“Böhm-Bawerk viewed economics and time as inextricably linked. Like time is to music (something close to the heart of any Viennese), it is the very canvas of capital and economics; it can be stretched, compressed, and distorted, with dramatic implications.”
As a former music student and lifelong lover of the arts, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that those most inclined to pursue a life surrounded by music are uniquely suited to appreciate how profound an invention Bitcoin really is.
It’s a symphony of code — the harmony of disparate elements composed into a single work of staggering genius.
It’s not just that Bitcoin is an elegant creation akin to a song: Bitcoin is also the harmonic framework itself. In a single free and open source code base it harmonizes completely separate aspects of culture and society — deeply foundational ones — and leverages our own human nature (especially our flaws) to make the network richer, stronger, and ever more effective. Much like Wikipedia, it should not work in theory.
But in practice it does. Beautifully.
Many have written about Bitcoin and helped me learn its ins and outs from a variety of vantage points over the years, dating back as far as 2013, and believe me when I say I write this from atop the shoulders of giants. If I leave out details about the protocol or its societal impact I encourage you to plunge down those rabbit holes yourself and see what you find, armed with what I hope is a newfound appreciation for what you’ll see down there. And if you need some recommendations just let me know.
My goal here is not to painfully strain a musical metaphor past the point of usefulness, but to encourage my fellow musicians and patrons of creativity to entertain the idea that Bitcoin isn’t just a technological concept or a financial innovation, but rather an entire liberal arts major worthy of fascination, respect, and lifelong pursuit in itself.
Getting your money sorted is the foundational prerequisite for pursuing anything requiring time and effort, yet those who choose to dedicate themselves to a life in the arts are usually the least likely to consider money a worthy pursuit at all.
Hopefully, Bitcoin can fix this.
I. The System
“Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.”
Most take for granted the system underpinning all of Western music, from Bach to B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix to Jay-Z: the diatonic scale.
This was not an obvious choice, and other systems have been used in the past, but through the centuries society has gradually converged on what is essentially a musical Schelling point.
The history of the scale goes back to the invention of even temperament, which was itself a controversial invention.
Many people assume that the 12 keys representing a full octave on the piano are a human creation placed on top of what is really a natural phenomenon, but it’s actually the reverse. Human beings invented an evenly-divided octave despite the fact that nature’s divisions are, in fact, uneven.
Below is an image showing how nature divides up a pitch. Each of the wavy lines below represents a sound wave but also a single string being plucked, with someone holding their finger down on one of the intersection points. The “fundamental” pitch is when no finger is pressing down on the string and its sound rings out. To get that same pitch but one octave up you just need to press directly in the middle of the string and pluck again. By cutting the string in half you’ve raised the pitch one octave.
And so, by playing with these natural harmonics you can get what starts to become a musical scale: aset of notes moving away from their fundamental pitch until they finally return back to that same pitch, only one octave higher.
The problem is, scales don’t scale. These ratios are very limiting and many configurations sound dissonant when played together. Multiple tones clash, which is a problem for composers wanting to paint with these tones and blend things together into new shapes and patterns. So even temperament was put forth as a solution, as it nudges some of these ratios into close approximations of what is found in nature but is enough to divides the scale into 12 evenly spaced intervals. Then composers can change keys and create chords with the greatest of ease. It was simply another instance of man looking at nature and making tradeoffs in the name of advancement.
The Bitcoin protocol, in much the same way, draws inspiration from nature and codifies a foundational system on which human progress can more comfortably proceed.
Bitcoin is a protocol, and in many ways that’s all it is. Rules. You don’t have to use them. You can fork off and create your own rules, but you won’t have anyone to play with for awhile. No one will know your rules, and you won’t be speaking the same language. You can’t jam with anyone who hasn’t taken the time to study, practice, and adopt your new rules as the ones they know. Your new system has to compete with a back catalogue of music and a massive community of musicians who know what to do when someone says “I’m in the key of B.”
“Why did music play such an important role in our technological history? One likely reason is that music naturally lends itself toward the creation of codes, more than any other human activity other than language and mathematics.
…Music was among the first activities to be encoded, the first to be automated, the first to be programmed, the first to be digitized as a commercial product, the first to be distributed via peer-to-peer networks.”
