Immaculate conception

Some bitcoin plebs draw parallels between bitcoin and religion, usually in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Unsurprisingly, bitcoin is just a tool. Nothing more than a shining example of what humanity is capable of with the coming together of brilliant minds. But one prevailing aspect is Immaculate Conception. What does this mean in relation to bitcoin?

Startups that develop new ideas and technologies usually need a boat load of funding to just move from the starting blocks. Financial backers need to be convinced, compromises have to be made when there are new stakeholders on board, technologies need to bend to regulation and adapt to fickle markets. There needs to be frameworks for financialising the technology, often to the sacrifice of the founders original vision, maybe even infringing on their morality.

New entrants into the cryptocurrency space is no exception in this regard, decentralisation is one of the central tenets of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, which crypto startup often strive for. However founders, developers, marketers and early investors of new projects need something in return for their time or investment. This nearly always comes in the form of premines, where tokens are mined and allocated to them before public sale. This gives them disproportionately large slices of token supply, and, as is particularly the case with Proof of Stake crypto’s, equally disproportionate authority on the network.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth

Genesis 1:1

Bitcoin on the other hand, is very different in the way it was conceived. The cryptocurrency market didn’t exist at the time. Satoshi Nakamoto, and the cypherpunks involved were not getting paid, nor paying themselves with their own tokens, they were just experimenting with open-source software in their spare time. There was no need for marketing, as there was no market, there was no need for financialisation, the motivation was purely shared ideals, particularly the right to privacy through cryptography.

Bitcoin’s immaculate conception goes, in many ways beyond the financial motivations of its founder and early developers, or rather lack of. For bitcoin, trustlessness is fundamentally important. Bitcoin achieved a level of trustlessness through simply being the first mover. The network had time to allow the number of nodes to proliferate globally and become truly decentralised. By existing at a time before most people, not least politicians and regulators even knew what crypto was, the network was able to spread freely and organically.

Another aspect of bitcoin’s immaculate conception is Satoshi’s dogged anonymity. As the first mover, combined with perhaps an element of the environment of the time, Satoshi was able to launch the biggest computer program conceived, with little notice outside of the cypherpunks domain. Bitcoin launched without a known figurehead to be coerced, censored, litigated against or corrupted.

Fast-forward 13 years, bitcoin has carved out an entirely new asset class. And with it, the ensuing stampede of pretenders and peripheral circus-acts have brought about a raft of scams, scandals and spectacular blow-ups. Drawing the ire of politicians and the leash of the regulators. It has become abundantly clear that the environment can no longer allow another cryptocurrency the grip it needs to proliferate and decentralise like bitcoin did. If there ever could be another bitcoin, the environment to allow its creation has passed. There simply can’t be another bitcoin.