Bitcoin puts physics on your side.
Ideas to take with you.
- 01
Every prior form of stored wealth was physical, which meant the attacker held the asymmetric advantage – concentrated force could always overwhelm distributed defense.
- 02
The modern state is best understood as a monopoly-on-violence protection service, with inflation functioning as the modern, invisible form of the protection tax.
- 03
Bitcoin's mining process still expends physical energy, but points it at defending the ledger rather than attacking someone's stock – flipping the offense/defense asymmetry for the first time in recorded history.
- 04
A successful 51% attack would destroy the value of what the attacker sought to capture, which makes cooperation the game-theoretically rational move, not coercion.
- 05
Because Bitcoin is information distributed across many minds and geographies, the cost of surveillance and enforcement scales up faster than the resources any single actor can bring to bear.
