Bitcoin Don’t Care

keypressingmonkey

Just now·3 min read

Photo by Tim-Oliver Metz on Unsplash

A lot has been written about Bitcoin from a price perspective — but to the media that is all there is to it. It is always approached from a carefully considered angle of putting it in a weird light, like a novelty that is somehow blowing out of proportion.

To get behind why this thing even exists you have to dig in, get lost in subreddits and forums, YouTube videos and whitepapers — but then you start seeing the light. You see why the novelty is in fact revolutionary: Bitcoin don’t care.

That is not to say that larger entities can’t influence it’s price, not to say that States could theoretically start shutting down exchanges and make it harder for people to acquire coins — but they can not control it.

If a state decides they don’t like Bitcoin then the people of that state have it harder, but it’s never totally impossible. And the rest of the world is unaffected. To actually control the network you have to control the hash rate, the physical computers — and you would need a majority of a globally distributed system.

The network is already so large that you need to start thinking on a country level and even the biggest countries would be hard pressed to acquire that much hash rate. We saw this fight once back when BCH fought against BTC and for a while it looked close — and that was a community-driven effort with a lot of shady propaganda. It was a great test of one of the core concepts behind Bitcoin — just a shame that a lot of people got sucked into a fight they did not understand.

Another part where Bitcoin just doesn’t care is when it comes to the overall network health. Right now as I write this Texas was completely offline for a few days because of freak weather — and nobody lost money, only time they could have spent mining of course. But any Texan who held Bitcoin during the power outage has that same amount of Bitcoin left as soon as the power comes back online — the rest of the world takes care of that.

This is where I go back to the difference between control and influence: Obviously it helps the network when large influxes of money come in — but the network does not suddenly belong to them or anything.

The core group of users is by now large enough to prevent a complete collapse even on dips and crashes — there are just too many memes that protect the network from all enemies. HODL alone is enough to shield us, never mind all those Lambo and Tesla memes. We are safe. *obviously not investment advice, I eat pain chips for dinner, don’t trust what I say.

Sooner or later we’ll see attempts to regulate the influx and outflow of money into and from the network — but good luck trying to regulate the network as a whole.

The great part here is that any state who tries to limit their people’s access to it only harms themselves as there are other, more expensive ways to get around anything the government could come up with. Plus you know how inefficient all attempts at regulating existing assets are — and those are in essence in the government’s own hands. Bitcoin is not, all the government can really do is try to tax you or fine you in their own currency.

In fact since pretty much all major countries are now invested into it somehow this becomes a global market that allows states to fight each other’s cash reserves and slowly extract money from a state’s economy into a globally available fund anyone can dip into. Anyone who messes things up only limits themselves.

If you lose your password then good luck living with the results — there is no way to get your money back. Sent your own money to the wrong address? Your fault, ain’t gonna give you back, only gonna let you down.

If a fallback existed it would put the whole concept ad absurdum and thankfully that is not the case.