I saw a comment by Liu Cixin about blockchain that was quite shocking.

He said he’s never seen anything like Bitcoin in science fiction novels—this is a rare case where technology has outpaced sci-fi.

It does make sense when you think about it. Humans landing on the moon was written about endlessly by sci-fi authors, so when it actually happened, it didn’t seem so mysterious. But blockchain? It appeared out of nowhere. No foreshadowing, no buildup.

With all the imagination sci-fi writers have, why did no one come up with this decentralized ledger system in advance? Maybe because it’s too counterintuitive—it doesn’t require a central authority, yet it enables strangers around the world to establish trust.

This makes me curious: what will be the next technology like this? Could it be something in a direction we can’t even imagine yet?