Bitcoin is often compared to the internet in the 1990s. But a better analogy may be the telegraph in the 1840s: the beginning of a transformation whose full scope we can barely imagine. Bitcoin Astronomy was our exploration of the distant future, but what about one closer to home?

Bitcoin Ecology explores the nearer future by starting with the past. Why did earlier digital currencies fall short? What made bitcoin succeed? And how could its peer-to-peer markets provide a model for decentralizing much more than money?

From thousands of providers competing to carry your data across the world to AI paying for its own computation, this series looks ahead at how bitcoin could reshape the internet in the image of bitcoin’s decentralization—and how it might align new kinds of artificial life.