Despite its recent cultural relevance, cryptocurrency was actually introduced to the public in 2008. Nearly two full decades ago now, that year was when the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto first published his Bitcoin white paper titled “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” With the publication of this document, Nakamoto announced the debut of the first-ever form of entirely digitized currency, and it was met with a heavy dose of skepticism from insiders and outright apathy from the general public.

It’s important to remember just how different the world was in 2008 from the one you know today. While it was less than twenty years ago in actuality, the speed with which culture has accelerated over those years cannot be overstated. For example, in 2008, the most popular social media site in the world was the still fairly nascent MySpace. Today, MySpace is all but extinct. To this end, while it made perfect sense to Nakamoto that, in the aftermath of the Great Recession in the United States, people would be looking for alternatives to traditional banking methods, it didn’t to everyone else.