Back before NANO was what it is today there was a young man who had a dream of changing the world from what it is to what it can be.

Colin LeMahieu, the founder of NANO, seems to have understood the underlying issues with a currency that is not necessarily centralized by nature, but one that becomes bound to a reward system, making it controllable by those who wish to rake in the profits of those who want to use the currency.

Colin began his journey into cryptocurrency in 2010 when he first found out about the current king of crypto, Bitcoin, intrigued by the promises of a better future he decided to take a deeper dive. It just so happened that four years later he began expanding upon the original bitcoin concept, the original large scale peer to peer currency. Seeing what Bitcoin had turned into after the departure, of our Lord and savior Satoshi Nakamoto, Colin decided that it was time for a change. Thus, RaiBlocks was born.

To do what Colin set out to do he would need to re-invent the technology which made bitcoin what it is today, blockchain. The blockchain is a technology that has been around since the inception of Bitcoin back in 2009, and it is the underlying technology behind nearly 2000 different cryptocurrencies on the current market. The blockchain is not only utilized in the currency world, but it is also instrumental in much of the new underlying technologies behind things like supply chain management. The blockchain is an unalterable, time management system at its core. However, as a currency, it has much left to be desired.

Having a middle man in any currency leaves it susceptible to attacks praying on one of the most difficult to understand human instincts, survival of the fittest, it is something that has driven society to where it is today, and it is also driving our world away from where it needs to be. Greed, it is the be all end of all of humanity, the reason the poor are poor is that we attach value to everything, how one another looks, their intelligence, how much money they have when we are all sharing this planet, a symbiosis between mankind and the world we call home. Colin realized this, that is why he set out to create a better form of currency. One that does not need to go through a bank or another central entity. Something in which the people control the transactions, the effort put in to conduct the transfer of whatever goods they need.

Colin has stated that at any point if he finds another project that does what NANO has set out to do but better he would stop working on the project altogether. He understands the underlying implications of technology that can change how we conduct ourselves. How we choose to hold our transactions because at the core transactions are not meant to be one making use of your neighbor, they are there as a means of communication between two individuals. That is why the work on the NANO protocol as a whole is such a big deal.

Thus began the construction of the Block-Lattice, a message-passing data-structure where each account can add transactions to their account with zero contention. The NANO protocol is based on something that is entirely different from anything that has come before. At its core, it is a means of communication, based off of a wholly new architecture known as Block-Lattice. Block-Lattice has nothing to do with lettuce, and while it is loosely based off of Blockchain, from the ground up, it is entirely different. It is not necessarily setting out to keep track of time through a central chain of command. It is attempting to achieve something more substantial, communication between the people involved in the transaction. Everything that has to do with the actual deal between two people, or in case of the protocol the message, is handled by the people involved. From work done producing the information needed to publish that data to a public ledger. To the way the transaction can be confirmed by all of its peers, making it fungible. To the peers who take in the information shared by the two individuals, leading to a valid transaction based on a consensus mechanism which is not based on the need to have other people confirm the trade unless they choose to do so due to their interest of the outcome.

A fundamental shift in the status quo, this is what Colin was attempting to achieve. Before NANO became what it is today and what it strives to be, it started with the idea of being something scalable, quick, and fee-less. Achieving all of these things was a feat that most in the crypto space had had a hard time wrapping their heads around when RaiBlocks was born, it had a lot of doubt surrounding it. I indeed ask myself why that is, especially seeing as how we live in a society where change is happening all around us. Adapting to that change and embracing it is how we move forward, and we can do it together. Especially when that change is something that can alter the way we conduct our day to day communication, for not needing a middle man like a bank or someone else to do the work for you is the way we accomplish such a feat.

This is something that we can do together, humanity, sharing a symbiosis with, technology, with each other, and with the world and universe, we live in.