A personal tale of gaming hardware, lost Ethereum, and the layered nature of human progress
Bitcoin: An Idea Whose Time Had Come
There is something strangely humbling about human progress: brilliance alone is not enough.
You can have the blueprints for an airplane, but without industrial aluminum, it remains a fantasy. You can invent the finest cryptographic algorithm, but without global networks, it gathers dust.
Ideas must wait for the soil of civilization to be ready. When it is — they bloom seemingly overnight.
Bitcoin was one of those ideas.
I. Progress Is a Layered Cake
I once knew a sharp systems engineer back in the late 90s. In 1996, he spent six grueling weeks installing Sybase database software — via floppy disks.
Not hours, not days — weeks.
Just to get a basic enterprise database running was an epic of cables, patches, and patience.
Fast forward to 2015: the same job can be done in ten seconds with a Docker container. Or today, with a Helm chart spinning up Kubernetes pods in the cloud — entirely automated.
Why? Because progress is a layered cake. Each generation builds on the layers of the last.
Take airplanes. Even if Leonardo da Vinci had possessed perfect blueprints for a Boeing 747, he’d have been stuck. Why? No aluminum.
Industrial-scale aluminum processing is only a few centuries old. Without it, there’s no airframe strong and light enough to fly.
Here’s a delightful historical twist: nearly 2000 years ago, a clever merchant demonstrated a shimmering new metal to Roman Emperor Tiberius.
It was made, he claimed, from sand — and more beautiful than gold.
Tiberius, whose wealth was largely plundered gold, grasped the threat instantly. If this “sand metal” spread, his riches would be devalued. He had the merchant executed — and humanity forgot about bauxite-derived aluminum for another 1500 years.
The moral: progress waits for readiness. And even then, it often faces resistance.
II. Why Bitcoin Could Not Have Been Born Earlier
Bitcoin is not just “software” or “magic internet money.” It is an emergent monetary phenomenon — the child of many converging technologies.
Bitcoin could not have emerged in 1990. Nor in 2000. It required a perfect storm — which finally arrived in 2008–2009.
The essential ingredients:
1️⃣ Cryptography Maturity
SHA-256, digital signatures, Merkle trees — the Lego blocks of trustless computing had to mature and standardize.
2️⃣ Global Networks
A reliable, fast, affordable internet was required — not fragile dial-up.
3️⃣ Affordable Compute
CPUs and GPUs had to be widespread enough for average users to run nodes and mine.
4️⃣ Cultural Catalyst
2008’s Global Financial Crisis shattered trust in fiat money and central banks.
Satoshi’s Genesis Block contained a sly message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Bitcoin was not just code — it was a reaction to a broken system.
5️⃣ Theoretical Breakthrough
Satoshi finally solved the Byzantine Generals Problem — achieving consensus across a trustless network through Proof of Work.
For the first time in history, humans had a scarce, decentralized, uncensorable digital money.
III. Why Bitcoin Had to Emerge Exactly When It Did
If Satoshi had launched Bitcoin in 1995, it would have failed. The internet wasn’t ready. Cryptography wasn’t mature. The cultural moment hadn’t arrived.
If Satoshi waited until 2035? Perhaps state surveillance and financial repression would have blocked it entirely.
2009 was perfect:
The technology was ripeCultural distrust in fiat was highThe need for an “exit” was visceral
In short: Bitcoin was an idea whose time had come.
IV. How Bitcoin Helped Birth the Modern AI Era
Here’s a delightful hidden chapter of this story:
Bitcoin’s rise indirectly funded the GPU revolution — which in turn made modern AI possible.
Early Bitcoin miners used CPUs. But GPUs — with their parallel architecture — soon dominated.
Then came altcoins like Ethereum, driving even more demand for high-end GPUs.
This GPU demand sustained NVIDIA and AMD through years when gaming alone would not have justified vast R&D into graphics hardware.
And here’s the kicker: without these GPU advances, we would not have ChatGPT today.
Training ChatGPT-3.5 reportedly cost billions. In 2010, it would have cost trillions — or simply been infeasible, taking months or years to complete.
You could have thrown infinite money at the problem in 2005 — it wouldn’t have mattered. The foundation wasn’t there.
