Is that you with red, drowsy eyes from all-night Bitcoin research, obsessively consuming all available cryptocurrency info, boring everyone around you to death while moaning, soullessly blockchains… blockchains! Yes? Then you too are a Block Zombie.

How did this happen?

Prior to “infection” you were probably like most other humans. On discovering Bitcoin and other blockchain technology, people dismiss it as yet another cute technical theory. A skeptical view presumes that any software solution to a problem of real world economics cannot avoid being crushed by the might of large central banks, corporate financial institutions and nation states, doubly so for a community-driven project. Alternative currencies aren’t even new. Leading the skeptics are those who have seen this movie before. Maybe a starry-eyed idealist could accept the theory, but only the very youngest and most naive would dare think that such preposterous upstarts could be allowed to flourish for long. Surely such unruly schemes would be shut down before they reach a useful scale.

It’s sensible to be skeptical.

Technology is full of spin and snake-oil. Add abstract economics to the mix and highly charged topics like illicit underground markets, peer-to-peer internet sharing and a whiff of “get rich quick” hyperbole and you have combination that would cause strong warning signals from anyone’s pattern-matching intuition.

The skeptic resists accepting the improbable until there are enough compelling reasons to believe it. So at some point, skeptics need to get educated. If you do the homework, you become ripe for Block Zombie infection.

After scratching the surface of the blockchain, the courageous skeptic discovers a deep and compelling world of open possibility beneath. Incredibly the cryptocurrency world bears little resemblance to the often confused and contradictory reports from an equally confused press. Perhaps it’s not just a den of thieves and Ponzi scammers, illicit markets and tulip mania. Once your mind is open, questions flood in. How can it work? Who controls it? What could cause it to fail? Each answer raises further questions, but it appears increasingly solid.

At some point in the discovery of bitcoin the penny drops. This is a big deal. It’s a much bigger and more important than it seemed at first. It’s a paradigm shift.

Bitcoin has a steep learning curve. Every insight reveals an even greater potential, most remarkable of all is how far into that future possibility today’s bitcoin is already well prepared for. Another incredible realisation reported by many Block Zombies is that after reading about Bitcoin, one becomes aware just how poorly understood traditional money is!

Some people arrive at Bitcoin via a technological path. Others discover it via a path of finance or economics. Many approach Bitcoin with a political agenda such as American Libertarianism or “Anarchocapitalism”. Whichever way, the persistence results in the same undead infection, the same monstrous realisation that Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are a virtual tsunami that is approaching ill-prepared world economies, still dominated by 20th Century institutions. Its dangerous forces present the possibility of a massive increase in human potential, but not without heavy disruption, much like the internet itself.

Are you prepared for the Block Zombie apocalypse?