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21 Lessons - What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole: Daily Summaries Delivered
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- Apr 29, 2022
Preface
Preface Little Alice felldownthe hOle,bumped her headand bruised her soul. Falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole is a strange experience. Like many others, I feel like I have learned more in the last couple of years studying Bitcoin than I have during two decades of formal education. The following lessons are a distillation of what I’ve learned. First published as an article series titled “What I’ve Learned From Bitcoin,” what follows can be seen as a second edition of the original series. Like Bitcoin, these lessons aren’t a static thing. I plan to work on them periodically, releasing updated versions and additional material in the future. Unlike Bitcoin, future versions of this project do not have to be backward compatible. Some lessons might be extended, others might be reworked or replaced. I hope that a future version will be something you can hold in your hands, but I don’t want to promise anything just yet. Bitcoin is an inexhaustible teacher, which is why I do not claim that these lessons are all-encompassing or complete. They are a reflection of my personal journey down the rabbit hole. There are many more lessons to be learned, and every person will learn something different from entering the world of Bitcoin. I hope that you will find these lessons useful and that the process of learning them by reading won’t be as arduous and painful as learning them firsthand. Gigi
- Apr 29, 2022
Introduction
Introduction "But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked."Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.""How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here." In October 2018, Arjun Balaji asked the innocuous question, What have you learned from Bitcoin? After trying to answer this question in a short tweet, and failing miserably, I realized that the things I’ve learned are far too numerous to answer quickly, if at all. The things I’ve learned are, obviously, about Bitcoin - or at least related to it. However, while some of the inner workings of Bitcoin are explained, the following lessons are not an explanation of how Bitcoin works or what it is, they might, however, help to explore some of the things Bitcoin touches: philosophical questions, economic realities, and technological innovations. The 21 lessons are structured in bundles of seven, resulting in three chapters. Each chapter looks at Bitcoin through a different lens, extracting what lessons can be learned by inspecting this strange network from a different angle. Chapter 1 explores the philosophical teachings of Bitcoin. The interplay of immutability and change, the concept of true scarcity, Bitcoin’s immaculate conception, the problem of identity, the contradiction of replication and locality, the power of free speech, and the limits of knowledge. Chapter 2 explores the economic teachings of Bitcoin. Lessons about financial ignorance, inflation, value, money and the history of money, fractional reserve banking, and how Bitcoin is re-introducing sound money in a sly, roundabout way. Chapter 3 explores some of the lessons learned by examining the technology of Bitcoin. Why there is strength in numbers, reflections on trust, why telling time takes work, how moving slowly and not breaking things is a feature and not a bug, what Bitcoin’s creation can tell us about privacy, why cypherpunks write code (and not laws), and what metaphors might be useful to explore Bitcoin’s future. Each lesson contains several quotes and links throughout the text. If I have explored an idea in more detail, you can find links to my related works in the “Through the Looking-Glass” section. If you like to go deeper, links to the most relevant material are listed in the “Down the Rabbit Hole” section. Both can be found at the end of each lesson. Even though some prior knowledge about Bitcoin is beneficial, I hope that these lessons can be digested by any curious reader. While some relate to each other, each lesson should be able to stand on its own and can be read independently. I did my best to shy away from technical jargon, even though some domain-specific vocabulary is unavoidable. I hope that my writing serves as inspiration for others to dig beneath t
- Apr 29, 2022
Chapter I - Philosophy
Chapter I Philosophy The mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing. Looking at Bitcoin superficially, one might conclude that it is slow, wasteful, unnecessarily redundant, and overly paranoid. Looking at Bitcoin inquisitively, one might find out that things are not as they seem at first glance. Bitcoin has a way of taking your assumptions and turning them on their heads. After a while, just when you were about to get comfortable again, Bitcoin will smash through the wall like a bull in a china shop and shatter your assumptions once more. Bitcoin is a child of many disciplines. Like blind monks examining an elephant, everyone who approaches this novel technology does so from a different angle. And everyone will come to different conclusions about the nature of the beast. The following lessons are about some of my assumptions which Bitcoin shattered, and the conclusions I arrived at. Philosophical questions of immutability, scarcity, locality, and identity are explored in the first four lessons. Lesson 1: Immutability and change Lesson 2: The scarcity of scarcity Lesson 3: Replication and locality Lesson 4: The problem of identity Lesson 5: An immaculate conception Lesson 6: The power of free speech Lesson 7: The limits of knowledge Lesson 5 explores how Bitcoin’s origin story is not only fascinating but absolutely essential for a leaderless system. The last two lessons of this chapter explore the power of free speech and the limits of our individual knowledge, reflected by the surprising depth of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I hope that you will find the world of Bitcoin as educational, fascinating and entertaining as I did and still do. I invite you to follow the white rabbit and explore the depths of this rabbit hole. Now hold on to your pocket watch, pop down, and enjoy the fall.
