Sunday Summary, JUN22

A week in review from the Editor

In the early 2000s…

I watched my parents marvel at the magic of email. To them, it was wondrous—instant letters, no postage, no delay, just instant contact.

But, ask them how TCP/IP worked, and they’d blink blankly. They didn’t need to know. They just clicked “Send.” The infrastructure faded into the background, and utility took center stage.

Bitcoin follows a similar path.

Most people will use Bitcoin. Most people will not understand it. That’s okay.

The technical roots of Bitcoin are deep. It emerged from cypherpunk mailing lists, shaped by Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto, who were obsessed with cryptography, monetary theory, and decentralized systems. In its early years, Bitcoin was firmly the domain of developers and ideologues (those willing to run nodes, tinker with command lines, and debate block sizes for hours on end).

This unique population formed the early immune system of Bitcoin: skeptical, rigorous, and allergic to compromise.

But as adoption grew, the user base diversified. Builders were replaced by users. The self-custody crowd gave way to those using flashy apps with marketing teams. The language shifted—from private keys and consensus models to cashback rewards and “just tap to pay.” Bitcoin’s interfaces improved, its abstractions get stronger, and, like the internet, it begans to “just work.”

That means fewer people will understand why it works. Or how.

And that has consequences.

We shouldn’t expect every new user to become a philosophical maximalist. Most won’t even read the whitepaper, or grok the tradeoffs behind proof-of-work, or worry about miner incentives.

They will simply want money that works better,more reliably, more globally, and more freely. For them, Bitcoin’s value isn’t rooted in elegant cryptographic proofs; it’s in practical experience. They’ll use it because it protects them from inflation, capital controls, or remittance fees—not because they want to recite Gresham’s law at dinner parties (I know some of you have done this).

Yet, this widening of the proverbial tent demands maturity from those of us inside.

If we expect the next billion users to also become educators, node runners, and monetary philosophers, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment (and them for alienation). Instead, we must do what early adopters in any technological revolution must do: protect the core and welcome the crowd.

That means maintaining the integrity of the system by fighting for decentralization, preserving censorship resistance, and upholding the values that make Bitcoin different, without demanding that every new user understand the full stack. It means defending open-source principles while supporting user-friendly wallets.

It means preparing for a world where Bitcoin is common—but Bitcoin literacy is likely rare.

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, developed a powerful concept—The medium is the message.

In Bitcoin’s case, the medium is programmable money; the message is monetary sovereignty. As the medium spreads, we risk losing the message—unless we intentionally preserve it.

We need to build cultural redundancy.

Encourage education, yes, but also engineer systems that assume ignorance (and the eternal need to educate future generations, like support tools that default to self-custody but make recovery intuitive).

We must accept that misunderstanding doesn’t always imply misuse. Some will ride the wave without ever seeing the swell below. But, the wave will still carry them.

This is not cause for panic. It’s the pattern of every great technology. Few understand how GPS works, but we all use it to navigate. Few could diagram an electric grid, but we flip switches with confidence. The early engineers built systems strong enough to withstand ignorance and designed incentives aligned with continued usage.

We are entering an age where Bitcoin’s survival will depend less on being understood and more on being used. The job of the maximalist is evolving—from prophet to steward, and from gatekeeper to gardener.

Not everyone needs to know why Bitcoin works, but a critical mass must remember.

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