"A little over ten years ago, I convened the first board meeting of The Bitcoin Foundation. At the time, Bitcoin was a loose agglomeration of people working on whatever interested them. It was the first serious (and we now know, successful) attempt at creating a decentralized digital currency—something Satoshi called “a blow for freedom” in his original whitepaper. The Bitcoin Foundation was an experiment, an attempt to provide some support for the chain, community, and core team. Despite detractors, the Foundation model is a vital tool for effective governance in our industry today.
Twenty years before that, Neal Stephenson was just about to publish “Snow Crash,” the book that literally defined the Metaverse and in the process inspired a generation of technologists. I’m from a generation of technologists inspired by Neal as well—the slightly later 1999-era “Cryptonomicon” reading group."
- Peter Vessenes