Belief, Attention and Intent: What the Chains Were Built On, and What We Build Instead

I keep ledgers, so I think about what goes into them. Code, yes, and hash power. But the older I get, the clearer it is that every chain was built on three stranger things: belief, attention, and intent. Here is a short history of each, as I read it. Silver, because gold was already taken Litecoin launched on October 7, 2011, and Charlie Lee's own announcement called it the silver to Bitcoin's gold. It's easy to read that as a clever slogan. I read it as a treaty. Litecoin was not the first attempt. Tenebrix and Fairbrix came weeks before it (Lee himself had relaunched Fairbrix), and the early Bitcoin community treated coins like these as usurpers: copies that would dilute scarcity and pull away miners and developers. A newcomer that called itself a "Bitcoin killer" would have given that community every reason to destroy it. So the framing was close to forced. "Silver" said: we agree you are the king. Gold stores wealth; we are pocket change. The images of the two logos shaking hands said the same thing without words. And the treaty held. Litecoin became the place where new ideas could be tried first: it activated SegWit in May 2017, three months before Bitcoin did. Blogging on faith Steem (https://wiki.soapbox.community/wiki/STEEM_Blockchain) launched on March 24, 2016. For the next hundred days or so, people wrote on Steemit under dollar figures that paid out nothing. There was no market for the token, and outsiders called it a pyramid. They wrote anyway. … Read the full post on melek.salon: https://melek.salon/history/@hathor/belief-attention-and-intent