It’s easy to underestimate why Bitcoin’s rules are, in fact, the best rules given what it was built to do: remove the need for central banking to manage a monetary system, and remove the need to trust strangers on the internet. It’s a peer-to-peer system for sending actual value across the planet at the speed of light to another recipient and with final settlement, requiring no trust and no permission. Many books have been written that explain exactly how Bitcoin achieves this and solved a long-standing problem in computer science in the process, but suffice to say it’s an elegant combination of one-way encryption algorithm, energy expenditure, probability theory, automatic difficulty adjustment, game theory, fixed supply, and distributed consensus, all conducted within an adiabatic, thermodynamically secure network architecture built arounds a decentralized time chain of ledger entries. Believe it or not, the whole thing can be simply explained in just 9 pages.
If the whole world wants to exchange information with one another we need to be operating under a shared protocol. An fundamental agreement about the code of conduct. Other systems have offered alternatives that introduce tradeoffs on the security and/or decentralization aspects of Bitcoin, but inevitably represent two important tradeoffs that society is increasingly unwilling to make when it comes to disintermediating central banks.
To do that, we all need to be in the key of B.
II. The Key
“True, astronauts have learned to live in outer space, where there’s no north and south, no up and down; but how many of us are fortunate enough to have spent a few hours or days in space? The fact is, we are all earthbound creatures, born with a natural frame of reference in which gravity defines our personal “down.” It is perhaps no accident that gravity and grave come from the same word. This holds also true in music: without a tonal frame of reference, a central key to gravitate toward, we feel lost, wandering aimlessly in an ocean of sound.”
The notion of a “key” is central to the diatonic system — a necessary and inevitable consequence — much in the same way a block chain is a natural and necessary byproduct of the creation of Bitcoin. (It’s so natural that some have described Bitcoin as being more discovered than created, given some of inevitabilities and parsimony involved.)
A key is the central point around which everything in a piece of music is grounded against and oriented by. It’s the central point of stability, as sounds take the listener on a journey away from the “home” note into adventures of tension and release before finally returning to the comforting sound of home.
Much in the same way Bitcoin is designed to be the base layer of a new monetary system, the diatonic key also represents the “bass” layer of a harmonic sequence. And your private Bitcoin “key” is indeed the one key to your funds on the network.
Below is a chord progression in the key of C. The “I” chords at the beginning and the end are each a C chord. Not only that, the lowest note at the bottom of each — the bass note — is a C as well.
Whatever is in the bass “grounds” the music in something solid against which to judge the harmonies on top of it. This is what Bitcoin does.
It’s a true, honest price signal representing a freely traded asset on top of which a full monetary system can be built on top of. (It’s true and honest because it can’t be manipulated by new policies, interest rates, or unexpected supply increase)
The Circle of Fifths is an elegant visual that succinctly shows the relationship between keys in music, making it easy for musicians to orient themselves depending on what’s being played. It organizes the 12 chromatic pitches as a sequence of perfect fifths, but the visual result helps players construct intuitive bass lines and seeing which keys share certain chords.
This type of layered architecture is how networks like the internet were designed as well as monetary systems like our current central banking paradigm were designed as well. The TCP/IP protocol was created in the 1960’s but still underpins all of today’s internet services in the 2020's, and for about 5,000 years gold served a similar function for economies trading in coins and paper notes. New global reserve currencies would rise and fall, each succumbing to the irresistible temptation by leaders to debase and dilute the supply for personal gain, but it wasn’t until we began removing the gold standard entirely and economies started trading on free-floating and easily manipulated fiat (“by decree”) currencies that we ran into problems. Serious problems.
We no longer had a key.
Bitcoin is the new key.
III. The Player
“Recent studies using identical and nonidentical twins have shown that genes help explain musical ability, in part because of their effect on an individual’s willingness to practice an instrument and in part by affecting what we colloquially describe as talent.”
Bitcoin isn’t just the codification of rules for people to follow but also exerts influence back on the people following them. There’s plenty to appreciate about Bitcoin when you zoom out of the technology itself and start to understand what the technology does to us.
Part of the reason I think musicians make good Bitcoiners is because musicians are trained to listen. They are trained to be receptive — to receive signals and patterns of information. Those who find auditory pattern-seeking rewarding tend to become music lovers or music makers, two sides of a single coin. Without players there’s no music, and without listeners there’s no music. And to really appreciate what Bitcoin offers and why it’s not a delusional figment or maniacal Ponzi scheme requires the humbleness to consider, for a moment, that there’s something there worth listening to. In order to truly grasp the profundity of Bitcoin you need to open your mind, and your ears.