- Apr 29, 2022
Lesson 1 - Immutability and change
Lesson 1 Immutability and change I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle! Bitcoin is inherently hard to describe. It is a new thing, and any attempt to draw a comparison to previous concepts — be it by calling it digital gold or the internet of money — is bound to fall short of the whole. Whatever your favorite analogy might be, two aspects of Bitcoin are absolutely essential: decentralization and immutability. One way to think about Bitcoin is as an automated social contract. The software is just one piece of the puzzle, and hoping to change Bitcoin by changing the software is an exercise in futility. One would have to convince the rest of the network to adopt the changes, which is more a psychological effort than a software engineering one. The following might sound absurd at first, like so many other things in this space, but I believe that it is profoundly true nonetheless: You won’t change Bitcoin, but Bitcoin will change you. “Bitcoin will change us more than we will change it.”Marty Bent It took me a long time to realize the profundity of this. Since Bitcoin is just software and all of it is open-source, you can simply change things at will, right? Wrong. Very wrong. Unsurprisingly, Bitcoin’s creator knew this all too well. The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.Satoshi Nakamoto Many people have attempted to change Bitcoin’s nature. So far all of them have failed. While there is an endless sea of forks and altcoins, the Bitcoin network still does its thing, just as it did when the first node went online. The altcoins won’t matter in the long run. The forks will eventually starve to death. Bitcoin is what matters. As long as our fundamental understanding of mathematics and/or physics doesn’t change, the Bitcoin honeybadger will continue to not care. “Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. […] It can’t be changed. It can’t be argued with. It can’t be tampered with. It can’t be corrupted. It can’t be stopped. […] If nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, it would continue to live, uncorrupted. “Ralph Merkle The heartbeat of the Bitcoin network will outlast all of
- Apr 29, 2022
Lesson 2 The scarcity of scarcity
Lesson 2 The scarcity of scarcity That's quite enough — I hope I sha'n't grow any more... In general, the advance of technology seems to make things more abundant. More and more people are able to enjoy what previously have been luxurious goods. Soon, we will all live like kings. Most of us already do. As Peter Diamandis wrote in Abundance: “Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.” Bitcoin, an advanced technology in itself, breaks this trend and creates a new commodity which is truly scarce. Some even argue that it is one of the scarcest things in the universe. The supply can’t be inflated, no matter how much effort one chooses to expend towards creating more. “Only two things are genuinely scarce: time and bitcoin.”Saifedean Ammous Paradoxically, it does so by a mechanism of copying. Transactions are broadcast, blocks are propagated, the distributed ledger is — well, you guessed it — distributed. All of these are just fancy words for copying. Heck, Bitcoin even copies itself onto as many computers as it can, by incentivizing individual people to run full nodes and mine new blocks. All of this duplication wonderfully works together in a concerted effort to produce scarcity. In a time of abundance, Bitcoin taught me what real scarcity is. Down the Rabbit Hole Modeling Bitcoin’s Value with Scarcity by PlanB Bitcoin Can’t Be Copied by Parker Lewis Presentation on The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous 🎧 Misir Mahmudov on the Scarcity of Time and BitcoinTFTC#60 hosted by Marty Bent 🎧 BTCDCA on Dollar Cost Averaging BitcoinBEC#20 hosted by Collin 🎧 Misir Mahmudov on Bitcoin as Stored TimeOTC#126 hosted by Pomp 🎧 Hass McCook on the importance of Auto-DCASLP#288 hosted by Stephan
- Apr 29, 2022
Lesson 3 - Replication and locality
Lesson 3 Replication and locality Next came an angry voice—the rabbit's—"Pat, Pat! where are you?" Quantum mechanics aside, locality is a non-issue in the physical world. The question “Where is X?” can be answered in a meaningful way, no matter if X is a person or an object. In the digital world, the question of where is already a tricky one, but not impossible to answer. Where are your emails, really? A bad answer would be “the cloud”, which is just someone else’s computer. Still, if you wanted to track down every storage device which has your emails on it you could, in theory, locate them. With bitcoin, the question of “where” is really tricky. Where, exactly, are your bitcoins? “I opened my eyes, looked around, and asked the inevitable, the traditional, the lamentably hackneyed postoperative question: ‘Where am l?’”Daniel Dennett The problem is twofold: First, the distributed ledger is distributed by full replication, meaning the ledger is everywhere. Second, there are no bitcoins. Not only physically, but technically. Bitcoin keeps track of a set of unspent transaction outputs, without ever having to refer to an entity which represents a bitcoin. The existence of a bitcoin is inferred by looking at the set of unspent transaction outputs and calling every entry with 100 million base units a bitcoin. "Where is it, at this moment, in transit? […] First, there are no bitcoins. There just aren’t. They don’t exist. There are ledger entries in a ledger that’s shared […] They don’t exist in any physical location. The ledger exists in every physical location, essentially. Geography doesn’t make sense here — it is not going to help you figuring out your policy here.”Peter Van Valkenburgh So, what do you actually own when you say “I have a bitcoin” if there are no bitcoins? Well, remember all these strange words which you were forced to write down by the wallet you used? Turns out these magic words are what you own: a magic spell which can be used to add some entries to the public ledger — the keys to “move” some bitcoins. This is why, for all intents and purposes, your private keys are your bitcoins. If you think I’m making all of this up feel free to send me your private keys. Bitcoin taught me that locality is a tricky business. Through the Looking-Glass 🔍 Follow-up articles that expand upon ideas discussed in this lesson:
