“Why is it different this time, Bitcoin?”

“You claim that bitcoin is going to redistribute wealth, end poverty and violence. But all this claims where made by technological advances in the past, The internet for example, but they just led to more concentration of power and wealth. Why is it different this time?”

The fair question asked by my friend @rarpschneider had me thinking several days.

Coincidently, I was reading ‘How innovation works’ by Matt Ridley and found the perfect example of what he meant:

This was not the first time he posed the question to me. This time it was motivated by the article ‘Web3, no mercy, no malice’

The article has resonated over social media probably because of the fuzz about web3 claims on distributed ownership. Too many web3 projects are promoting themselves as ‘distributed’ when they are actually not: over 70% of the tokens are in the hands of founders and financiers, the community being left with 30-15%. But is this a ‘technology’ or a ‘lying to my face’ problem? I guess the latter. I believe evolution of the technology is always good. It tends level-up the ‘battle field’ and democratize access. Yes, Web2 led to the creation of big tech manipulative conglomerates like Google and Facebook, but also to the creation of individual ‘youtubers’ and ‘influencers’, granting access to authorship in an unprecedented way. Web3 may not be as distributed as some projects claim, but it is, also in an unprecedented way, creating the tools for communities to organize themselves in complex and sophisticated ways that only big companies could do. And guess what, because web3 is fully transparent, you can verify the claims of any project and catch them in the lie (if they are lying), what was not possible with web2.

But since I never made any statements that web3 would fix the world, only that #bitcoin would, I have to leave this web2/3 discussion behind and focus on what matters.

Or not, because one could argue that Bitcoin is not only the first, but actually the one and only web3 project. It was created by a pseudonymous that claims nothing over it, voluntarily and open source, without pre mining tokens, without any organization beyond the code and nurtured by a community to grow organically. Associated with the disruptive brilliant invention and innovation of SHA protected blockchain and cryptocurrency, this project is so particular that cannot be created more than once and it is not replicable.

But this features alone do not guarantee that bitcoin can fix the world. It is the truly permissionless nature of the protocol (with perfectly tuned distribution of incentives for each role) that guarantees its truly distributed nature, and thus renders the network truly censor and tyranny proof. The moment you can have one property that cannot be stolen, confiscated or seized… it is just a matter of time until until all other property is related to this one and, by association, protected. And that… is the moment that you are really free and that prosperity can come to all.

Yes, it can see that this may sound as a bunch of meaningless works put together. It is actually quite hard to understand it. The best that I can do for you in the short length of this blog post is to suggest you listen to @JasonPLowery explaining how on @APompliano’s podcast (episode #749). The explanation starts around minute 30.

And when you can fully agree with this tweet, it is because you finally understood it:

To win any PoW vs. PoS protocol argument, ask the following two questions:

"Who has the authority to write the ledger?"

"How can users impeach their authority if they abuse it?"

— Jason Lowery (@JasonPLowery) January 15, 2022

So, this time will be different because bitcoin is truly decentralized, distributed, permissionless, self defended, censor and tyranny proof.

And you don’t have to trust me or anyone else regarding these claims: you can verify yourself (for example, here https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution/) and see how bitcoin ownership is actually being diluted, not concentrated, overtime.

But I want to finish this post with another quote from Matt Ridley’s book, hoping that it applies also to my friend’s question: Amara’s law