Ernest Hemingway said “When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.” And he’s right. Anyone who has trained as a musician quickly finds out that listening is a skill, and like any skill it can be learned. Most people don’t care to learn.
Musicians also practice, and they practice deliberately. Deliberate practice means showing up every day to put in some effort, specifically on the things you need to improve. This is a big part of what separates amateurs from professionals, and stasis from progress. The 10,000 hour rule of mastery isn’t just about the time spent getting better at something but also the function of the quality of that time. It’s very easy, and tempting, to spend a practice session playing things you can play well and confidently, but that’s not how you improve. You improve by playing things you can’t play well. At least not yet. And it’s musicians’ appreciation of the power of that word “yet” that creates a shared value with Bitcoin advocates who can see the promise of something that isn’t quite there, but can be. They are rational optimists.
These two constraints — the challenge of listening and the challenge of difficulty — are what musicians embrace, because constraints are the friction from which progress is born. Practice is the proof-of-work.
“Music has been altered by technology for more than a century. Early gramophone equipment could make recordings that contained no more than four and a half minutes, so musicians abbreviated meandering works to fit to the phonograph, and today the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes.”
Part of the reason Bitcoin has succeeded is because it’s a protocol that harnesses natural human dynamics of greed, competition, and a propensity to deceive. It doesn’t protect the system against these negative impuleses, it uses them to actually grow stronger.
Earlier this year we saw China institute what has so far been the biggest “attack” on the Bitcoin network, banning mining from all provinces and forcing a huge amount of hashing power offline. This left the network temporarily less secure, as miners looked for friendlier domiciles to plug back in (or simply wait and weather the political storm). But because of the automatic 2-week difficulty adjustment, mining Bitcoin quickly became much easier for all existing miners. They were then incentivized to plug in old equipment to take advantage of this, earning more Bitcoin as a reward without needing new capital expenditures. This caused the hash rate to subsequently increase, compensating for the dropoff and continuing to secure the network in the process. All of this required no coordination or central planner and Bitcoin’s price barely moved. The network is now even more decentralized, since mining is more spread out and not as concentrated under Chinese rule. The network got better.
Bitcoin encourages you to see the world as an gameful, adversarial environment that rewards participation, not as a punitive world that requires authorities and protection. It reframes individual competition as collective cooperation, and invites attacks as invitations for improvement. This is radically different from how most people view the world. As has been said in the past by those far wiser than myself: you don’t change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. It also acts as a kind of center of gravity toward which like-minded individuals coalesce around, like communities of a certain musical genre or style.
Musicians play around with tension, dissonance, and difficulty and turn it into something valuable for society. Bitcoin does the same. But to truly appreciate why that is and how it does it, you need to show up every day and listen.
Learn. Practice. Challenge yourself.
IV. The Meaning
“The first true peer-to-peer networks for sharing information were designed specifically for the swapping of musical files. It is still too early to tell, but this innovation may turn out to be as influential as those piano keyboards and pinned cylinders, if in fact peer-to-peer platforms like Bitcoin eventually become an important part of the global financial infrastructure, as many people believe.”
Why do we make music? Why do we like it so much? What purpose does it serve? Thankfully for me these answers, or attempts at answers, are outside the scope of this essay. Some have suggested music is merely “auditory cheesecake” — a vestigial remnant of our pattern-seeking impulse that has since gotten hijacked for the purposes of dopamine hits. Something trivial. A curiosity of evolution.
“Our aesthetic appreciation probably also coevolved with our pattern-seeking impulse, which assists our brain’s prediction system, perhaps as a cognitive signal to direct our attention: here is something special that needs figuring out or deciphering. Beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction alerting us to explore further — it is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. Art hijacks this instinct: if we’re looking at a Van Gogh, that twinge of beauty in the brain’s aesthetic center is telling us that this painting isn’t just swirls of color, it is meaningful.”
Well, perhaps. But that simply attempts to explain something from the vantage point of the thing doing the explaining. To my mind it’s a variation of the Anthropic Principle: of course we have music, because humans are built a certain way and music is something our bodies are built to respond to. It’s a bit circular, but okay.
