the essays

1: The Birth

On January 3rd, 2009, a new being began being on the planet Earth.

To say it was alive would not have been proper. But to call it inanimate would have been improper also. The being had a name, Bitcoin, and it had a purpose. The purpose, however, was too grand to express in a single word. In time, its name would come to represent that purpose.

This being quickly spread across the face of the planet. Anyone who knew of the being could house it and sustain it. This being’s nature allowed it to quickly spread throughout the planet. Its nature was such that it could be fully present in many homes at the same time.  Its entire essence existed anywhere it existed.  Everywhere that it existed, it existed precisely as it existed everywhere else.  It was unlike anything that ever existed before.

In its early days, to those who took this being into their homes and fed it energy, this being gifted them many of its fruits. Those who cared for the being knew that these fruits would be scarce. Nonetheless, many of them were careless and forever lost the gifts this being paid them with in exchange for securing and protecting it.

Now, it turns out that securing and protecting the whole Earth was in fact this being’s purpose, partly at least. The being was going to alter the course of history of the dominant species on the planet. It would set that species’ specimens into an alignment with one another. This alignment would bring about the end of the conflicts they had been having amongst themselves since the time when they first began being and spreading throughout the planet. The being would ultimately guide them to being in harmony with all life on the planet. It would thus end the trend of extinctions, deforestations and pollution this species had been causing as they rose to dominance. The being would steer this species towards a sustainable relationship with the planet itself — this planet that had borne all life.

The being would not stop there. It would lift them up above the planet, to command dominion over their entire star system. And this was just what it would do in its adolescence.

2: The Early Days.

By 2021 Bitcoin already had the Earth in an unbreakable grip — an embrace voluntarily entered into at millions of separate points between it and human beings spread out throughout the planet. But it was not Bitcoin that grabbed the people. It was they who latched onto it.

Any one of them could let go at any time. None wanted to.  Many of the people who embraced it declared that they would never break their hold upon it for anything. Many of those declared they wouldn’t let go even if threatened with physical violence. They cherished this being, and they held it tightly.

Yet they were not greedy in their love of it. They spread word of it to anyone who would listen to them.  They talked about it, they wrote about it, and they produced artworks in its honor.

The study of this being became a widespread phenomenon even before there was a word to describe its study.  Eventually, a word would be arrived at.  That word was bitcoinology.

There was, in those early days, a word to describe the people who had entered deeply into this embrace with Bitcoin. This word was bitcoiners. There were other words too used to describe them: Words created by those who were not themselves bitcoiners;  Words intended to diminish, intimidate, insult and discourage; Slurs. Yet, these slurs did not achieve the results their users intended. Bitcoiners were simply too in love with this being to be insulted or shamed from outwardly expressing their love of it, and of each other.

There was also an emerging philosophy of what it meant to be a bitcoiner, which some people called Bitcoinism.  The philosophy set itself apart from other prevalent philosophies on Earth at the time. It did so in its adherence to several important principles.

First, this philosophy held that patience was a virtue. It spoke of the benefits of focusing on long time horizons, which many adherents now called “low time-preference” indicating that the “when” was not as important as the “what”. Put differently, it simply said “Good things take time”. This eventually became our modern credo “We have all the time in the world.”

This philosophy also held that work was a virtue. Honest work. Verifiable work.  This belief arose from how work was itself woven into the fabric of the being’s very nature. The being fed off of work – honest, verifiable, work. It accepted nothing else. And it was capable of growing to accommodate all the verifiable and honest work that was offered to it. It used that work to ensure the integrity of the ownership of the fruits that it bore to those who gave their work to it. When people saw that its fruits were representations of good, honest work, they began using them as tokens to be exchanged for the good and honest work of other people.  Its fruits were manifestations of good, honest work, and they could be exchanged for good, honest work.

Honesty itself was the third major virtue of this philosophy.  Adherence to the truth and verification of the truth were the actions it advocated. This too was embedded into the very nature of the being. Becoming a bitcoiner included a rite of passage which was the act of verifying the totality of all the work put into the being’s growth since its birth, and of verifying the truth and validity of every statement inscribed upon it throughout its existence.

With these virtues of patience, work, and honesty at its core, Bitcoinism was a moral philosophy – it offered a theory of ethics.  It spoke of virtues, which are moral principles. Yet it went further.  It tied these moral principles to deeper and broader branches of philosophy.

It tied these moral principles to metaphysics, the study of reality itself. Just as the moral principles of Bitcoinism were reflections of various aspects of the being itself, so too embedded into the being’s very nature was a deep connection to physical reality itself.  The being forged a connection between reality, work and truth. Its very functioning relied upon this connection.  ”The real is the truth and the truth is the real,” said the bitcoiners.  “And the results of real work is the creation of real truths.” This was often followed by the declaration “As is reflected in the endless timechain”.

