Bitcoin is born, a digital currency and peer-to-peer payment system. Andreessen, creator of Netscape and a pioneer in the early years of the internet, hopes this will spark a better model for rewarding content on the internet and creating greater value. The visionary Ted Nelson, in 1963, and Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, envisioned a two-way hypertext system. Nelson called it Xanadu. Essentially, every single piece of information published on a global computer network would be published with the address it points to, as well as the address from which it points. If their vision had been implemented on the World Wide Web, it would have given rise to a system that automatically valued content, counting and weighting the links pointing to the information, making a potential micropayment system for publications easier. Instead, the network developed differently, with a single-way approach.
