The honeymoon is over for cryptocurrency. Now for the shotgun wedding ...

The honeymoon is over and the big guys are moving in.

It is 1989 and Sir Timothy Berners-Lee builds what we today call the web. The combination of language (HTML), a communication protocol (HTTP) and the means to see the information (The browser). The objective was to give better access to thousands of documents created at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Then came the first eCommerce transaction. There are competing accounts about when and what was sold first - was it a CD or books or an email server? Here is the timeline and you can decide for yourself. But I vividly remember the uproar in the web community how anybody could dare to bring business to the pristine land of information exchange and a paradise without borders.

Now we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Shopify, Facebook. I’m not sure how close that is to the paradise people imagined.

It is 2008 and an entity called Satoshi Nakamoto invents Bitcoin. It combines various concepts and technologies (peer-to-peer network, cryptographic algorithms, blockchain, crypto wallet and more). Bitcoin is positioned as a decentralized cryptocurrency without a central bank. Since 2008, many things have happened in this space. Thousands of cryptocurrencies (7,800 according to CoinMarketCap have been created. We've been introduced to Tokens and all this is under the premise of freedom from the controlling central authority. If only ...

It is 2014 and Gemini Trust Company, LLC (Gemini) has been given approval by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) as a digital currency exchange and custodian. In 2020 - the US Feds talks about digital currency. The European Union is talking about eEuro.

Now, it is April 2021 and China is releasing Digital renminbi and the IRS wins court approval to serve Kraken with a request for customer information.

It is an exciting time to work in technology. The intensity and the concentration of new ideas is overwhelming. The ability to invent and test new things is exhilarating. It always has the feeling of a Gold Rush. But then governments move in, consolidation happens and things become boring again.

Whether the relationship between cryptocurrency innovators and governments is a marriage of convenience or a shotgun wedding, they’re setting up for a long-term relationship.

Thanks to new technology, we will be able to buy, sell and exchange things easier, faster and better. Governments will be able to collect the taxes easier, faster and better. Then the inventors will move on to build something better and the excitement will continue to help humanity move forward.

And that's the recurrent pattern.