- Apr 29, 2022
Lesson 4 - The problem of identity
Lesson 4 The problem of identity "Who are you?" said the caterpillar. Nic Carter, in an homage to Thomas Nagel’s treatment of the same question in regards to a bat, wrote an excellent piece which discusses the following question: What is it like to be a bitcoin? He brilliantly shows that open, public blockchains in general, and Bitcoin in particular, suffer from the same conundrum as the Ship of Theseus: which Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin? “Consider just how little persistence Bitcoin’s components have. The entire codebase has been reworked, altered, and expanded such that it barely resembles its original version. […] The registry of who owns what, the ledger itself, is virtually the only persistent trait of the network […] To be considered truly leaderless, you must surrender the easy solution of having an entity that can designate one chain as the legitimate one.”Nic Carter It seems like the advancement of technology keeps forcing us to take these philosophical questions seriously. Sooner or later, self-driving cars will be faced with real-world versions of the trolley problem, forcing them to make ethical decisions about whose lives do matter and whose do not. Cryptocurrencies, especially since the first contentious hard-fork, force us to think about and agree upon the metaphysics of identity. Interestingly, the two biggest examples we have so far have lead to two different answers. On August 1, 2017, Bitcoin split into two camps. The market decided that the unaltered chain is the original Bitcoin. One year earlier, on October 25, 2016, Ethereum split into two camps. The market decided that the altered chain is the original Ethereum. If properly decentralized, the questions posed by the Ship of Theseus will have to be answered in perpetuity for as long as these networks of value-transfer exist. Bitcoin taught me that decentralization contradicts identity. Down the Rabbit Hole What Is It Like to be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel What is it like to be a Bitcoin? by Nic Carter Ship of Theseus by Wikipedia Authors <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
- Apr 29, 2022
Lesson 5 - An immaculate conception
Lesson 5 An immaculate conception "Their heads are gone," the soldiers shouted in reply... Everyone loves a good origin story. The origin story of Bitcoin is a fascinating one, and the details of it are more important than one might think at first. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Was he one person or a group of people? Was he a she? Time-traveling alien, or advanced AI? Outlandish theories aside, we will probably never know. And this is important. Satoshi chose to be anonymous. He planted the seed of Bitcoin. He stuck around for long enough to make sure the network won’t die in its infancy. And then he vanished. What might look like a weird anonymity stunt is actually crucial for a truly decentralized system. No centralized control. No centralized authority. No inventor. No-one to prosecute, torture, blackmail, or extort. An immaculate conception of technology. “One of the greatest things that Satoshi did was disappear.”Jimmy Song Since the birth of Bitcoin, thousands of other cryptocurrencies were created. None of these clones share its origin story. If you want to supersede Bitcoin, you will have to transcend its origin story. In a war of ideas, narratives dictate survival. “Gold was first fashioned into jewelry and used for barter over 7,000 years ago. Gold’s captivating gleam led to it being considered a gift from the gods.”Gold: The Extraordinary Metal Like gold in ancient times, Bitcoin might be considered a gift from the gods. Unlike gold, Bitcoins origins are all too human. And this time, we know who the gods of development and maintenance are: people all over the world, anonymous or not. Bitcoin taught me that narratives are important. Down the Rabbit Hole Catallaxy - the origins of Bitcoin, innovation and spontaneous order by Francis Pouliot Why Bitcoin is Different by Jimmy Song Only The Strong Survive by Allen Farrington and Big Al Against Cryptocurrency - The Ethical Argument for Bitcoin Maximalism by Pete Rizzo Gold - The Extraordinary Metal by the Austrian Mint
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About 21 Lessons - What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole
Falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole is a strange experience. Like many others, I feel like I have learned more in the last couple of years studying Bitcoin than I have during two decades of formal education. The following lessons are a distillation of what I’ve learned.
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