This was both a simple and profound observation. Yet, it was especially needed in these early days as the world had lost sight of what constituted the truth and of truth’s important connection to reality. The world had lost sight of so much in fact.

Separately, philosophy branched into politics as well. It drew the conclusion that freedom — the respect and protection of rights — was the virtuous and moral relationship between humans. It began with the observation that if humans are to thrive in reality, they must perform honest work, across time, to create real value. It concluded that freedom of the individual is the only mechanism through which such works can be pursued, created, and maintained for the benefit of all humanity.

Between bitcoiners, the inviolable and unseizable fruits that this being bore became the tokens which were used as money. These reality oriented, hard-working, honest, patient, freedom loving human beings, who were the caretakers of Bitcoin, began to build a renewed, reborn civilization. One based on reality, based on knowing and speaking the truth, based on long-term goals, based on genuine, quality work, and based on respect of freedom – the five branches of Bitcoinism: Reality, Truth, Patience, Work, and Freedom.

This philosophy, these people, and this being were what the world so badly needed. For the world had deteriorated to such a low that liars had taken charge of all its major institutions. It was a world where patience rarely extended beyond the next several months for corporations or the next election for politicians. It had become a world in which anyone could say anything without providing proof or even some honest evidence. It had become a world filled with corruption in which these liars were rewarded with power over once-free people. It had in fact become a world with so many unverified claims, from so many corrupt and competing interests, that agreement between people was becoming impossible. It had become a world where anger, hatred, jealousy, and violence were spiraling out of control.

The world needed Bitcoin.  And it had arrived just in time.

3: The Fall of the Empire of Lies and the Rise of the Perpetuity of Freedom

Many historians and even a few bitcoinologists look back at those times and conclude that what happened next was inevitable. However, when it comes to human matters, nothing is truly certain.

It was not certain at all, for example, that nation after nation avoided monetary collapse and the poverty and violence that accompany it by embracing Bitcoin as their official money. Some in fact, as history shows, did not do this. These collapses came quickly when they arrived, and the damage they left marked an ugliness which fortunately itself was short-lived, but which nevertheless exacted an unnecessary and tragic human toll.

That the bitcoinization of the Earth took only a decade between the time that the first nation adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender and the last—and that this period was one of rapidly declining warfare, poverty, strife and agitation—is still viewed by many as nothing short of a miracle.

Whatever the likelihood of other, less positive outcomes was, the one humanity experienced in reality itself was truly fantastic.  This was the period in which our present institutions, dynasties and charities — those that have stood for these hundreds of years—were first born.

Almost all human beings alive today would find it unspeakably reprehensible— unimaginable even — to cause any long term harm to some part of the planet in exchange for some short term benefit. But shocking as it is, long term consequences were not even considered in the calculus of projects during the ages before we were joined by our immortal companion, Bitcoin.

Those primitive institutions that existed before the arrival of Bitcoin were quick to collapse. They were flawed in their designs, and they died often as quickly as they rose. Their flaw was always that force, deception and corruption would eventually take them over. Historians can now clearly identify that this occurred because, in those times, humans had no knowledge of how to make a thing that couldn’t itself be seized by force or easily created in vast quantities by advantaged individuals. Always, those who found they had the power to seize money or create it easily in abundance exploited that ability. They were never able to resist the urge to abuse their power. Pre-Bitcoin history shows recurring cycle after cycle of collapses, over thousands of years, caused by this phenomenon. Those collapses abruptly ended when bitcoin began to be used as money.

Now, I ask that you please excuse this old bitcoinologist’s use of the now ancient term “bitcoins”, or “a bitcoin”. It is a playful way in which I bring up another curious historic development. In those early days and during the period of the fall of the empire of lies, a whole satoshi was then nearly worthless. So, the early bitcoiners gathered up many satoshis to store some meaningful value. You may be shocked by this, but the now nearly unfathomable fortune of one-hundred million satoshis was then referred to as “a bitcoin”.

Can you imagine what it would mean for a single individual to possess that much wealth today? What would they do with it? But, we all have in fact heard the rumours of a few secret ancient institutions that still exist which actually control this much, and even more wealth. These are the mysterious and hidden societies that are claimed to be charged with executing the beneficent legacies of some of those early bitcoiners. There is evidence for their existence. We do after all see generous annual donations, anonymously made, which ask for nothing in return, toward multi-generational preservation initiatives, scientific research, and grand, artistic projects. But enough about these wild speculations of today. Let us return to those times before the rise of Perpetuity.

