Bitcoin is digital gold.
Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation.
Bitcoin is money.
Bitcoin is a technology.
Bitcoin is software.
Bitcoin is hope.
Bitcoin is an electrical system.
Bitcoin is a heating system.
The truth is that they are all wrong, in the sense that they are all just partial descriptions of what Satoshi Nakamoto started. The second word “is” is where the problem is. Although Bitcoin is all of them, if you say just one, you limit your understanding of it. The only real answer: Bitcoin is Bitcoin. We have to recognize all the characteristics that Bitcoin has and describe it as such without putting a limit on it. Because the person who says bitcoin is an inflation hedge has actually seen it when it isn't. Whoever says that it is digital gold suffers from the argument that it lacks metallic properties. Someone who says it's money is going to miss the whole proof-of-work aspect of real-world electrical energy harvesting, heating, etc.
Every invention or discovery in mankind was unknown at the point of discovery. If it is unknown, how can you describe it in one word or sentence?
Until all of humanity dedicated a word to it, language remained limited, and language had to evolve around reality to describe it correctly. We are currently still trying to assign words to what Bitcoin means, and they all fail at some point. Just to be clear, the descriptions fail – the truth about Bitcoin still stands.
Even the true principles of Bitcoin that you understand at a deep level still struggle to penetrate the collective consciousness because we are trying to describe the unknown, and in current human language that is not sufficiently developed. Not only has it not evolved, but even with the new terminology that has been incorporated, it is a different language to outsiders.
Bitcoin's monetary policy is subject to adjustment difficulty, the halving schedule, and the consensus mechanism.
This sentence, although true, is incomprehensible. You can't teach someone a new language by explaining it in the new language. We have to connect all the words one by one in the language that the person already knows. And to make matters worse – what happens when you try to explain something without using the language surrounding it? The only possible solution is to observe the new thing with all its characteristics and experience it. When you do all this, new words will appear because the existing ones are not enough.
We don't help people by teaching them philosophy about Bitcoin. This is for bookworms and Bitcoin enthusiasts like me, who have the time to do this and who like to learn things this way. For others, this is an unnatural way to learn. When children are young, how do they learn before they can speak, read, or understand the language their parents speak? Are they stupid, and should toxic extremists tell them: “Enjoy staying poor”? i don't think so. They learn from experiencing everything through their senses. This is much more learned information than input from speaking and reading. And when they enjoy the experience, they keep doing 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 great joy when you improve your life with all the experiences it can bring you. That's the focus of Breez and our entire team: building the technologies that will give them this experience. We will teach them through experiences, not through promises of the future.
Talk is cheap, people say, and orange granularity is a tactic that targets a small segment of the total population. Experiments can be available to anyone, experiencing them now. They don't have to wait to try Number Go Up in the future; They are experiencing the benefit now. Give them experience if you want to keep them. This achieves things in a way that makes language and problems of description irrelevant. You create a deeper understanding of each person going through the experience, and they won't back down if you solve their problem. There's a real-life example of what I'm talking about.
Dale Carnegie observed reality and discovered something no one else did. He discovered how to use the hardest metals in a way that no one had ever done before. He realized that this was something that would change the construction industry, and that it would bring with it completely new possibilities that would be impossible without it. Carnegie began to harvest the strength of steel. I'll leave it to you, the reader, to see how many analogies you can identify with Bitcoin's progress and how we approach it all.
Once he discovered this, he decided to make his first major application: a steel bridge spanning the Mississippi River. The river was so wide, no other material could have withstood the current of water and the load which was conceived to be upon it. There is no other material than steel. Carnegie did his best to convince everyone to build this bridge because the enormous cost of harvesting steel was much greater than any other structure. In addition, its usefulness assessment was unknown, and construction took much longer than expected. Everyone was only seeing the cost and did not want to bear it for the unknown future. Only a few, like Dale, saw the benefit and that it was worth it.
He had somehow managed to finish building it, but there were very few who knew and acknowledged this new reality. Everyone was trying to impose their beliefs of wood, stone and iron structures on steel. No one wants to step on the bridge because of that. No matter how Dale was trying to teach people that this was something new with new properties (dare I say “pill” to them). People lived in the ancient reality, and their minds created the story why the steel bridge was just a fantasy. And in a way, that was true. It was a fantasy because it was only in the mind of everyone who had not experienced it (walked on it).
How do you make someone experience a new reality that they thought was fantasy? How do you explain something (through the imagination of language) about which there is no language? There is a biological protection within all of us trying to survive, and new things trigger that instinct. Things we all know can be classified as safe or dangerous. Unknown things we cannot evaluate because if they are dangerous, their cost is high; If it is safe, the benefit is little. In this case, if the bridge is bad, people walking on it could die when it collapses. If it is stable, it saves time in travel costs to the other side of the river. This is a disproportionate risk-to-reward ratio and a very reasonable fear.
So, to get people to experience this new reality (even though it was right 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 believe that elephants do not walk on unstable structures, and this was a fairly common belief among residents. So, they used this imaginary belief to destroy the other imaginary belief. They hired an elephant and invited all the people to see that the elephant thought the temple was stable. When the elephant walked on the bridge and people saw it with their own eyes, their reality changed, and the fantasy they had been telling themselves about the bridge was shattered. Although the reality did not change before and after the elephant walk, people's support was gained by demonstrating this new reality through an event that people saw and experienced for themselves. Carnegie didn't have to explain anything anymore. The experience they put into people's minds was much stronger and deeper than words.
When Dale was building the bridge, and later, if he wanted people to use it, explaining all its properties was putting him on the defensive. He had to explain why he was right. Even if he explained why, no one would believe him because he was saying everyone was wrong. When they made the bridge and had people try it, everyone who wasn't using it was put on the defensive. Now the dynamics had changed, and they had to explain why they didn't go along with it. Why walk around the river or make many trips back and forth with boats to move something from one side to the other instead of just using the bridge?
This is how Bitcoin will expand into human consciousness. Not by talking to the world about something they don't believe in, but by building useful apps for them and strategically marketing them to shatter their old beliefs. If you're someone who prefers the color orange, you know that this is an uphill battle, and you're on the defensive.
Let's start building that and showing it to people, so they're the ones who are put on the defensive, why don't they use Bitcoin. Stop defending Bitcoin, and start attacking the problems people face by using the Bitcoin system to solve them. Stop thinking you know Bitcoin, and start experiencing everything it can do. Don't set a limit for what it is, because you will be setting a limit for yourself, not Bitcoin.
Let's go!
This is a guest post by Evan Makedonski. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.