The fact that so few of us are excited about the existence of a teleportable absolutely scarce resource tells you something about the human race.

Depressingly enough, most people are clueless about how much of an achievement the discovery of Bitcoin was.

Discovering more and more of what it could do was simply mind-blowing to a curious kid growing up on the countryside of a country that was quite unaware of the world outside its borders at the time. There were two state owned TV channels and three radio channels at the time. Some enthusiasts broadcasted short wave radio from their homes here and there, but commercial actors in mass media were unthinkable at the time.

It wasn’t really until after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that we got any form of commercial TV and Radio. The Commodore machine was something else entirely.

You connected the device to your TV and all of a sudden, you were in wonderland. When you pressed the buttons on the massive keyboard, you could control what happened on your TV. It seemed like pure magic. In the small town we later moved to during my early teens, a shop had opened up that sold wine essences for home brewers alongside games and books for the Commodore 64 and 128, which even had a floppy disk drive. It wasn’t very long before some of us kids started sharing and trading cassettes full of pirated games with each other. The Nintendo kids couldn’t do this, this was just for us Commodore nerds.

The nature of how copiable data really revealed itself to me when I learned how to write a simple program using only PRINT and GOTO. With these commands I could make the computer write whatever sentence I wanted on the screen, over and over again, until the entire TV said “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, or something. You could make a seemingly infinite amount of copies of everything. Not only strings of text, but programs, games, cassettes or any other type of data.

My memory from this era is a little blurry, and I can’t really recall if I ever thought of computerized money so early on. But I definitely thought about it in the 90’s, when the internet started changing everything once again. When MP3-files started to appear, you realized that music was not a scarce thing tied to a physical CD or cassette, but could be copied over and over and over again.

The idea of computerized money seemed more and more impossible, the more powerful computers became. The PC games of that era often came with a specific password for the specific two or three CDs that your specific copy of the game came with. But it was easy to get around this by just making an image file of those CDs and burning it to writeable CD-ROMs, so that you could use that code again and again.

The host said it was a nice t-shirt, to which the Napster guy replied “Oh, it’s not mine, I borrowed it from a friend”, to a standing ovation from the crowd. MP3’s and videos were now widely shared via different peer-to-peer programs. After the introduction of The Pirate Bay, it seemed like piracy had won the world and that we would never have to pay for entertainment ever again. But there was a catch. The central bankers had taken notice of the nature of data too.

Even though they did it at a slower pace than us proper nerds, the bankers and central bankers of the world had also initiated a digitalization process. They had done so by employing some nerds here and there in order to make money digital. I don’t recall ever hearing anything about this on the news, and a program that handled figures that represented actual money was never really revealed to the public anywhere that I’m aware of.

The process of producing new money is hidden from everyone.

The ones among us who are allowed to conjure new money out of thin air had found an even more powerful way to use data than the file sharing pirates. They could create infinite copies of money itself, enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Everyone knows about inflation.

Almost all people know that the value of their money will slowly erode over time. What everyone doesn’t know is why this happens and who benefits from it. People seem to think that moneys’ inflationary nature is just another law of physics, a natural phenomenon that just happens. Some people might know that their country has a central bank, and that this institution decides how much money there should be, but not why they are allowed to do so. Most people think that a central bank is made up of experts on economics that know what metrics to look at and how they ought to react when deciding whether to keep their printers running or not.

What almost no normal person knows, is that this whole system isn’t natural at all. That it’s deeply flawed and corrupt, and that the ultimate tool for getting out of it was invented in 2009.

With the discovery of Bitcoin, absolute digital scarcity was discovered.

The total amount of bitcoins that will ever exist is finite. To me, having grown up with the Commodore 64, the thought of this was as fascinating as the thought of a perpetual motion machine, a human teleporter or someone figuring out how to travel faster than the speed of light.

The invention of the smartphone was not even half as jaw dropping as this, because absolute scarcity in digital form changes everything. There’s just no denying that. If this had been discovered before the computer itself, the world would have been a very different place. All of the privacy flaws, the censorship and the centralization that we see on the internet now would have been much harder to implement, because everyone would have owned their own stuff online to a much greater extent.

But history didn’t play out that way. We didn’t get privacy in the base layer protocols and we didn’t get an internet native type of money until most of the infrastructure had already been built. We’re all chained to the unforgiving arrow of time, and in our timeline of the multiverse this is how things played out. We will have to deal with it. What dealing with it means is that our small band of rebel bitcoiners will have to fight the evil central banking empire from the ground up. There’s no getting around that. Those of us that know about this thing and realize its potential will have to convince everyone else, before we find ourselves living in a total surveillance dystopia.

If you’re a Bitcoiner and if you’re excited about Bitcoin for the right reasons, you should know that you’re ahead of the curve. You’ve recognized a paradigm shift before it has happened. You’ve predicted the next stage of human civilization. You get it. You’re probably a bit more advanced in the cognitive department than most people you know. Remember the words of Spider-Man’s uncle, “with great powers comes great responsibility”. Remember that there’s no marketing department. You will have to tell people about it. You will have to educate your friends. You are the voice of Bitcoin, and so is everyone else in it.

Everyone except Craig Wright.