In 2015 the two threads of the next decade were both spun in the same year.
2015 saw Ethereum go live and OpenAI founded within months of each other: programmable money and a serious bet on general artificial intelligence. In July, New Horizons returned humanity's first close views of Pluto after a journey of more than nine years.
2015 is a year I think about often, because two things started in it that now define almost everything. Ethereum went live, taking Bitcoin’s idea and making the money programmable, able to carry logic and contracts, not just value. And at the end of the year, OpenAI was founded on the audacious bet that general machine intelligence was something you could actually aim at.
Crypto and AI, the two loudest forces of the decade that followed, were both just seeds in 2015, easy to wave off.
I had learned by then not to wave off seeds. This whole archive is really one lesson repeated: the thing that looks like a toy in the quiet years is the thing that runs the world in the loud ones.