Bitcoin is digital gold.
Bitcoin is an inflation hedge.
Bitcoin is money.
Bitcoin is a technology.
Bitcoin is software.
Bitcoin is hope.
Bitcoin is an electrical system.
Bitcoin is a heating system.
In reality, they are all wrong. That is, they are all only partial descriptions of what Satoshi Nakamoto started. The second word “is” is the problem. Bitcoin is all of those things, but saying only one of them limits your understanding. The only real answer is Bitcoin is Bitcoin. You need to recognize all the properties Bitcoin has and describe it as such without any limitations. Those who say Bitcoin is an inflation hedge are wrong because we have already seen a time when it was not. Those who say Bitcoin is digital gold suffer from the argument that it lacks metallic properties. Those who say Bitcoin is money miss the whole aspect of PoW, which is harvesting electrical and thermal energy in the real world.
Every invention and discovery of mankind was unknown when it was discovered, and if it was unknown, how on earth could it be explained in a word or a sentence?
Until humanity as a whole assigned a word to describe Bitcoin, that language remained limited and had to evolve to fit reality in order to adequately describe it. We are still trying to assign words to describe what Bitcoin is, but each one has failed at some point. To be clear, the description has failed. Bitcoin’s reality is here to stay.
Even true aphorisms from those with a deep understanding of Bitcoin have a hard time penetrating the collective consciousness because they are trying to explain something unknown. Current human language is not evolved enough. Not only has it not evolved, but even with the new terminology that has been adopted, it is still a different language to outsiders.
Bitcoin’s monetary policy is governed by difficulty adjustments, a halving schedule, and a consensus mechanism.
This sentence is correct, but it is incomprehensible. You cannot teach someone a new language by explaining it to them in the new language. You have to relate every word, one by one, to the language that the person already knows. Even worse, what would happen if you tried to explain something without language? The only solution is to observe the new thing and all its properties, experience it. Doing all that, new words will emerge because your current words are insufficient.
We are not helping people by teaching them the philosophy of Bitcoin. It is for bookworms and Bitcoiners like me who have time and like to learn this way. For everyone else, it is a very unnatural way of learning. How do children learn when they are small, before they can speak, read and understand the language their parents speak? Are they stupid and in need of a harmful aphorism to tell them “enjoy being poor”? I don’t think so. They learn by experiencing everything through their senses. That is much more learning information than they get from talking or reading. If they enjoy the experience, they keep doing it! If they experience pain or discomfort, they stop doing it!
The great thing about Bitcoin is that there is pain for people who don’t use it, and great joy for people who optimize their lives with all the experiences that Bitcoin brings. That’s the focus of Breez and our entire team: building the technology to give them that experience. We teach them through experience, not through promises of the future.
As they say, lip service is cheap. The orange pill is a technique that targets a small percentage of the overall population. The experience is available to everyone, experience it now. No need to wait for the numbers to go up in the future, experience its usefulness now. If you want to keep them, give them the experience. This way things are achieved in such a way that the question of words and explanations becomes irrelevant. A deeper understanding is created in everyone who experiences it, and once the problem is solved, they don’t go back. What I am talking about can be illustrated with a real life example.
Dale Carnegie looked at reality and came up with something no one else had thought of. He figured out how to use the hardest metal in a way that no one had used before. He realized that this would change the construction industry and bring about entirely new possibilities that were not possible without it. Carnegie began to harness the power of steel. We’ll leave it to you, the reader, to see how many parallels you can see between Bitcoin’s progress and the way we approach everything.
Once he understood it, he decided to use it to make its first big use: a steel bridge over the Mississippi River. The river was wide, and there was no other material that could withstand the flow of water and the loads that were expected to be placed on the river. There was no other material but steel. Carnegie tried desperately to convince everyone to build this bridge, since it was much more expensive to harvest steel than other structures. Furthermore, it was unclear whether the benefits could be appreciated, and the construction took much longer than expected. Everyone only thought about the cost, and did not want to incur it for an unknown future. Only a few, like Dale, understood the benefits and thought it was worth it.
He managed to finish the construction of the bridge, but very few people knew and recognized this new reality. Everyone else was trying to impose their own beliefs about wood, stone and iron structures onto the steel. So no one dared to step on it. Even if Dale was trying to teach people that this was something new with new properties (I dare say “steel pill”), it didn’t matter. People were living in the old reality and their minds created a story to justify why the steel bridge was fiction. In a way, it was true. It was fiction because it was in the minds of all those who had not experienced it (walked on it).
How do we make people experience a new reality that we believe to be fiction? How do we explain the absence of language (through the fiction of language)? There is a biological defense within all of us that wants us to survive, and new things stimulate that instinct. Things we all know can be categorized as safe or dangerous. Things we don’t know can’t be evaluated because the costs are enormous if they’re dangerous, and the benefits are small if they’re safe. In this case, a bad bridge could kill a person walking by when it collapses. If the bridge is stable, it saves the cost of traveling to the other side of the river. This is a disproportionate risk-reward ratio, and a very rational fear.
So, to get people to experience this new reality (even though it was right in front of their eyes), Dale Carnegie, as a marketer, had to create a fictional story and shatter people’s fictional beliefs about the reality of steel. They discovered that people believed that elephants would not walk on unstable structures. This was a fairly common belief among people. So they used that fictional belief to shatter another fictional belief. They hired an elephant to show everyone that the elephant thought the structure was stable. When the elephant walked on the bridge and people saw it with their own eyes, their reality changed and the fiction they had told themselves about the bridge was shattered. Even though the reality did not change before and after the elephant walked on it, to get people on their side, they needed to show this new reality through an event that people actually saw and experienced. Carnegie didn’t need to explain anything anymore. The experience they planted in people’s minds was much more powerful and deeper than words could ever hope to achieve.
When Dale was building the bridge, and even afterward, if he wanted people to use it, explaining all of the bridge’s properties would have put him on the defensive. He had to explain why he was right. Even if he explained why, no one would believe him, because he was telling everyone else that it was wrong. When they built the bridge and let people experience it, anyone who didn’t use it was put on the defensive. Now the dynamics had shifted, and they had to explain why they wouldn’t walk on the bridge. Why would they use it to transport something from one side to the other, by bypassing the river or making multiple trips in a boat, instead of just using the bridge?
This is how Bitcoin will penetrate the consciousness of humanity – not by telling the world what they don’t believe in, but by building applications that work for people and marketing them strategically to shatter their old beliefs. If you’re someone who’s taken the orange pill, you know it’s an uphill battle and you’re on the defensive.
Build Bitcoin and start demonstrating it to people so they are on the defensive about why they shouldn’t use it. Stop defending Bitcoin and start addressing the problems people face and use the Bitcoin system as the solution. Stop thinking you know Bitcoin and start experiencing all it can do. Don’t put limits on Bitcoin, because you’ll be limiting yourself, not Bitcoin.
Alright, let’s go!
This is a guest post by Ivan Makedonski. The opinions expressed here are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
