Bitcoin, 16 years in the nonsense

Nothing is built in stone;
everything is built on sand,
but we must build
as if the sand were made of stone.

Jorge Luis Borges.

Bitcoin is a graveyard of narratives. But of zombie narratives, as many times killed as many times raised as a shield to defend that Bitcoin is this or something else. And one who has already tired of being a gravedigger settles for the job of a watchman, contemplating the rows of neophytes desecrating tombs or practicing necromancy, with the expectation that the deceased narratives will reveal their financial future.

Allow us to explain, dear reader, before you flee in horror from these funereal visions (the undead that crawl through this text are not the kind that chew brains with dislocated jaws). Excuse me, but it is not our fault that Satoshi decided to share the white paper of Bitcoin on Halloween, Day of the Dead, Samhain, or whatever you call it at home. Coincidence or causality? We will never know. Just as we will never know if those symbolisms attributed to Satoshi (such as his date of birth) are intentional or not. Because Satoshi is no longer among us, even though he has always been among us.

That is precisely the framework of this text: the death of Satoshi. His symbolic death, because we have no certainty about his physical death. And it is this uncertainty that occupies the space of its absence. Given Satoshi’s silence, many clamor to know what Bitcoin is, defining it as best suits their interests. Since there is not a creator Whether it affirms or refutes, the way is opened to any narrative. “If Satoshi does not exist, everything is allowed”Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov would say.

And to continue citing intense and mortuary ideas, we invite Roland Barthes to our cemetery. If the French philosopher rose from his grave to share a few words at our wake of narratives, he would probably extract them from his text The death of the author, not having had time to prepare something original during his eternal rest. He would explain to us about the white paper, calling him text, for convenience:

“Today we know that a text is not made up of a row of words, from which a single, theological meaning emerges, in a certain way (since it would be the message of the Author-God), but rather by a space of multiple dimensions in which various writings are agreed upon and contrasted, none of which is the original: the text is a fabric of quotations from the thousand centers of culture.”

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

Barthes (or us through him) here is alluding to the cypherpunks and all the research on digital money and cryptography that preceded and made possible Bitcoin, which served Satoshi as blocks to build his text.

But, excuse me, Barthes, we did not interrupt you; continues:

“Once the Author is removed (referring to Satoshi, missing since 2011), the attempt to “decipher” a text becomes useless. Giving a text an Author is imposing insurance on it, providing it with an ultimate meaning, closing the writing. Writing incessantly establishes meaning, but always ends up evaporating it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption from meaning.”

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

That’s what we mean, in part, with our headline. Yes, Satoshi gave him a sense to Bitcoin: being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. But, as the years went by, This sense has also been evaporating. We are not only referring to the debate over whether Bitcoin should function as cash or digital gold, a controversy that ended in the fork of Bitcoin Cash in 2017. These people still shared the vision of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic system, although they disagreed about its effectiveness. But today the heaviest players in this market they use unused btc Bitcoin; They are exposed to the price of the asset without even having touched the network with a clamp.

Here we do not want to become moralistic, condemning one or another supposed use (although we do take the opportunity to remind you that, if your Bitcoin is in the hands of a custodian, it is not yours). Since our work in this imaginary cemetery is that of vigils, we only want to reveal to you the existence of zombie narratives.

Although we doubt with the deepest skepticism that the majority of people who currently hold BTC have read the white paper, for reflective purposes let’s suspend disbelief and give the implausible a chance. Every time a person reads the white paper, this person re-creates the white paper. With his reading, full of his cultural baggage, biases and other filters of perception, he makes an interpretation of Satoshi’s words that gives the text a new meaning. This is what Barthes says:

“There is a place in which all this multiplicity is collected, and that place is not the author, as has been said until today, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which they are inscribed, without losing a single one, all the quotations that constitute a writing.”

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

That this phenomenon occurs in Bitcoin is not something new. Already in 2018, researchers Hasu and Nic Carter presented a list of changing narratives in their text Bitcoin Visions, which listed the different interpretations made about Bitcoin so far:

Among others.

Historically we have seen how these zombie narratives come and go, die and revive, some more frequently than others. But the interesting thing about all this is that, in the absence of Satoshi, Bitcoin does not and will not have a single meaning.

Bitcoin will remain meaningful and useful to the people who use it. As if we were babies exploring the world, when a fork can be an airplane, a freesby, a staff, or whatever is useful to the game, people will continue to use Bitcoin in the way that best suits them, and that overflow of life and meaning is what we want to celebrate this day of the dead, anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to its author and do not necessarily reflect those of CriptoNoticias. The author’s opinion is for informational purposes and under no circumstances constitutes an investment recommendation or financial advice.