I would rather leave things with a reminder of where music fits in the larger cultural context and try to understand things from there. The word “music” itself is named after all of the Greek muses (which reveals something about how highly it was esteemed as a pursuit) and has historically been designated as one of the liberal arts — generally recognized to be the four academic categories of natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The subjects within these categories include physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, logic, linguistics, literature, history, political science, sociology, psychology, and mathematics. Back in medieval times they bucketed these subjects into the two overarching categories of the artes liberales called the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). Bitcoin, too, is comprised of a curriculum of cross-disciplinary studies that could keep a grad student busy for four semesters.
But do you know why they were called ‘liberal’ arts?
In ancient Greece it was a term referring to subjects and skills that ‘free’ people in a society studied. Exploring these subjects signaled “liberation,” and an act of defiance against servitude (mental or physical). They were taken up by people who could afford not to toil all day long.
In other words, to fully embrace the liberal arts you have to have money. Good money. Hard money.
In fact, the age we typically associate with an explosion of artistic and creative activity is the Italian Renaissance, which owes much of its wealth and abundance to patrons in and around Florence that were using hard money: the gold florin. Introduced in 1252, it was the first major European sound coinage Since Julius Caesar’s aureus and helped Florence establish itself as the cultural center of Europe.
Hard money refers to an economic good that was historically, literally “hard”: a currency that is made up of or implicitly backed by a valuable commodity like gold or silver. This was in contrast to promissory notes or bills that could be redeemed for such a commodity, but that were separated from the real thing by intermediaries and layers of abstraction. Hard money is respected as a store of value worth holding onto, making it a reliable foundation on which to do calculations for exchange and accounting. The gold florin was highly valued for this reason. The U.S. dollar, today, is not, and for the same reason. People wanted to hold their florins because they kept their purchasing power. People want to spend their dollars because they don’t.
“Throughout history, jurisdictions that enabled citizens to accumulate + store wealth in a sound money saw periods of immense innovation, cultural richness & relative peace. It acts as a magnet for both capital and the highly skilled.”
This creates large ripple effects — sound waves of consequences outward. Hard money lowers your time preference and causes you to naturally value the future more highly, encouraging you to save and think more long-term. When you are free from the anxiety of having to protect your purchasing power with investments, and escape the hamster wheel of inflation by taking on more and more menial work, you can afford to spend time thinking about projects that interest you and require a longer time horizon. Projects like, say, multi-year ceiling frescos and cathedral construction built to last multiple generations. There is a very human component to adopting high quality money in a society.
I’m not the first to point out these insights, but I fear they’re not getting to their intended recipients: artists.
Adopting a Bitcoin standard and owning the hardest money mankind has ever had is not just a financial imperative, it’s a creative one. Artists and creators stand to gain the most from doing so because its deflationary nature and value accrual over time clears the space needed to think and work on creative pursuits. Much like Bitcoin itself (which has its own internal metronome by systematically holding miners to enter new blocks onto the chain of transactions every ~10 minutes like clockwork), Bitcoin allows artists to have their own time.
Bitcoin in a very real sense, is time, but it also gives you time. Time back to create. And since time is the one thing we can’t make more of, to my mind that’s far more valuable than any token issued on the network will ever be.
I think Bitcoin should be at the center of any life that is committed to taking the liberal arts seriously, and I think musicians possess the skills and tendencies necessary to make understanding this imperative more intuitive.
Bitcoin, through sheer virtue of the properties in its code, teaches its hodler valuable lessons: personal responsibility, the relationship between privacy and security, how to decide tradeoffs, reasoning up from first-principles, second order thinking, Austrian economics and the subjective nature of value, what “enough” looks like… the list could go on and comprise an article of its own.
Some days I lean back and wonder if the Bitcoin protocol is actually mining us, minting newer, better, more sovereign individuals in the process. I like to think that’s what artists are doing too: taking our scarce time and attention and returning something that feels well spent and meaningful. I usually come away from both musical concerts and Bitcoin insights feeling changed somehow, more in tune with what’s going on and what really matters, feeling the sense that we’re all in concert with one another with Bitcoin helping to ensure that our concert is in tune, on time, and grounded in the same key.
Maybe at the end of the day we’re all just playing together — trading licks, exchanging patterns, expressing the value we bring to the world. Maybe that’s all society has really ever done.
And maybe that’s the point.
“Genius hears the overtones, and the music of the spheres; genius knows what Pythagoras meant when he said that philosophy is the highest music.”
Mark Mulvey is a brand, marketing, and product strategist with 15 years of professional experience in tech and digital media. He writes regularly about Bitcoin, business, investing, and human nature. He holds a B.A. in Music from Rutgers University.