Over the long arch of human history, it was rare in anyone's life that something comes along to disrupt society's collective applecart profoundly. Over the past 200 years, that has changed. Electric lighting extending the workday, telephone improving our ability to keep in touch, and penicillin helped us live longer, healthier lives. As profound and influential as these have been, seldom was it apparent when first introduced. In part, they didn’t require much out of the end-user to use them. We didn’t have to learn anything complicated for them to work. We just used them.
The internet's growth through the 1990s was different; it required people to learn new stuff, including a new language. Those who made a modest investment of personal time to understand internet technology and what it meant, wealth often followed. This wealth wasn’t granted through connections into predicate industries or who you knew but rather what you knew; it came as a result of individual curiosity and an investment of personal time. The top five companies in the S&P 500 (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook) are all new-comers with the internet, their principal means to success. Their founders followed their curiosity and investment of time.
Given what you’ve just read, what might you want to do going forward? Would you know a new disruptive technology if it came up and kissed you on the lips? If you found it, would you invest in your time to learn what you can in the expectation of your future prosperity? Or perhaps you would prefer to wait for any technology to evolve to where you can take advantage of it without having to make any cognitive investment? All choices are reasonable, though a few are more costly than others.
Well, this question is in front of you right now. There is a new, sophisticated, and admittedly a bit complicated technology around that will dramatically impact your future. This technology is very young, expanding across the globe, and even lives on a satellite. This technology has created thousands of millionaires and will create tens of thousands more over the next 10 years, and it is open and available to you and everyone you know.
This technology is Bitcoin. The broader market is cryptocurrency, but don’t waste your time there until you first understand Bitcoin. Like the internet, it is better experienced than explained. The rest is up to you; I’m happy to help.
Be well,
Tom
@ThomasACoss
