"Begin at the
beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come
to the end: then stop."
As mentioned in the beginning, I think that any answer to the
question “What have you learned from
Bitcoin?” will always be incomplete. The
symbiosis of what can be seen as multiple living systems —
Bitcoin, the technosphere, and economics — is too intertwined, the
topics too numerous, and things are moving too fast to ever be fully
understood by a single person.
Even without understanding it fully, and even with all its quirks
and seeming shortcomings, Bitcoin undoubtedly works. It keeps producing
blocks roughly every ten minutes and does so beautifully. The longer Bitcoin
continues to work, the more people will opt-in to use it.
“It’s true that things are
beautiful when they work. Art is function.”
Braschi
Bitcoin is a child of the internet. It is growing exponentially,
blurring the lines between disciplines. It isn’t clear, for
example, where the realm of pure technology ends and where another realm
begins. Even though Bitcoin requires computers to function efficiently,
computer science is not sufficient to understand it. Bitcoin is not only
borderless in regards to its inner workings but also boundaryless in respect
to academic disciplines.
Economics, politics, game theory, monetary history, network theory,
finance, cryptography, information theory, censorship, law and regulation,
human organization, psychology — all these and more are areas of
expertise which might help in the quest of understanding how Bitcoin works
and what Bitcoin is.
No single invention is responsible for its success. It is the
combination of multiple, previously unrelated pieces, glued together by game
theoretical incentives, which make up the revolution that is Bitcoin. The
beautiful blend of many disciplines is what makes Satoshi a
genius.
Like every complex system, Bitcoin has to make tradeoffs in terms
of efficiency, cost, security, and many other properties. Just like there is
no perfect solution to deriving a square from a circle, any solution to the
problems which Bitcoin tries to solve will always be imperfect as
well.
“I
don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take
the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take
it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly
roundabout way introduce something that they can’t
stop.”
Hayek
Bitcoin is the sly, roundabout way to re-introduce good money to
the world. It does so by placing a sovereign individual behind each node,
just like Da Vinci tried to solve the intractable problem of squaring a
circle by placing the Vitruvian Man in its center. Nodes effectively remove
any concept of a center, creating a system which is astonishingly
antifragile and extremely hard to shut down. Bitcoin lives, and its
heartbeat will probably outlast all of ours.
I hope you have enjoyed these twenty-one lessons. Maybe the most
important lesson is that Bitcoin should be examined holistically, from
multiple angles, if one would like to have something approximating a
complete picture. Just like removing one part from a complex system destroys
the whole, examining parts of Bitcoin in isolation seems to taint the
understanding of it. If only one person strikes
“blockchain” from her vocabulary and replaces it with
“a chain of blocks” I will die a happy man.
In any case, my journey continues. I plan to venture further down
into the depths of this
and I invite you to
along for the ride.
Thanks to the countless authors and content producers who
influenced my thinking on Bitcoin and the topics it touches. There are too
many to list them all, but I’ll do my best to name a
few.
Thanks to
Balaji for
tweet which motivated me to write this.
Thanks to
Bent for providing endless food for thought and
entertainment. If you are not subscribed to
Ƀent and
Crypt, you are missing out. Cheers
Marty for guiding us through the rabbit hole.
Thanks to
Goldstein and
Rochard for curating and providing the greatest Bitcoin
literature via the
Institute. And thank you for creating the
Podcast which influenced my philosophical views on
Bitcoin substantially.
Thanks to
McCormack for his
tweets and the
Did podcast, which keeps providing great insights from
many areas of the space.
Thanks to
Antonopoulos for all the
material he has put out over the years.
Thanks to
Ammous for his convictions, savage tweets, and writing
The Bitcoin Standard
Thanks to
Pouliot for sharing his excitement about finding out
about the
Thanks to
and
providing feedback to early drafts of some lessons. Special thanks
to
proofread multiple drafts multiple times.
Thanks to
Bansal and
Odell for taking the time to discuss some of these ideas
with me.
Thanks to
Swann for producing an audio version of
21lessons.com.
Last but not least, thanks to all the bitcoin maximalists, shitcoin
minimalists, shills, bots, and shitposters which reside in the beautiful
garden that is Bitcoin twitter. And finally,
thank you for reading this. I hope
you enjoyed it as much as I did enjoy writing it. Feel free
to reach out
to me on twitter. My DMs are open.
