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The Bitcoin Story

2021-02-17

According to Hacker News, Bitcoin has many problems, and therefore, is not merit-worthy:

By this same logic, email should also not have succeeded:

But email’s days are numbered, yeah? Any day now.

Perhaps by this same logic, the English language shouldn’t succeed either:

Will the startup that disrupts the English language come from California, or will it be Texas?

If the pattern has not yet been made obvious, networked technologies like Bitcoin, email, and the English language are not valued by their feature set and design—they’re valued by the number of nodes that speak that same language. The most useful language is the one spoken by the most number of people. The most useful communication technology is the one accessible by the most number of people. The most important currency is the one believed in by the most number of people.

The philosophical arguments against Bitcoin end up being precisely why it is so valuable:

If you continue judging stories like Bitcoin by their technical merits, you will perpetually blind yourself to their importance, value, and potential. When you instead judge networked technologies by their narrative, ubiquity, trust, and ultimately, decentralization, you might begin to understand what a $1 trillion dollar story looks like.

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