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Two simple analogies to explain Bitcoin and the Lightning Network
World War II Salvage, Ponies, and the birth of a new financial system.
Bitcoin
In 1952, a North Carolina man named Malcom McLean took out a $22 million dollar loan that would change the face of international commerce.
With that loan, he bought a pair of WWII-era oil tankers.
Over the coming months and years, Malcom gutted them. He ripped out baffles, braces, and tanks. He reduced the ships to shells. And in their cavernous darkness he started welding something new. He added braces, clamps, chains, and hooks. Four years later, he was done.
In April of 1956, Malcom McLean launched the world’s first container ship.
It set sail from Newark, New Jersey with fifty-eight identical steel containers on board — each of them full to the brim with goods bound for Houston.
Freddy Fields (a leader of the International Longshoremen’s Association) was asked what he thought of Malcom’s invention. His response? “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch.”
Freddy Fields and his Longshoremen were a critical link in the global supply chain.
