When I was a kid, I remember walking down the block and noticing something different. The sidewalk—normally a cold, gray sheet of certainty—was soft. A fresh slab of cement had just been poured, smoothed over like a blank canvas. And suddenly, I was standing in front of it with a war raging in my chest.

Should I?

Would I?

Could I?

I knew what it was. A chance. A moment. A doorway to permanence. That cement was going to dry, and anything I etched into it would outlast the day, the week, maybe even my entire life. And so I hesitated, holding a stick in my hand, wrestling with a question far bigger than my age would suggest:

What is worthy of being remembered?

It’s a question humans have been asking for tens of thousands of years.

That urge I felt—to leave a mark, to outlive myself—isn't just about graffiti or childhood rebellion. It’s something deeper. Something primal. It’s the same drive that sent our ancestors crawling into dark caves to paint stories on the walls. Those paintings still speak today, frozen in time, but locked away in distant mountains and hidden chambers. The stories they told were meaningful, but they were isolated—geologically quarantined.

For most of our history, humans used oral traditions to pass down knowledge. Songs, chants, and myths were told and retold, generation after generation. Evidence suggests music wasn’t just entertainment—it was memory technology. A melody sticks in the mind, a rhythm holds a pattern. Perhaps that’s why music still stirs something ancient in us; maybe the blueprint for remembering is buried in our DNA.

Later, we turned to clay—etching stories into tablets. More portable, yes. But fragile. Smudged. Reserved for scribes and priests. Information was still a privilege.

Then came papyrus. Then paper. Then printing presses. Each innovation more egalitarian than the last, but still vulnerable. Fire. Water. Time.

Radio changed that. Then television. And then came the internet—an explosion of information, globally accessible, instantly transmissible. But even the internet is slippery. Servers go down. Platforms disappear. Links rot.

We’ve always searched for the perfect medium: something long-lasting, portable, and accessible. Something that doesn't just preserve the message, but democratizes the memory. Something that lets everyone leave a mark.

That’s what blockchains represent. Not just money. Not just data. But a new kind of sidewalk. A fresh slab of digital cement. Immutable, borderless, eternal (at least as far as human technology goes). It’s the next evolution in our species' quest to remember not just what happened, but who we were.

And what information is worth preserving?

All of it.

Because we don’t know what will matter tomorrow. We don't get to decide what future generations will find meaningful. We owe it to our species to remember the jokes, the journals, the contracts, the chaos. All of it. Just in case.

So let me take you back to that slab of sidewalk.

I stood there, still as the wind, heart pounding.

And I wrote one word:

Believe.

And then I walked away.