-resistant digital money (max supply: 21 million) that solved the double-spend problem without a bank in the middle.
Why this mattered: decentralization isn’t just ideology — it’s practical. A credibly neutral system treats every valid transaction the same, regardless of who you are. That opens up permissionless access for people excluded by unstable or repressive financial systems.
Then came Ethereum (2015). Vitalik Buterin asked: if we can make money trustless, why not agreements? Ethereum made the blockchain programmable. Smart contracts are code that lives on-chain and executes automatically — think automatic flight insurance: if a flight is delayed more than 24 hours, the policy pays out instantly, no claims department, no disputes.
Two quick analogies:
- Bitcoin is a calculator: simple, secure, built to do one thing well — store and transfer value.
- Ethereum is a world computer: flexible, Turing-complete, built to run complex, unstoppable applications.
Bottom line: blockchain removed the need to trust a central intermediary for preserving truth. Today that technology secures money, and increasingly, automates agreements that once needed armies of intermediaries.
What’s one manual, trust-heavy process in your world that you’d like to see become an automatic smart contract? I’d love to hear examples.