Rejection

One of the most common, but least discussed criticisms of Bitcoin Maximalism is a proclivity for confirmation bias. This accusation is lobbed at Bitcoiners by ideological opponents ranging from experts to sycophants representing diverse fields in defense of their own conventional wisdom, established system, or school of thought. While rarely addressing the premise of a Bitcoiner’s argument, these charlatans will use the accusation as a way to dispel its implications with a hand wave of barely contained contempt—this is understandable.

While not true across the board, the role of many trusted experts, institutions and technologies has been turned against the promotion of critical thinking at the individual level and towards a dependency on validation from outside sources in support of actions and incentives that destroy personal sovereignty. As society has inverted the lessons of the Enlightenment, it has recreated the castes and fiefdoms of supposedly bygone eras. Thus our self-proclaimed overlords accuse those who would overthrow them of the error that has overridden their own ability to reason.

Bitcoin has the potential to disrupt so many systems—after all, money touches everything—it draws the ire of powerful detractors from all spheres of influence. Even within its own domain of cryptographically-secured digital currencies, Bitcoin has faced an avalanche of competition and attacks. Whether Bitcoin is being attacked by a member of the established order or from an upstart competitor, the common theme is the disingenuous stance taken by those leading the charge. A debate on first principles cannot be sustained without admitting critical flaws, which are often acknowledged by fiefdom insiders, but are dramatically defended in the presence of outsiders.

In the short term, the generals commanding over these walled gardens have a distinct advantage: not only do they have the benefit of societal-level confirmation bias in their favor, but they have access to resources that amplify their messages more effectively, too. The implied lesson is that the defense of closed systems is less costly than the defense of open systems. As the wheel of circular logic turns, this fact is used as a defense of centralized systems in general.

Nodes of Dissent

While obvious to those who have already fallen prey to the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the entire purpose of this new form of money is to subvert centralized authorities and the crumbling foundations on which they’ve been built. This realization dawns on each fledgling Bitcoiner in a unique way and finds its expression only after their closely held presuppositions have been destroyed.

Once a person has passed the event horizon of Bitcoin’s gravity well, the diverse backgrounds of those drawn in cast out explosive bursts of radiation traveling at different frequencies, which are then picked up by those receptive to them. The effect of this radiation on those it encounters is often catastrophic to the DNA of their existing belief systems, and they are no longer able to replicate. In its place, a mutated strand of DNA begins to rapidly reproduce itself taking the best of the old code and rewriting it around its new set of instructions.

The impact of this life-altering experience is to cast new light on each individual’s area(s) of expertise. From this newly enlightened position, individual Bitcoiners have examined the implications of Bitcoin’s existence from fields of study as diverse as computer science, economics, political science, climate science, artificial intelligence, mycology, game theory, memetic warfare, social engineering…this list could go on ad infinitum.

A version of this experience plays out for each new participant in the system that's received the life-altering code, and then journeys down the path toward Bitcoin Maximalism. As with the decentralized network of Bitcoin nodes, which validate and confirm the blocks mined on the protocol itself, these individuals provide unique sources of validation and confirmation for the emerging concepts mined by new participants in the social network. With each new node, a slow drip of increased cognition and influence is focused on the unfolding paradigm

Bitcoin's information and social networks both thrive as they become more decentralized, and the incentives are such that every node in both spheres has greater opportunity and security the more stringently it approaches the tasks of mining, validating and confirming. At the social level, these incentives often drive participants to challenge orthodoxies in their own fields and those far-removed from their area of expertise. In asserting these challenges, the reality of the opposition’s defenses is made clear: while brittle in limited engagements, the line of defense holds firm on a larger battlefield.

While the network continues to grow and make dramatic increases in its overall sophistication, a sort of stalemate is reached until the next wave of nodes enters the network.

Block Discovery and Validation

On occasion, a new node will join the network in a way that drastically expands its potential and increases the stakes for participation. When this happens, the existing participants are thrust into a higher level of activity as they anxiously anticipate the discovery of new blocks.

Very recently such an event occurred, and it came in the form of an understated tweet without so much as a mention to the magnitude of the commitment being made: 

Accompanying the tweet from Michael Saylor(CEO of Microstrategy) was a standard corporate PR release. However with just a few paragraphs, this corporate communication revealed the radioactive embers of a dying star, which had recently been reborn as cosmic radiation traveling at light-speed into the genetic code of an entirely new field of would be participants. The code injection was summarized in a few declarative statements:

It was now official that this publicly traded company had purchased 21,454 bitcoin at a total cost $250 million and MicroStrategy had laid claim to 0.1% of Bitcoin’s terminal supply, or put another way a 1/1000th share.

