From Cypherpunks to Crypto Billions: The Untold Story of How Blockchain Happened ebook

Before Bitcoin made millionaires, before NFTs broke the internet, a small group of cryptographers dreamed of money governments couldn't control. This is their story—and everything that came after. This visually rich narrative traces blockchain technology from its ideological roots in 1980s cypherpunk communities through today's multi-trillion dollar Web3 ecosystem. You'll discover the people, ideas, failures, and breakthroughs that transformed obscure cryptography into technology reshaping finance, art, governance, and identity. Journey through defining moments: the cryptography breakthroughs that made digital scarcity possible, Satoshi Nakamoto's mysterious Bitcoin whitepaper and disappearance, early adopters buying pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin, Ethereum's launch enabling programmable money, the ICO boom and bust, DeFi summer that rebuilt finance, NFT mania that confused the world, and DAO experiments in decentralized governance. Meet the visionaries and villains: cypherpunks who laid ideological foundations, developers who coded impossible ideas into reality, entrepreneurs who built exchanges and platforms, scammers who ran billion-dollar frauds, regulators struggling to contain innovation, and ordinary people whose lives changed through cryptocurrency adoption.