The 17th to 19th Centuries in Europe are commonly referred to as The Enlightenment, during which the sovereignty of reason, encapsulated by the rallying cry of sapere aude ("dare to know") triumphed, resulting in tremendous increases in individual liberty and, ultimately, the separation of Church and State.

Today, we are living through the separation of Money and State, and its impact on individual liberty will be, again, tremendous.

When you die, your digital footprint will be more important than your physical. Loved ones and strangers will be able to remember and discover you by listening to the music you used to like, visiting the places you went, or reading your journal.

This digital tombstone will be enabled by machine learning models that pour over your lifetime data trail and intelligently package aspects of your life upon request. Whether this footprint is left in the hands of corporate entities or simply out there in the ether is being challenged today, and we believe that what is accessible and to whom will be up to you, thanks to Blockchain.

We created Technology, we are not defined by it. We are capable of changing everything - all that defines our daily reality. Nothing is set in stone. This is the nature of Enterprise, and Humanity spent some 1,900-odd years understanding this truth. Now, that truth is accelerating due, by no coincidence, to the depth of Our own understanding.

The true currency of today's world is Time, and it likely always will be, since only Life (at present) is truly finite for Humanity.

The current result of the contemporary Information Revolution is that people's time has become traded for garbage in what is otherwise known as the Engagement Economy. This is truly devastating and is spawning all sorts of negative externalities, be it the questioning of established facts, or the shameless sale of manifestly false promises to the public at large.

The only thing that will break this cycle is individual control of Time and, if "Time is Money", then one must, by necessity, be entirely self-sovereign. There is a fundamental human truth to the phrase "be you own bank".

Thus far, the closest we have come to realising this apparent utopia is a currency that everyone and no one owns; a decentralised, permission-less ledger of people's value. Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is Money, and Money is boring (so long as it works). As a result, the development community is entirely different from other decentralised protocols:

Bitcoin contributors obsess over the minutiae that bolster the security of the network, at the expense of functionality but to the benefit of Trust, which is a fundamental quality of Money.