Conclusion - Lessons Learned

Conclusion Lessons Learned "Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."   As mentioned in the beginning, I think that any answer to the question “What have you learned from Bitcoin?” will always be incomplete. The symbiosis of what can be seen as multiple living systems?—?Bitcoin, the technosphere, and economics?—?is too intertwined, the topics too numerous, and things are moving too fast to ever be fully understood by a single person. Even without understanding it fully, and even with all its quirks and seeming shortcomings, Bitcoin undoubtedly works. It keeps producing blocks roughly every ten minutes and does so beautifully. The longer Bitcoin continues to work, the more people will opt-in to use it. “It’s true that things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.”Giannina Braschi Bitcoin is a child of the internet. It is growing exponentially, blurring the lines between disciplines. It isn’t clear, for example, where the realm of pure technology ends and where another realm begins. Even though Bitcoin requires computers to function efficiently, computer science is not sufficient to understand it. Bitcoin is not only borderless in regards to its inner workings but also boundaryless in respect to academic disciplines. Economics, politics, game theory, monetary history, network theory, finance, cryptography, information theory, censorship, law and regulation, human organization, psychology?—?all these and more are areas of expertise which might help in the quest of understanding how Bitcoin works and what Bitcoin is. No single invention is responsible for its success. It is the combination of multiple, previously unrelated pieces, glued together by game theoretical incentives, which make up the revolution that is Bitcoin. The beautiful blend of many disciplines is what makes Satoshi a genius. Like every complex system, Bitcoin has to make tradeoffs in terms of efficiency, cost, security, and many other properties. Just like there is no perfect solution to deriving a square from a circle, any solution to the problems which Bitcoin tries to solve will always be imperfect as well. “I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.”Friedrich Hayek Bitcoin is the sly, roundabout way to re-introduce good money to the world. It does so by plac