bitcoin is digital gold.
bitcoin is a hedge against inflation.
bitcoin is money.
bitcoin is a technology.
bitcoin is software.
bitcoin is hope.
bitcoin is an electrical system.
bitcoin is a heating system.
The reality is that they are all wrong, in the sense that they are all just a partial description of what Satoshi Nakamoto started. That second word, “is,” is where the problem is. Although bitcoin is all of them, if you say only one of them, you are limiting your understanding of it. The only true answer: bitcoin is bitcoin. We have to realize all the properties that bitcoin has and describe it as such without putting limits on it. Because the person who says bitcoin is a hedge against inflation has already experienced when he wasn't. The person who said it is digital gold suffers from the argument that it lacks metallic properties. The person who says it's money will miss the whole PoW aspect of collecting electrical and heating energy in the real world, and so on.
Every invention or discovery of the human race was unknown at the time of discovery. If it is unknown, how could you describe it in one word or phrase?
Until all of humanity assigned a word to it, language remained limited and had to evolve around reality to adequately describe it. We are currently still trying to assign words for what bitcoin is, and they all fail at some point. To be clear, the descriptions failed: the reality of bitcoin remains.
Even true bitcoin maxis who understand it on a deep level still struggle to penetrate the collective consciousness because we are trying to describe something unknown, and with current human language that has not evolved enough. Not only has it not evolved, but even with the new terms that have been incorporated, it is a different language for outsiders.
bitcoin's monetary policy is governed by the difficulty adjustment, halving schedule, and consensus mechanism.
This phrase, although correct, is not understandable. You cannot teach someone a new language by explaining it in the new language. We have to correlate all the words one by one with the language that the person already knows. To make matters worse, what happens when you try to explain something without language? The only possible solution is to observe the new and all its properties and experience it. When you do all that, new words will emerge because the current ones are simply insufficient.
We don't help people by teaching them philosophy about bitcoin. This is for bookworms and bitcoin cultists like me, who have the time to do it and who like to learn things this way. For everyone else, this is a very unnatural way of learning. When children are young, how do they learn before they can speak, read, or understand the language their parents speak? Are they stupid and the toxic maxis have to tell them: “Have fun being poor”? I do not think. They learn by experiencing everything through their senses. That is much more information learned than the contribution of speaking and reading. When they enjoy the experience, they continue doing it! If you feel pain or discomfort, stop doing it!
The beauty of bitcoin is that there is pain for people who don't use bitcoin, and there is significant enjoyment when you optimize your life with all the experiences it can give you. That's the focus of Breez and our entire team: developing the technologies that will give them that experience. We will teach them through experiences, not through promises of the future.
Talk is cheap, as people say, and orange pills are a method that targets a small sector of the entire population. The experiences can be for anyone and they experience them NOW. You don't have to wait to experience Number Go Up in the future; they experience the usefulness now. Give them the experience if you want to keep it. This accomplishes things in such a way that the language and problems of description are irrelevant. You are creating a deeper understanding for each person who goes through the experience and they will not turn back if you solved their problem. There is a real life example of what I am talking about.
Dale Carnegie looked at reality and discovered something no one else did. He discovered 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 with it completely new possibilities that are impossible without it. Carnegie began to harness the power of steel. I'll leave it to you, the reader, to discover how many analogies you can recognize with the progress of bitcoin and how we approach it all.
Once he understood that, he decided to make his first big application: a steel bridge crossing the Mississippi River. The river was so wide that no other material could withstand the flow of water and the load that was expected to be on it. No other material than steel. Carnegie fought hard to convince everyone to build this bridge because the enormous cost of collecting steel was much greater than that of any other structure. Furthermore, it was unknown to evaluate its benefits and construction took much longer than expected. Everyone saw only the cost and did not want to bear it in the unknown future. Only a few, like Dale, saw the benefit and saw that it was worth it.
He somehow managed to finish its construction, but there were very few who knew and recognized this new reality. Everyone else tried to impose their beliefs from structures of wood, stone and iron to steel. Nobody wanted to set foot on the bridge because of that. It didn't matter how Dale tried to teach people that this is something new with new properties (dare I say “steel pill”). People lived in the old reality and their minds created the story that justifies why the steel bridge is a fiction. In a way, that was true. It was a fiction because it was in the minds of everyone who didn't experience it (walk on it).
How do you make someone experience a new reality that they believe is fiction? How do you explain something (through the fiction of a language) for which no language exists? There is a biological protection in all of us that tries to survive, and new things trigger that instinct. Things we all know can be classified as safe or dangerous. We cannot evaluate unknown things because if they are dangerous, the cost is enormous; If they are safe, the benefit is small. In this case, if the bridge is in poor condition, people walking on it may die when it collapses. If it is stable, they save time on travel costs to the other side of the river. This is a disproportionate risk-reward ratio and a very reasonable fear.
So in order for people to experience this new reality (even though it was right in front of them), Dale Carnegie had to be a marketer and create a fictional story to shatter their fictional beliefs about the reality of steel. They found that people believed that elephants do not walk on unstable structures, and that was a fairly popular belief among the population. Then, they used that fictitious belief to destroy the other fictitious belief. They hired an elephant and invited all the people to see 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 told themselves about the bridge was shattered. Although reality did not change before and after the elephant walk, conquering people was demonstrating this new reality through an event that people saw and experienced for themselves. Carnegie no longer had to explain anything. The experience they put into people's minds was much stronger and deeper than words.
When Dale was building the bridge, and after that, if he wanted people to use it, explaining all of its properties put him in a defensive position. He had to explain why he was right. Even if he explained why, no one would not believe him because he was saying that everyone else was wrong. When they made the bridge and had people experience it, everyone who DIDN'T use it was put in a defensive position. Now the dynamic changed and they had to explain why they didn't walk on it. Why do you go around the river or make lots of boat trips to transport something from one side to the other instead of just using the bridge?
This is the way bitcoin will scale into human consciousness. Not by telling the world about something they don't believe in, but by creating apps that are useful to them and marketing them strategically to destroy their old beliefs. If you are people who take orange pills, you know that it is an uphill battle, that you are on the defensive.
Let's start building it and demonstrate it to people, so that they are the ones who get defensive, why they don't use bitcoin. Stop defending bitcoin and start attacking the problems people face by using the bitcoin system in the solution. Stop thinking you know bitcoin and start experiencing everything it can do. Don't put a limit on what is, because you will be putting a limit on yourself, not on bitcoin.
Come on, damn it!
This is a guest post by Ivan Makedonski. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of btc Inc or bitcoin Magazine.
