Web3 Marketing

2The Evolution of Bitcoin and Ethereum

On September 11, 2001, I was in the fourth grade at an Episcopal girls' school in Washington, DC. In the middle of that morning's English class, we were told a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, and that our parents would be coming to pick us up early; we were not yet aware of the attack on the Pentagon less than six miles away. When I got into the car with my mother, she was crying—something I had never seen before. “This might change everything,” she said. “I'm not sure what happens next.”

A confluence of historical circumstances in the first decades of the 21st century accompanied the shift from Web1 to Web2. These events would likely inspire Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, to build the technological foundation of Web3. The first event was 9/11. After winning the Cold War, many Americans believed something like Fukuyama's thesis that history had reached its logical conclusion—namely, the Western order led by the United States, which, unlike previous failed empires and superpowers, would justifiably and basically peacefully dominate forever. After all, hadn't we introduced prosperity to the whole world by spreading democracy and capitalism through globalization? Who could really be against that? Against us?

Of course, many dissenters had long said otherwise, but for many Americans, 9/11 shattered the myth of an untouchable last superpower and exposed wider cracks in the American mythology. ...