Crypto, like railways, is among the world’s top innovations of the millennium

cointelegraph.com:

You are about to read a half-fiction witty story based on Stuart Hylton’s review of “the making of Modern Britain” and my interpretation of the blockchain’s impact on today’s world. I found it fascinating how the description of the industrial age front-runner technology resembled the awe and fear of blockchain in modern times. Some quotes are so relevant that changing the “railroad company” to “blockchain protocol” would give the same shilling.

After several “bubbles” (actually eight so far) and some huge announcements — remember Libra and TON? — I figured it was a good time to coin (pun intended) the history of the emerging technology that could be the biggest innovation in the last 500 years.

Why bother? From a distance of two centuries, it is difficult to grasp or even believe the impact that the development of the railways must have had at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a similar manner, the common observer is stuck between a Bitcoin (BTC) evangelist preaching the dollar’s Doomsday and a big bank’s crypto skeptic. In fact, there is no clear trend of what to expect from distributed ledger technology in the next few decades.

The physical impact of railways was dramatic: “great mechanical horses, breathing fire and smoke and drawing impossibly heavy trains at unimaginable speeds, across a landscape transformed by the embankments and cuttings, viaducts and tunnels their passage demanded.” Stuart Hylton depicts the powerful role that emerging industry, often scary and speculative, has had on Britain, a selected case for a thorough review.

The author engaged me in informative and entertaining storytelling, which seemed almost a parallelled retrospective into the blockchain industry. Railways “transformed the way