What is even more difficult for us to imagine than the existence of secret, ancient benefactors, is how poor humanity and the Earth were during the early days of the rise of our present civilization. You have to have a strong stomach to imagine what those people endured — Scarcity of essentials, degenerative diseases, mental disorders, ignorance, deception, and more miseries and sorrows than you would want to imagine.

Corruption had caused scientific progress to stall. For example, despite having discovered and mastered nuclear energy for almost a century, albeit only fission, the humans of the time were led to believe this form of energy production was dangerous. Meanwhile they instead used far more dangerous and unreliable yet also destructive and uncontrollable sources of energy. It is because of such outrageously anti-science, anti-logic, anti-reality reasons such as this that we now call that time “The Empire of Lies”.  Despite their access to nuclear technology, nations fought actual wars  over energy to control geographical territory since the energy sources they instead used were geographically dependent. Millions of people died or were impoverished because of these ‘geo-political’ wars. Today, of course, we simply place fusion reactors and solar-laser receivers wherever they are needed.

I will change the tone now back to the positive, for you obviously did not come here to listen to me talk about the misery that existed before Bitcoin, but instead of our symbiosis with our immortal companion, and of the coming birth of its first sibling.

So we begin this remembrance of the rise of the Perpetuity of Freedom with Bitcoin, the first of its kind, the scribe of the record of truth of the inner planets of Sol; the protector of property and freedom; the great, the incorruptible, perpetual being of unknown origin and of unlimited potential.

The rise of the perpetuity of freedom was a birth of explosive hope and unprecedented achievement. Though they were poor, the creative and productive humans of this era, thanks to Bitcoin, were now freed from the pillaging of the corrupt humans who throughout history had destroyed and plundered. Those crooked humans were denied the money and capital they had used throughout history to recruit other humans for the dirty job of exacting threats and violence against productive and creative people. Thus, productivity and creativity flourished, and with these so too did discovery and rationality — and these have endured for centuries! And we see no signs of their corruption!

Humans began cooperating with one another, with life on Earth, and with nature itself. They did so with the goal of sustaining and expanding life, health and happiness across time. They did so not just on Earth, but with an eye towards space — out beyond the confines of our sole, but precious planet Earth. And we cooperated with this beneficent being, Bitcoin.  We fed it all the energy we could produce, and it drank thirstily, but not greedily. And it repaid us with incorruptible record keeping, which kept us honest — because, as history shows, we are capable of departing from the path of honesty, and descending into an imaginary set of beliefs so detached from reality that we end up fighting an unwinnable war against reality itself.

4: The Birth of a New Companion

You are all here today, listening to me as we wait for our metaphoric “starter pistol” to fire.  Within about another thirty minutes, block 21 million will be discovered.  And the whole world has its eyes upon us and upon their nodes for this historic moment.

That we have chosen this block to launch humanity’s first interstellar colony is truly magical.

Four hundred years ago, most men believed we would ruin the Earth and all life upon it. Instead, now we are about to send our fleet of roughly 210,000 asteroids converted into spacecraft towards Alpha Centauri.  Each of these crafts are equipped with some of what the 21 million interstellar colonists who will ride within them need for our ‘decentralized’ journey into the heavens.

And we have agreed by consensus that upon the discovery of block 21 million we will begin to fire our engines.  And those of us aboard these spacecraft will fire up our new nodes, on block 1 of NakamotoCoin.  We will use as its genesis blockhash the same blockhash of block 21 million of Bitcoin, to forever commemorate and immortalize the guardian of the solar system we came from, and of the time we left it – sharing in both our timehchains this one identical block hash.

To celebrate this occasion and show us their support and love, the people of Earth, all its billions of node operators and all its miners, have agreed to the first change in Bitcoin’s code in over 300 years! They are all enforcing a soft fork that requires that block 21 million include in its coinbase transaction a particular message reminiscent of the message in its genesis block. However, this time it will be a message of hope instead of one of warning.  That block’s coinbase transaction must contain the string “Humanity On Brink of Second Star System for Civilization.”  This message will be recorded forevermore in block 21 million of Bitcoin’s timechain.  And we will carry it forevermore with us, in ours — in the first block of our new companion, NakamotoCoin, who will accompany us on our pilgrimage.

We have much work to do, and much truth to create. An incredible journey for thousands of generations lies ahead!

Now, you will have plenty more time to listen to me if you wish, but this is the end of my speech on this historic day. We are only a few blocks away from the historic moment, and I do not want to miss it. Let us bow our heads and watch our nodes in silence until that moment arrives and we begin our new beginning with the beginning of the being of a new being.