Why bitcoin is a thing
How I see bitcoin through the Yuval Noah Harari lens of shared myths.
I saw bitcoin in 2009. My friend Hugh McGuire who I was working with told me about it briefly and said 'just buy a thousand of them, its 3 grand!'. Without really doing any work on it, I dismissed it as a classic Ponzi scheme. Or more precisely, a greater fool theory.
Years later I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and learned the concept of shared myths. Human civilization needed shared myths to operate in groups of more than an optimal number of 150 people. As cities and nations grew, so did shared myths. Religion is the classic one but there are many. If I traded with cities far from me, it helped if we both believed in a particular god. Human rights? They do not actually exist. We as a society decide that they exist and conform to them. Well some countries don't. A corporation is a shared myth. It is not a thing. But we all agree it is and even treat it that way in the eyes of the law, giving a company almost human qualities with rights and obligations.
Money is a shared myth. Gold is real and has some practical uses but it is mostly used as money or a store of value. It only works that way because we share the myth that it is in fact of value. Fiat currencies are even more so just a shared myth. Because the piece of paper it is on is barely useful. We decide to believe that a US dollar has value. We work for them, save them, and spend them. People will accept them in exchange for their house. However, they are not a thing. A piece of paper sure and a digit on the screen maybe. There have been many different types of money. Stones and even shells have been used. It all works, until it doesn't, because we believe.
This is what I missed with bitcoin. To be fair to myself, I would have had to have taken the view in 2009 that bitcoin would in fact become a shared myth. Bitcoin has now become a shared myth. It has unique properties that people believe are valuable. It has become a global shared myth much like gold or the US dollar. We often hear the argument that bitcoin isn't a thing or it doesn't actually exist. Be sure it does. It exists in in the minds of the believers. And the data suggests there are more believers every day.
