What follows is an open letter from Jimmy Zhong, co-founder and CEO of IOST, to his team members and shared with Bitcoin Magazine with permission.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about an ultimate way of safely storing value — gold, Bitcoin, real estate and power all came to mind. That’s when I started to realize that, in essence, the concept of a “store of value” is simply an act of consensus. Power, even, is no exception.
Thousands of years ago, due to geographical and technological limitations, human beings relied on seashells as a store of value and medium of exchange. Seashells, today an unthinkable form of currency, were valuable for their rarity, but only because their value was agreed upon in a social consensus.
As mankind developed, we strived for a sturdy yet relatively rare replacement. Enter gold: chemically stable, very unreactive and unlikely to form compounds — making it hard to damage or corrode, rare in supply and difficult to cast. Together, these qualities allowed for a global consensus to form, making gold a relatively secure store of value.
Then, in 2008, with the continued development of cryptography, the first portable, rare and sovereign asset in the history of mankind was born: Bitcoin. As a species that is exploring Mars and hoping to one day go beyond Earth, humans need reliable digital assets. Bitcoin was a major step toward an era of comprehensive digitization capable of evading the risks of a centralized system. As Peter Thiel once said, “Bitcoin is a hedge against the whole world falling apart.”
It didn’t stop there. The Ethereum network went live in July of 2015 — Vitalik Buterin’s way of showing the world that there is incredible potential for blockchain technology to reshape the world we live in. Suddenly, blockchain wasn’t just
