Op Ed: Making Friends With Time in the Cryptocurrency Space

What follows is an open letter from Jimmy Zhong, co-founder and CEO of IOST, to his team members and shared with Bitcoin Magazine with permission.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an ultimate way of safely storing value — gold, Bitcoin, real estate and power all came to mind. That’s when I started to realize that, in essence, the concept of a “store of value” is simply an act of consensus. Power, even, is no exception.

Thousands of years ago, due to geographical and technological limitations, human beings relied on seashells as a store of value and medium of exchange. Seashells, today an unthinkable form of currency, were valuable for their rarity, but only because their value was agreed upon in a social consensus.

As mankind developed, we strived for a sturdy yet relatively rare replacement. Enter gold: chemically stable, very unreactive and unlikely to form compounds — making it hard to damage or corrode, rare in supply and difficult to cast. Together, these…