Founding Fathers of Technological Revolutions: Why Geniuses Often Remain in the Shadows
Pasadena, late 1930s. A young self-taught chemist, Jack Parsons, launches homemade rockets in the Arroyo Seco canyon near Los Angeles. At night, he immerses himself in the world of esotericism and the occult. Several decades later, his developments would help propel humanity into space. Parsons would become one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and his contributions to rocketry would form the basis of the American space program. A crater on the far side of the Moon would be named after him. However, during his lifetime, he died in obscurity, and the press labeled him a "priest of a black magic cult."
The story of Jack Parsons is an archetypal narrative of how world-changing ideas are born on the periphery, among people whom contemporaries consider eccentrics. States and corporations are interested in maintaining the status quo. Experimentation is a risk without immediate gain. Therefore, radical novelty rarely emerges where power and capital are concentrated. A small community of like-minded individuals has no reputation to lose and no superiors to be ashamed of failure in front of. The periphery becomes a laboratory of the future precisely because it can afford to make mistakes.
From the "Suicide Squad" to Solid-Fuel Engines
Parsons began his experiments in 1928 with his school friend Ed Forman. In 1934, they were joined by Caltech graduate student Frank Malina. Most scientists at the time considered talk of space flight to be science fiction, and the group was dubbed the "Suicide Squad" for its series of dangerous experiments. Parsons' main invention was a composite solid fuel that could be cast into any desired shape and mass-produced. The solid-fuel engines of the Minuteman missile and the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters trace their lineage back to this technology. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory grew out of the "Suicide Squad" in 1943, and a year earlier, Parsons co-founded Aerojet, a pillar of the US military-space industry.
Freedom as a Double-Edged Sword
By day, Parsons was an engineer. By night, an occultist. In 1946, he wrote an essay, "Freedom is a Double-Edged Sword," which became a manifesto defending individual freedom against any repressive authority. He warned: "When the majority is deprived of freedom, barbarism appears on the horizon. But when the creative minority renounces freedom, the Dark Ages set in." Surveillance, vanishing privacy, a bet on a handful of dissenters — half a century later, these ideas would become the creed of a movement that would give the world Bitcoin.
Cypherpunks and the Birth of Bitcoin
The cypherpunks of the 1990s became the literal embodiment of Parsons' "creative minority." In 1992, mathematician Eric Hughes, engineer Timothy May, and programmer John Gilmore founded the eponymous mailing list, and a year later, Hughes published the "Cypherpunk Manifesto" with the line "Cypherpunks write code." Bitcoin grew out of this environment. In January 2009, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block, embedding a headline from The Times about a new bailout for banks. In its early years, the project's fate was decided by a handful of anonymous individuals on forums, and "money without the state" seemed like a toy for geeks. But over a decade and a half, it transformed into a exchange-traded asset, approved by the SEC in 2024.
Survivorship Bias
From Parsons' story, it is easy to draw an overly general conclusion: since the future is born on the periphery, any persecuted idea must be right. But for every idea that changes the world, there are hundreds and thousands of failures. Alchemists never learned to turn lead into gold, and phrenology remained a historical curiosity. In the crypto industry, dozens of projects promised to revolutionize the market, raised enormous sums of money, and disappeared a few years later. The success of an idea is determined by whether the technology works, whether it solves a real problem, and whether anyone is willing to pay for its implementation. A position on the periphery provides the freedom to experiment, but in itself guarantees nothing.
My analysis: Parsons' story is a powerful reminder that technological revolutions are often carried out by outsiders whom society is ready to reject. For the crypto industry, this lesson is particularly relevant: today's "crazy" ideas in the fields of DeSci, neural interfaces, or network states could tomorrow become the foundation of a new economic reality. However, investors should remember that the periphery is not a guarantee of success, but merely a field for experimentation, where only a few survive.