I come from the last generation to grow up without the internet. To know the characters I'm typing into the blockchain will exist essentially forever both thrills and disturbs me.

For years it has been said that anything you do on the internet is permanent. Don't post photos of yourself at the club when you told your boss you were off sick. Don't do porn if you want to go into politics. Don't do google searches you don't want coming back to you. That kind of thing.

But I remember an internet, well before the turn of the century, when everything was brand new and undecided. It wasn't widely known that what we were doing was permanent. "The internet" was, at first, just an application in our clunky old desktop IBMs. It was a way to send and receive "electronic mail", to visit www pages others had uploaded, and not too much else.

Times change.

More than 10 years ago, I warned my friends "everything we say or type into a computer or cell phone is recorded and attributed to us, for all time". They were dismissive and rude, as though I should never have even suggested it. When "the Snowden revelations" and other leaks revealed EXACTLY that, a few years ago, I took no pleasure in being right.

Here we are now, at the brink of yet another quantum leap forward. And without so much as a glimmer of contemplation, we've lept headlong off the cliff, arms and feet flailing. There is no going back.

Where is this leading? Blockchain code, from this layman's understanding, is unlike anything we humans have had before. FAR more than just a payment system, it's a new frontier - like the world wide web of the 90s - and we don't even know what it can do. We've only seen the opening chapter, but if Steemit is any indication, blockchain code is going to change the world.

And we need something to change the world.