Bitcoin is useful because it’s precious.

Today is January 3rd, 2024, the day Bitcoin turns 15 full years old. Let’s start by wishing Bitcoin a happy 15th birthday!

The conventional story telling in the media is that Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin 15 years ago, on January 3rd, 2009, on a server in Helsinki, Finland.

However, according to Teach Chain’s examination, it is actually more likely that the truth is that Satoshi Nakamoto got his hands on the January 3rd edition of the Times between the 3rd and 9th of that year, and after a few days of trial runs, officially launched Bitcoin on the 9th.

 

The above image is from Liu Teach Chain’s History of Bitcoin, #3, “The Times” Bitcoin mining

But, in any case, Satoshi Nakamoto chose the publication date of that January 3 Times newspaper as the timestamp for the Genesis Block, and thus, people have come to think of January 3, 2009 as the date of Bitcoin’s birth.

Fifteen years, literally, have flown by.

Today, Bitcoin has gone from worthless to a unique global asset with a market capitalization of $886.2 billion, surpassing the market capitalization of Musk’s Tesla and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, and ranking among the top 10 assets in the world.

 

Today, the passage of a Bitcoin ETF is imminent, and global management giants such as BlackRock and Fidelity have already jumped on board, filing applications with the SEC, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, for a Bitcoin ETF.

Some, however, are still watching, questioning, and mocking. From out of sight, to out of mind, to out of mind, and finally just out of touch.

Bitcoin is the touchstone. In his 2021.1.10 article, “Breaking Coins to Recognize People,” Liu Teach Chain wrote, “The way you treat Bitcoin is enough to portray the essence of a person.” “The history of a coin owner’s Bitcoin holdings is the strongest reflection of his or her personality. There’s nothing that can hide that light, and nothing that can disguise that light. It’s the best reflection of a person’s true personality.” “For every coin holder, there are only two kinds of people in this world, those who hold bitcoins and those who don’t. For the latter, we recognize in seconds that these people are not yet qualified partners.”

If a financial V to this time today, still in the red mouth, upside down, black and white to warn you away from bitcoin, regardless of whether he moved out of the conspiracy theory, or ideological stick, such a V, advise you to stay away from early. After all, every day to their brains into the low-intelligence, retarded and anti-intelligence paste, sooner or later the brain will also become paste. ETC Miner 

Bitcoin has taught us a lot of things. It teaches us too many things, all the time in a deep impact on our concepts, shaking our hearts.

With the long days of consultation, it will be in the subtle between, improve our thinking level and cognitive level.

Let’s take an example. For example, it is well known that Bitcoin can only be obtained through a PoW proof-of-work, which costs arithmetic power, i.e., computer hardware, and electrical energy. Even in the early days of Bitcoin’s uselessness (of course, many people may still find it useless to this day), everyone had to pay this kind of price to get it.

Bitcoin teaches us about “precious” and “useful”.

What is precious will sooner or later be useful, but what is useful is not necessarily precious.

There are hundreds of elements in the periodic table of chemistry. Many of them were discovered when no one knew what they were good for. For example, rare earth elements have no value before the Industrial Revolution, but once science and technology have developed, these rare elements have a great use.

Buns and air, very useful to us humans, indispensable, but no one will think they are very precious.

Traditional industries, including the traditional Internet (the so-called web2), do things from the starting point is “useful”, so the Internet is the most talked about “user needs”, “application scenarios Therefore, the Internet talks most about “user needs” and “application scenarios”. As long as I can make something useful and sell it to users, I can make money.

Bitcoin, including the blockchain (the so-called web3), the starting point is “precious”. No one may know what it does now, but the point is that it costs money (and you can’t cheat) to get it, which makes it precious.

Things will be useful because they are precious, but not necessarily because they are useful. Blockchain is different from traditional industries and the traditional Internet precisely because of this difference in logic.

The logic is different, so the thinking and methodology are completely different. The starting point is different, so the order of doing things is completely different.

Fundamentally, because people are subjective and active. They automatically and spontaneously find a use for their precious possessions.

So what is the source of value?

The subjective theory of value says it is demand, while the labor theory of value says it is labor. This economic philosophy can also be attributed to the identification of “usefulness” and “preciousness”:

The usage scenario determines the feeling of “usefulness”, and the cost of acquisition determines the feeling of “preciousness”.

When I was engaged in the Internet in my early years, I was obsessed with subjective value theory, and I read a book called “Human Behavior” five or six times. But when the teaching chain and Bitcoin cut, in-depth blockchain practice, but more and more aware of the labor theory of value, began to put the “Capitalism” repeatedly read.

Das Kapital makes it clear that an increase in productivity causes a decrease in value. The more efficient you are, the less value you have. Bitcoin PoW is very inefficient, and therefore, has a lot of value. Other chains are chasing higher efficiency, then they are actually chasing lower value. (Off topic: AI ditto.)

If that makes counter-common sense to you in the abstract. Then teachchain can use the example of playing inscriptions to illustrate.

There are a couple ways to hit this 10,000 inscription collection:

The first, the most efficient. Write a crawler and download the 10,000 avatars. Then write a script, and all of them can be uplinked and beaten in a few hours. Not the slightest difference, fast and efficient.

The second kind, the efficiency of the center. Download the avatar, generate the code. Then develop a “one-click to start typing” web page, so that people only need to click the button to quickly complete the uplink. Because people do very little action, do not need to manually input, so almost never hit the wrong data.

The third type is the least efficient. There is only one on-chain contract, and everything else needs to be done by the user. You need to manually download the avatar image, you need to manually encode with the encode tool, you need to manually copy and paste into the contract interaction tool, you need to manually check that the input is correct, you need to manually complete the wallet installation, add the network, you need to manually send the address to request gas, you need to manually interact with the contract to complete the chain. This set of actions down, the time is not short, not to mention the hard work, there is a certain probability of playing wrong, playing bad.

The above three cases after playing 10,000, which method to get the highest value of the results? I think this is self-evident.

From the “useful” thinking, this picture hit the chain, what is the use? I can’t figure it out even if I think about it. But from another perspective, from the “precious” thinking, the crystallization of their own labor and sweat, inscribed by the blockchain, belonging to their own inscription collection, can not be re-created, every time you turn out to look at the heart of the heart is beautiful. “The important thing is not the picture, the important thing is that this I played with my own hands.” Reason is limited, and the feeling will not lie. This is what Wang Yangming called “inner light”.

Imagine if Satoshi Nakamoto had issued 21 million bitcoins in January 2009, directly in the code, what would bitcoins be worth today?

Satoshi Nakamoto did not. He would have mobilized so many people around the world, spent so much manpower, resources, energy and land, and taken more than a hundred years (until about 2140) to produce all 21 million bitcoins.

It’s not inefficient.

It’s the value that’s not so bad.

You say it’s possible to artificially create limits and scarcity without using PoW, using other methods, such as setting rules, right? But if people set the rules, people can break them. Satoshi Nakamoto doesn’t believe that people can hold the line in front of the temptation of great benefits. It is not that he is not willing to believe in people, but he can not believe in people. After all, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the Bitcoin whitepaper, “What we need is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proofs rather than trust [in people].”

Only a sufficiently expensive price tag is enough to convince people that Bitcoin is precious.

Only if Bitcoin is sufficiently precious will it continue to be explored and found useful.

Bitcoin is useful because it is precious.