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🛡️ Secure your crypto properly with a Ledger hardware wallet

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Before Bitcoin, digital money didn’t try to reinvent value — it tried to anchor itself to it. In this second part of our series on the true origins of crypto, we tell the story of gold-backed digital currencies like e-gold and why they briefly succeeded where earlier systems failed.

This episode explores how digital money finally scaled in the early 2000s, why gold gave it instant legitimacy, and how millions of dollars flowed through online systems that allowed fast, global value transfer long before blockchains existed. But it also explains why that success contained the seeds of collapse — how centralisation, custody, and visibility turned gold-backed digital money into an easy target once it became large enough to matter.

We break down what actually happened when these systems fell apart, how legal and regulatory pressure unraveled them step by step, and why their collapse permanently reshaped how governments viewed digital currency. Most importantly, this episode shows why anchoring digital money to physical assets didn’t remove fragility — it concentrated it.

By the end, you’ll understand why gold-backed digital money was both a breakthrough and a dead end, and why the search for a truly resilient form of digital value had to move in a completely different direction.

Leave your thoughts in the comments, hit follow if you’re new, and join us next time as the series continues into the cypherpunk era — Hashcash, b-money, bit gold — and the ideas that nearly solved the problem before Bitcoin finally did.

We will see you at the top.

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