Dreaming Systems: A Phantom Throws a Ball

As we found out last week, the more you believe in something, the realer it gets. Or does it?

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and, in a sense, the pilot project for blockchain technology.

In fact, blockchain technology and Bitcoin were born together. In 2008, a paper was published online titled “Bitcoin – A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” In 2009, the blockchain underlying Bitcoin went live. From that point on, we can say that Bitcoin - and the first blockchain - existed.

The paper was published by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto, or anyway, that’s the byline on the document. To this day, it is not entirely clear whether this person exists or ever existed, whose pseudonym it might be, or whether the name conceals an entire group of authors.

And the fact that Nakamoto’s identity remains unknown is not because people haven’t tried to find out. Quite the opposite. Over the years, something like a cult of veneration developed online around Nakamoto. Numerous theories circulate about his or her identity.

While Nakamoto has not been found, curious investigators have managed, through a kind of digital detective work, to identify his likely Bitcoin holdings. By analyzing early mining activity on the blockchain and patterns in the random numbers used, it is assumed that the creator of the Bitcoin blockchain owns just over one million Bitcoins, distributed across thousands of addresses.

Since its creation, Bitcoin has increased in value to such an extent that Nakamoto, with these roughly one million Bitcoins, would almost certainly rank among the ten or twenty richest people in the world - at current Bitcoin prices (as of early 2026).

Assuming one believes in the value of Bitcoin.

These two properties will become important later: the not-quite-anonymity of most cryptocurrencies - and how strongly their value depends on the belief of their adherents.

“But that’s true of all currencies,” you might object - and you’d be right.

In recent decades, it has happened often enough in various countries that people lost faith in their national currency and preferred to think in dollars or euros instead. And our language has long known that other financial relationships also depend on hope and belief: in German, the word Gläubiger means both someone who believes in a higher power and someone who believes that their money will one day return to them (ideally bringing a few friends along).

Anyone who loses faith in a national currency has, in fact, lost faith in the state behind it.

What, then, gives Bitcoin - and other cryptocurrencies, not backed by a state - their value?

It is not belief in a central authority like a state, or a central bank. As you will remember, none of that exists in Bitcoin. As the title of Nakamoto’s paper says, it is “peer to peer” - a system that is supposed to operate between equals.

Instead of belief in an authority, the value of Bitcoin is determined by belief in a technical system.

I have met many people involved in cryptocurrencies, and many of them would strongly reject the claim I just made. Bitcoin and its cousins do not run on belief or trust, they would say - quite the opposite! The keyword that often comes up is trustless: a cryptocurrency is supposed to function reliably and enable secure transactions precisely when the participants do not trust one another.

But, as I said, I have met many people in the blockchain space. Many of them were intelligent, quick to grasp new ideas, and possessed enormous technical knowledge.

And yet:

I can think of only a handful of people I would trust to personally verify all the algorithms of the cryptocurrency they preferred - and to convince themselves that there were no security vulnerabilities, no errors, no backdoors through which their digital wallet could be emptied or their transactions manipulated on their way into the blockchain.

And even those few have probably not done so. The effort would be enormous, and their days, too, only have twenty-four hours.

So in the end, it comes down to this:

The value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies consists in belief in a technical system. In two ways:

On the one hand, belief in the quality and security of that system.

On the other hand, belief that there are enough brothers and sisters in that belief - because a currency used by only a handful of people will never take off. Sooner or later, it will become worthless and be forgotten.

I imagine a cryptocurrency as a phantom.

A ghost that someone dreamed up, drifting half-transparent through the streets - until someone begins to believe in it.

The more belief it gathers, the less transparent it becomes, the more real - until it can begin to pick up real objects.

To throw a ball. To hand someone a glass of water.

Or steal someone’s bicycle - and ride away with it, into the sunset.