Sunday Summary, DEC07
A week in review from the Editor
When Do You Finally “Get” Bitcoin?
I’m sitting in the back of a packed room in Nashville, sipping a La Croix, watching a room full of entrepreneurs, hedge-fund partners, and other assorted professionals slowly lean forward in their seats. On stage, someone who is best described as a bitcoin and monetary theory historian is walking them through the power of capped money supply with certain technical characteristics.
Half the audience is nodding enthusiastically; the other half looks like they’ve just been asked to read ancient Sumerian.
At this point in the lecture, I’m in the second group, and I’ve been in the bitcoin space nearly a decade. That uncomfortable moment is, I think, the real bitcoin graduation ceremony.
We all carry a private metric
When we’ve “made it” in our understanding of Bitcoin. For some it’s running a node. For others it’s the first time they custody their own keys without bricking a hardware wallet. For a few hardcore types it’s being able to reproduce the difficulty-retargeting algorithm on a napkin (don’t ever do this on a date, btw).
Yet the longer I’m around this thing, the more I suspect true proficiency isn’t marked by mastery of details; it’s marked by an almost embarrassing admission: the more you learn, the less you feel you know.
Think about the phases most of us stumble through.
At first Bitcoin is magic internet money. Then it’s a clever hash-chain with asymmetric cryptography bolted on. Later it becomes a study in applied game theory: 21 million, halving cycles, stock-to-flow, the longest chain with the most work. Eventually, if you keep going, it turns into something closer to monetary anthropology; an experiment in what happens when you give billions of incentivized actors a rule set that no subset of them can change without convincing everyone else it’s a good idea.
Each layer feels like the final one, until the next arrives and quietly mocks your previous confidence.
That shift is the closest thing I’ve found to a litmus test.
You don’t need to be able to audit Bitcoin Core from scratch. You don’t need to have an opinion on every soft-fork controversy since 2015. You don’t need to know what a MAST root is.
But, if you can sit in a room of very smart people explaining very complicated things, and still feel the ground steady beneath the original insight (fixed supply, bearer asset, verifiable rules enforced by energy use), then something important has happened.
The details become enriching, not distracting, to your core understanding.
The danger, of course, is mistaking familiarity with understanding. I’ve met PhDs in distributed systems who can recite BIPs by heart, yet quietly confess they still keep most of their wealth in custodial exchanges “for convenience.”
And, I’ve met artists and farmers who can’t explain a single op_code yet will casually move six-figure sums on chain because they grok the deeper promise: no one can freeze it, no one can inflate it, no one can demand to know why you sent it.
Perhaps the real sign you’ve “succeeded” is when the question itself starts to feel beside the point. You’re no longer performing understanding for conference panels or X threads. You’re just using the damn thing, quietly, every day, while the rest of the world argues about whether it’s a bubble, a ponzi, or the future.