The date was January 2008.

The place was the virtual world of Second Life.

The event was banning unlicensed banking and related financial operations.

At that time, speculators were having fun trading on the many exchanges that offered ‘Linden Dollars’ (game tokens used in the virtual world to acquire products and services) for fiat currency, and vice-versa. We would see charts and graphs that looked pretty much how crypto looks today — the difference was the order of magnitude: transactions with Linden Dollars are measured in millions of US$, crypto trades in billions and beyond.

We saw the same scams, the same fraudulent schemes, the same greedy opportunists who would defend the most outrageous ‘companies’ (most of which weren’t even legally registered anywhere…), only to have everything crash. This tiny bubble lasted in Second Life for perhaps three years or so.

Satoshi Nakamoto put up his Bitcoin.org site in August 2008.

Coincidence?…

Disclaimer: This author had previously posted a similar text as a comment on Medium.