It's my first article, I'm still trying to figure out how all this works. And I was surprised as well to know that cryptos have been around since the 20th century. Blockchain itself is a new idea but cryptos are not. You might want to read about the work of David Chaum, who was the founder of Digicash. Digicash was a commercial company created in 1989 which proposed building a system of anonymous electronic payments for governments and private companies. You might also want to read about e-cash, which is also a digital currency that was being developed by Citibank in the late 90's. As you can imagine both projects ended up failing.