Rethink Bitcoin

Bitcoin quietly entered the world on January 3rd, 2009. Since that day, narratives about what it is have been abundant while attempts to understand its core essence have been scarce. Its code is visible and finite — it is indeed an objective thing — and yet its implications are so vast that even those who think they've looked closely still manage to miss important details.

In short, bitcoin is a completely new thing in the world. As with anything novel, it's very tempting to try to invoke metaphors when describing it. It's "digital cash," one might say, reducing its importance to the world to only peer-to-peer payments. It's "digital gold," others say, neglecting to note that bitcoin is programmable and perfectly finite, both of which might seem like minor details, but could alone have civilization-scale implications. Even calling it a "savings technology," a core characterization we use in this course, is insufficient: for the first time in human history, bitcoin enables someone in Utah to send value to Taiwan near-instantly and without intermediaries, among other things.

Bitcoin, like electricity or any other transformative technology, deserves your attention as the novel object it is. To begin this journey is to accept that it's not going to fit in a neat box quickly, and if it does, you're probably missing something. Benjamin Franklin, conducting his kite experiment, had no way to imagine the Las Vegas Sphere. Considering the implications of bitcoin is similar. This is your opportunity to dispense with your priors and rethink bitcoin.