Bitcoin is digital gold.
Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation.
Bitcoin is money.
Bitcoin is a technology.
Bitcoin is software.
Bitcoin is a hope.
Bitcoin is an electrical system.
Bitcoin is a heating system.
The reality is that they are all false, in the sense that they are only a partial description of what Satoshi Nakamoto started. That second word, “is,” is where the problem lies. Even though Bitcoin represents them all, if you only say one, you limit your understanding. The only real answer: Bitcoin is Bitcoin. We must become aware of all the properties of Bitcoin and describe it as such without imposing any limits on it. Because whoever says Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation has already experienced what it isn't. The person who said it was digital gold suffers from the argument of lack of metallic properties. The person who says it's money will miss the whole PoW aspect of harvesting electrical and thermal energy in the real world, and so on.
Every invention or discovery in the human race was unknown at the time of discovery. If it is unknown, how can you describe it in one word or sentence?
Until all of humanity gave it a word, language remained limited and it had to evolve around reality to describe it correctly. We're still currently trying to assign words to describe what Bitcoin is, and they all fail at some point. Just to be clear, the descriptions have failed – the reality of Bitcoin continues to be.
Even the real Bitcoin EPs who understand it in depth still have difficulty penetrating the collective consciousness because we are trying to describe an unknown, and with current human language which 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 to outsiders.
Bitcoin's monetary policy is governed by difficulty adjustment, halving schedule, and consensus mechanism.
This sentence, although correct, is not understandable. You can't teach someone a new language by explaining it in the new language. You have to correlate all the words one by one with the language the person already knows. To make matters worse: what happens when you try to explain something without language around it? The only possible solution is to observe the novelty and all its properties and experience it. When you do all this, new words will appear because the current ones are simply insufficient.
We don't help people by teaching them the philosophy of Bitcoin. It's for bookworms and Bitcoin enthusiasts like me, who have the time to do it and enjoy learning things this way. For everyone else, it's 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 EPs should tell them, “Have fun staying poor”? I do not think so. They learn by experiencing everything through their senses. This is much more information learned than the contribution of speaking and reading. When they enjoy the experience, they continue to do it! If they feel pain or discomfort, they stop doing it!
The beauty of Bitcoin is that there is pain for people who don't use Bitcoin, and there is considerable pleasure when you optimize your life with all the experiences it can bring you. This is the goal of Breez and our entire team: to build the technologies that will offer them this experience. We will teach them through experiences and not through promises of the future.
Talk costs nothing, as they say, and orange pilling is a method that targets a tiny portion of the entire population. The experiences can be for anyone, and they are experiencing them NOW. They don't need to wait for the Number Go Up experience in the future; they are experiencing it now. Give them experience if you want to keep them. This leads to results such that language and description issues are irrelevant. You create a deeper understanding for each person who is going through this experience, and they won't go back if you solve their problem. There is a concrete 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 thing would change the construction industry and bring completely new possibilities that would be impossible without it. Carnegie began harnessing the power of steel. I'll leave it to you, the reader, to discover how many analogies you can recognize with Bitcoin's progress and how we approach everything.
Once he figured it out, he decided to make his first major application: a steel bridge spanning the Mississippi River. The river was so wide that no other material could withstand the flow of the water and the load that was supposed to be on it. No material other than steel. Carnegie fought hard to convince everyone to build this bridge, because the enormous cost of harvesting the steel was much higher than that of any other structure. In addition, we did not yet know how to assess the benefits and construction took much longer than expected. Everyone only saw the cost and didn't want to bear it into an unknown future. Only a few, like Dale, saw the benefits and that it was worth it.
He somehow managed to complete the construction, but very few people knew and recognized this new reality. Everyone was trying to impose their beliefs by moving from wood, stone and iron structures to steel. No one wanted to set foot on the bridge because of this. It didn't matter how Dale tried to teach people that it was something new with new properties (dare I say them “steelpill”). People lived in the old reality and their minds created the story justifying why the steel bridge is fiction. In a way, it was true. It was fiction because it was just in the minds of everyone who hadn't experienced it (walked on it).
How do you make someone experience a new reality that they believe to be fiction? How can we explain something (through the fiction of a language) around which there is no language? There is a biological protection in each of us that tries to survive, and new things trigger this instinct. Things we all know can be classified as safe or unsafe. The unknowns that we cannot evaluate 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. This is a disproportionate risk-reward ratio and a very reasonable fear.
So, to introduce people to this new reality (even though it was 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 did not walk on unstable structures, and this was a fairly popular belief among the population. So, they used this fictitious belief to destroy the other fictitious belief. They rented an elephant and invited everyone to see that the elephant thought the structure was stable. When the elephant walked across the bridge and people saw it with their own eyes, their reality changed and the fiction they told themselves about the bridge was shattered. Even if reality did not change before and after the elephant march, convincing people consisted of demonstrating this new reality through an event that people saw and experienced themselves. Carnegie no longer needed 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 believe him because he said everyone was wrong. When they built the bridge and put people on it, everyone who was NOT using it was put into a defensive position. Now the dynamic changed and they had to explain why they didn't step on it. Why do you go around the river or make many trips back and forth with boats to transport something from one bank to the other rather than just using the bridge?
This is how Bitcoin will evolve in 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 break their old beliefs. If you're an orange type, you know it's an uphill battle, you're on the defensive.
Let's start by building it and demonstrating it to people, so they're the ones who are put on the defensive about why they're not using Bitcoin. Stop defending Bitcoin and start tackling the problems people face using the Bitcoin system as a solution. Stop thinking you know Bitcoin and start learning about everything it can do. Don't put a limit on what it is, because you will be putting a limit on yourself, not Bitcoin.
Let's fucking go!
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.