Walkman and Bitcoin: A Revolution from Personal Music to Independent Finance

[Coin World] This is an excerpt from the Supply Shock newsletter. When Satoshi built Bitcoin, they stood on the shoulders of giants. Bitcoin could only emerge in 2009 after the World Wide Web appeared in 1989, and the reason the World Wide Web became so popular was due to the advent of microprocessors in the early 1970s. These three innovations are all echoes of the telegraph. What I want to tell you here is that Sony's Walkman might be equally important.

The launch of the first Sony Walkman didn't happen entirely today. Yesterday, in 1979, Sony began selling the TPS-L2 in Japan—a blue, pocket-sized portable cassette player that became a global cultural phenomenon in just two years. Legend has it that Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka requested the company's tape recorder division to design a device for listening to operas during long flights. A secret team of engineers began working on it. They took apart the Sony TCM-100B, also known as Pressman, which was a portable cassette recorder that could be operated with one hand and had only been released a year earlier. Pressman had already become popular among journalists and businessmen for recording voice memos, and it was capable of playing back recordings at 1.5 times speed through its built-in speaker.

The innovation chart from Bank of America highlights the position of certain inventions in human population history. The chart compares Bitcoin with the polio vaccine and DVD, but the Walkman is not included. Within four months, under the leadership of engineer Kozo Ohsone, Sony's team replaced the Pressman's speakers and recording circuits with a stereo amplifier, producing a prototype on the same chassis. A portable stereo cassette player was created, equipped with a pair of lightweight headphones. Despite internal protests from skeptics at Sony, the first batch of 30,000 Walkman units sold out in just eight weeks in Japan, and by the end of 1980, 2 million units had been sold worldwide.

Although there had been iterations of portable music players before, Sony's Walkman quickly became a must-have across various sectors. The New Yorker described in September 1981 that they saw "diplomats in Washington, flight attendants in Chicago, cable car ticket agents in San Francisco, and toddlers in Seattle, all wearing Walkman tape players or their imitations."

To understand the situation: In the 1970s, having a portable personal soundscape was not possible. Creating a device that could achieve this was not a very complex technical challenge... but there was fundamentally no verified market.

Does it sound familiar? Before the Walkman, it was simply not possible to be your own DJ outside of the home and away from stereo systems. The Walkman changed social behavior, allowing people for the first time to isolate themselves with headphones in public spaces, on trains, buses, and airplanes.

This is an older slogan, but Bitcoin also makes it possible to be your own bank, at least beyond hiding cash under the mattress or in the walls. Bitcoin has changed the way people behave economically, providing an alternative to a financial system that has never served everyone. Both the Walkman and Bitcoin face resistance from society, with critics labeling personal audio systems as self-indulgent and antisocial, as accessories of the "me" generation. Bitcoin has hardly escaped its cultural connotations with criminals and fraudsters in other respects, although this is unfounded.

From a certain perspective, the Walkman may have culturally prepared us for the arrival of Bitcoin 30 years later, gradually allowing us to accept that we can become anything we want, no matter where we are. But here’s how Bitcoin beats the Walkman: The Oxford English Dictionary took a full nine years to include "Walkman" as a mainstream English term. Bitcoin did it in half the time, alongside "twerk" and "emoji."