To many outside observers, this may have appeared to be just an interesting anecdote. After all, $250 million is barely a blip on the balance sheets of all publicly-traded companies, and who is to say that owning any percentage of Bitcoin’s supply is an admirable achievement—especially with such a small percentage (even the Winkelvii own more!)? Taking this position is, again, understandable.

An outsider merely views such an act as attention-seeking behavior (perhaps reeking of desperation), or worse yet, a blatant attempt at market manipulation. These views even found confirmation among those currently validating the emerging narratives as they struggled to accept the new challenge being presented. In the fast paced world of tick tock, next block, the unspoken consensus was that while this was a striking event it would not catalyze a larger reaction—yet it did appear that a new block had been mined within the social network.

Just five weeks later, the exceptionally understated CEO sent a tweet which contained nothing but a link to another corporate PR piece.

This is a truly bland statement. The main announcement seems to be a relatively disappointing release reporting the results of the company’s tender offer for the buyback of its stock. The company had set aside $250 million for this purchase, but they were only able to acquire $60.5 million worth of their stock as a result of their offer. Ho hum.

Minutes later the CEO tweets again:

While characteristically sparse in its use of characters, this message contains the seeds of another potentially catalyzing event. After completing its disappointing stock buyback, the company took decisive action to allocate another $175 million to the purchase of bitcoin. Their total holdings now reaching 38,250 bitcoin, or roughly 0.18% of the terminal bitcoin supply.

In other words, the company had allocated nearly the entirety of its cash reserves to bitcoin, and there is no indication of anything other than a long-term position being taken. These messages were rapidly confirmed by and passed along to other members of the social network, yet there was seemingly little impact beyond Bitcoin's social layer.

Shortly thereafter it was announced that Saylor had accepted his first interview and would soon be talking with Anthony Pompliano:

This would be the first opportunity for the network to validate the intentions of this newly-established node. What followed was a series of insights and revelations that affirmed what many had hoped for, but few genuinely expected: not only did Michael Saylor enter Bitcoin’s black hole, but so too did his entire board and company. A consensus was emerging on Twitter that the interview represented a newly-emerging narrative, which had the potential to penetrate the previously inaccessible fortresses of the old order. A new block had been discovered.

Some examples:

This company, which had been hovering around the periphery of a centralized and stultifying galaxy of traditional finance and technology firms, was remade in a matter of months, and with it a new node entered Bitcoin's social network, and a new form of Bitcoin Maximalist was born.

While many Bitcoin-focused companies exist, this is the first example of an unrelated company staking its reputation and likely its entire future on the survival of the Bitcoin Network. As corporations have legal entity status, Microstrategy represents only a single new node on the social network and the first of its kind as a publicly traded Bitcoin Maximalist entity. Clearly, the network expanding potential of this node was beyond anything that had come before it, but would it start making outbound connections?

Propagation, Confirmation and Bias Destruction

The language, references and ideas conveyed in Michael Saylor’s interview were the proof of work required by the social layer to accept the novel node, and the block it was attempting to mine, into its network. This new block contained a multitude of relatable quotes, hard-won wisdom, and lessons that are broadly applicable to life, business, and the defense of Bitcoin.

This realization led me to write a hastily-put together tweet thread to share in the propagation and confirmation process that had already begun:

Due to the decentralized nature of Bitcoin’s informational and social networks, it is necessary to propagate newly-discovered blocks and provide successive confirmations of their validity. Having a low time-preference for these tasks is generally advised as the level of assurance as to a block’s truth is strengthened exponentially with each confirmation. In this way, Bitcoin not only subverts the charge of confirmation bias, but takes positive ownership of the negative accusation.

As the confirmations accumulated in the form of “likes,” “retweets,” and “DMs,” it became apparent that the social consensus was strong—both Michael Saylor and Microstrategy had been broadly accepted by the network. What remains to be seen is whether or not those old fortress walls of established order will be breached, and if their biases will be destroyed as our own are confirmed.

In pursuing the destruction of its own previously held biases, each new node that enters Bitcoin’s social network increases the likelihood that the walls protecting the institutionally-concealed confirmation bias infecting all of society will be torn down. As Bitcoin Maximalism evolves, the strength of its narratives will become undeniable to all but the most entrenched overlords of the current systems.

Tick tock, next block.