Thus: No Bitcoin → no GPU arms race → no modern large language models.
Technologies don’t evolve in silos. They evolve entangled, like threads in a great tapestry.
A Personal Detour
Personally, I stumbled into Bitcoin entirely by accident.
It all began with a quest — not for monetary sovereignty, but for frames per second.
Back when PUBG dominated PC gaming, I coveted the fabled NVIDIA 1080 Ti — a beast of a GPU, perfect for buttery-smooth gameplay.
But it was expensive. I reasoned: “Perhaps if I mine a bit of Ethereum or Bitcoin on the side, I can offset the cost.”
So I bought the card, mined diligently… and managed to produce about one Ethereum.
And then — in a classic crypto tale — I forgot the wallet password.
Yes — my first foray into crypto ended with a powerful GPU, many chicken dinners in PUBG, and a lost ETH.
Ironically, my gaming card was unknowingly fueling two revolutions: crypto and AI.
Such is progress — often accidental, often poetic.
V. What Bitcoin Really Is
Let’s be clear: Bitcoin is not merely an “investment.”
Here’s what it is not: ❌ Just a speculative asset ❌ Just a tech curiosity ❌ Just “number go up”
Here’s what it is: ✅ The first perfectly scarce, censorship-resistant, self-sovereign digital money ✅ A monetary network controlled by no government and no corporation ✅ Freedom encoded in math
Attempts to “ban” Bitcoin are like trying to ban math or energy. You can make life difficult, but you cannot uninvent an idea whose time has come.
VI. Where Do We Go From Here?
The future? Impossible to predict. But tantalizing.
We stand at the cusp of new frontiers:
AI is accelerating rapidlyRobotics and bioengineering are mergingMoney is entering a new era
In 10–20 years, many of us may operate as cyborgs — humans augmented by AI agents handling everything from finances to creativity.
In such a world, trustless, neutral money becomes ever more critical.
Imagine AI agents transacting on your behalf — do you want those transactions mediated by central banks? Or settled freely on a neutral protocol like Bitcoin?
Bitcoin may not merely be an “alternative investment.” It may evolve into the base layer of value for our emerging machine-augmented civilization.
VII. Lessons from History
Remember the story of Tiberius and the “sand metal”? Ideas that threaten existing power structures face suppression — but only temporarily.
Aluminum was once more precious than gold. Today, we fly because such suppression ultimately fails.
Bitcoin today is ridiculed, feared, banned, embraced — but it is simply the next stage of monetary evolution.
Just as the industrial world needed cheap aluminum, the digital world needed Bitcoin.
Now that it exists, there is no going back.
VIII. A Larger Philosophy of Progress
Zooming out, Bitcoin reminds us: Progress is layered, contingent, and deeply fragile.
Brilliant ideas fail when the world is not ready. Weaker ideas succeed when the infrastructure happens to support them.
Bitcoin succeeded because the world was finally ready — technologically, culturally, politically.
And it speaks to something profound in us — the longing for freedom, fairness, and sovereignty.
In an age of growing digital control, Bitcoin offers a rare counterweight: Agency restored.
It is not perfect. It is not finished. But it is here.
IX. Closing Reflections
In 1996, my friend wrestled with floppy disks. In 2025, kids spin up global infrastructure with a few lines of code.
In ancient Rome, a disruptive metal was suppressed. Today, we fly because such suppression fails in the long arc of history.
Bitcoin was an idea awaiting fertile soil. Now, that soil is global and digital — and growing richer by the day.
And in a delicious twist of fate, the GPU arms race spurred by Bitcoin helped enable the AI revolution we now witness.
No Bitcoin, no ChatGPT. No Sybase, no cloud. No aluminum, no flight.
Ideas do not live alone. They are entangled, woven into the great fabric of civilization.
Where this all leads? No one knows.
But I, for one, can envision a future where humans and AI agents transact in seamless value exchanges — with a humble protocol called Bitcoin quietly humming at the heart of it.
Freedom encoded into math. An idea whose time had come.
And whose time is, perhaps, only just beginning.
The future is uncertain. But history rhymes. We are fortunate — or perhaps fated — to witness the dawn of digital money. It is worth paying attention.
PUBG, GPUs, and the Accidental Road to Bitcoin was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
