The Station
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Proof of History
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, anonymous builders and ambitious degenerates. This is the story of the meta game that we play, a chronicle of genius, betrayal, and ultimate achievement.
Years of hard work, heroic efforts from now-famous luminaries, and unsung labors from those long-forgotten have culminated in Solana, a technology and a community, a grand exchange of assets and innovations.
A lifetime could pass without an era-changing invention and social paradigm shift for which crypto would come to be known as.
Before crypto spawned new financial systems and massive digital communities, it was more dream than substance. An unexplored frontier of secrets, riches, and danger.
It’s 2015. I find myself in a small room in an unmarked building, lost amongst the concrete grid of San Francisco. Scattered on the disjointed furniture are a VC-type with the trademark Patagonia vest, a girl donning an oversized tie-dye shirt and a catlike scowl, an asian man wearing a cowboy hat, and a few tech guys with company-branded hoodies.
Despite our diverse appearances and backgrounds, a palpable energy flowed through the room. We were each venturing the crypto frontier on the fringes of the internet, connected by a shared vision of how it could change the world.
Ready to make their legend and seize what they believed was theirs, brilliant technologists, savvy hustlers, and cunning financial minds eagerly flocked to the new frontier.
Crypto in 2015 was the wild west. Tiny communities of individuals manifested highly valuable digital assets out of thin air, massive wealth was made and lost in a matter of weeks, and cybercriminals and law enforcement played an endless game of cat and mouse.
Cowboy hat man makes a comment about how the Fed is going to auction the Bitcoin seized from Silk Road. As if waiting for his cue all evening, the VC-type jumps in and declares that his friend is going to bid for it all. This devolves into a bragging contest of who knows who. I’m no longer interested and a little fed up with my IPA, so I decide it’s time to leave.
I bid my farewells and emerge into the crisp summer night air of San Francisco. I keep thinking about that cowboy hat and how out of place it seems in the city. I would continue seeing him over the next few years at various meetups and conferences, never without with his iconic hat.
Like anything that shows financial promise, the crypto frontier attracted plenty of gold-seekers. The digital gold rush reached its peak in 2017, when Bitcoin became a household name and Ethereum opened up a pandora’s box of possibilities.
The applications of crypto and blockchain seemed endless. Money flowed freely and numerous new projects were launched: “Token for X”. “Decentralized Y”.
No good western is without a colorful array of characters. The young genius Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum. The anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto of Bitcoin. The rising giant CZ of Binance. The upstart Justin Sun of Tron. Ex-Ethereum Charles Hoskinson of Cardano.
Creators of riches, they became idols and tribes formed around them. Almost everyone was part of a tribe, each a zealot in a bird-themed digital town square, and rarely did they get along.
“This coffee sucks” is the only thing going through my head as I sit outside a cafe with two other fellows I met last night in a Santa Monica bar. I glance at the people around me typing away, probably writing screenplays. My wandering attention is quickly drawn back to my table as the man in front of me bellows that Ethereum is no match for the new faster networks.
The short man to my right counters with “real developers only use Ethereum, while other chains are plagued by marketers, copycats, and grifters looking to make a quick buck.” Frankly, he gave off quite the salesman vibe himself with his white dress shirt and the way he kept saying our names in every sentence. Somebody took Carnegie a little too literally.
Bitcoin and Ethereum carried the majority of the weight of this new frontier’s dreams. They were the pillars of this nascent digitally-native ecosystem that eschewed centralized authority.
Proof of Work, the consensus model that powered both, exhibited drawbacks that prevented them from scaling. New factions arose to challenge the existing paradigm, but none came as close as something that came into existence in 2017.
I’ll always remember this quote about this particular technology by Packy McCormick:
“You don’t need to think twice about doing anything because it moves so quickly and costs so little. That’s the point. It feels like using the internet.”
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