The Crypto Four Minute Mile: Have we Reached our Most Important Milestones?

Driving along a sweltering-hot road in Australia on a Sunday ‘arvo’ in the late 80s brings up all sorts of childhood memories for me. Mainly helping my dad take junk to the local rubbish tip and listening to Phil Collins or Jethro Tull, but some good conversations always came out of those trips. For my dad, the conversations could move quickly from logic gates and Boolean functions to whether John Bonham really was the greatest rock drummer of all time. However, one particular day we settled on discussing the four-minute mile.

Being a relatively talented runner, at least in those days, I was fascinated by how many people thought the four-minute mile wasn’t possible. It baffled me how it was considered the ultimate measure of human physical limitation, and, therefore, it just couldn’t be done. With youth and arrogance by my side, I calculated that four laps of the outside of a cricket field would make up about a mile and one minute per lap sounded pretty easy to accomplish.

At that point, sighting a public field, my dad pulled the car over and said “Okay, four laps of that field, that’s about a mile. If you don’t do it then you wash the car when we get back. If you do, five dollars is yours.”

Easy.

It Can’t Be Done

Over half a century of debate and scientific study would lead to precise parameters that needed to be met for the barrier to fall. The conditions to break the four-minute mile would have to be perfect: 68 degrees, no wind, a hard and dry clay track with a massive crowd to spur the runner onwards.

But it was on a cold day, with a wet track, at a simple race in front of just a few thousand people, that Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. A problem with no apparent solution had, somehow, found one. On reflection, one must ask, what was the problem in the first place? Was it one of science? The perfect conditions? Or simply the mental barrier for all those who tried before?

The Crypto Barrier

I’ve stopped counting the number of times over the years where the crypto community was told it was a ‘flash in the pan’. Experts were saying that the medium would die, that it couldn’t sustain itself or have any meaningful impact on the global economy. Yet, every time the naysayers spoke up, we then had more key moments that define a tech and an economy that is thriving in imperfect conditions, much like Bannister did on that memorable day.

The initial rise of crypto was done in imperfect economic conditions. The Bitcoin network came into existence in January of 2009, mere months after the huge global financial collapse. Its continued growth through a worldwide recession defied the conditions that experts considered ‘correct’ for the growth of a new store of value but grow it did, with the first organisations accepting the coin in 2011.

My guess is these ‘imperfect’ conditions were indeed quite perfect for those pioneers to break the mental barrier initially presented from early digital currency prototypes. As the saying goes, “Sometimes it’s all in your head.”

Lighting the Way

46 days after Bannister broke the four-minute mile, one of my own countrymen, John Landy, posted a time that was 1.5 seconds faster. A year later, three runners broke the barrier in a single race, and to date, 1400 people have produced a sub-four mile. Bannister’s achievement lit the way, and people followed in droves.

Was the launch of the Bitcoin network our four-minute mile? It allowed for the rise of alternative coins like Ethereum, EOS and NEO, as these coins saw ways to improve upon the original blockchain technology. Perhaps it was the solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem through Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW), which “proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust”. Maybe it was Bitcoin breaking the $1,000 mark, sparking a huge climb to $20,000 per coin in 2017, and bringing the rest of the market with it.

All are viable arguments, it seems.

Maybe, Maybe Not

Four laps of that cricket field I ran. The sun was baking down and draining my energy as I clocked my father’s eyes on his watch. The field was hard and undulating and my heels hurt as my 12-year-old’s bare feet struck the compressed grass. The conditions were imperfect in a typically brutal Aussie summer. Everything was against me.

3 minutes and 32 seconds was the time. Nailed it! My father’s reaction… “I think that probably wasn’t a mile.” A deal is a deal and that $5 was the sweetest I ever earned.

We both finally agreed that it probably wasn’t a mile but the story of Roger Bannister and his four-minute mile has stuck with me ever since. In 2005 it was named the greatest athletic achievement of our time, and it occurred to me recently that only after 50 years was such a title bestowed upon the feat.

Cryptocurrency has been around for just under 10 years and we have no way of knowing whether the launch of the coin, the achievement of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BZT) or the breaking of the $1,000 barrier was our four-minute mile.

There are those out there who believe we have yet to reach a similar milestone in the medium, and there’s no evidence to suggest this isn’t the case. Our current dreams see cryptocurrency as the future store of value and medium of exchange all around the world and maybe this will one day be our highest achievement.

But much like when I ran four laps in that harsh summer sun, I had no real way of gauging the reality of the feat. And until we’re a lot further down this path, I don’t think we in the blockchain community will know either but, man, what a journey it’ll be.

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