Fast forward to 2024. Elias was sitting in a cramped cubicle when a headline flashed on his monitor: Bitcoin Hits New All-Time High.
It was 2010. The post was simple: a link to a whitepaper about "peer-to-peer electronic cash." Elias didn't care about the philosophy of decentralization; he just liked the math. He followed a series of complex instructions to set up a node, opened his terminal, and typed the command that would change his life: ./bitcoind -daemon buy bitcoind
"You're buying magic internet beans," his roommate, Marcus, laughed, watching Elias move the coins into a digital wallet stored on an old Dell laptop. Fast forward to 2024