Bitcoin Is Neutral

Reader,

“The true test of one’s commitment to liberty and private property rights doesn’t come when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we agree. The true test comes when we permit people to be free to do those voluntary things with which we disagree.” — Walter E. Williams1

Bitcoin is neutral.

That is the whole of it.

Bitcoin is for friends. Bitcoin is for foes.

Bitcoin is no respecter of nations, peoples or ideologies.

A institution paying for coins. An individual paying for coffee. All pay the fee. A sovereign and a spammer. All play by its rules.

No one is above it. No one is below it.

For Bitcoin to be neutral, it must be neutral. Without exceptions.

The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.2

No one controls Bitcoin.

The exchanges do not control it. The miners do not control it. The wallet makers do not control it. The developers do not control it. The node runners do not control it. The plebs do not control it.

What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.3

“Do-gooders fail to realize that most good is not done in the name of good but done in the name of self-interest.” — Walter E. Williams

People project their ideologies onto Bitcoin. Their hopes. Their moral standings. They develop a persona around a thing. And then when the thing doesn’t bend to their will, it becomes evil. Corrupt. Lost.

You will say the developers control it. A developer changes the code. But the nodes don’t upgrade. His version dies alone.

You will say institutions control it. They put money in. They try to bend the network to their will. But the miners follow the profit, and the profit follows the longest chain.

Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote.4

Equal voice. Non-transferable. Cannot be bought or legislated. The structure itself prevents hierarchy.

They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them.5

You cannot vote for special treatment because the vote is mathematical. The rule applies to all or none.

You will say it enables evil. That it carries the worst of us. That it permits what we abhor.

I say: I abhor it too.

I do not want it. I do not wish for it. But Bitcoin cannot want or not want. It cannot discriminate. It cannot decide what passes through it and what does not. To build such a thing, to give it the power to judge, is to give it the power to exclude. And once you build the muscle to exclude the thing you hate, someone else owns the knife.

Who decides what is moral? Who decides what is ethical?

There are cultural agreements. Broad ones. Deep ones. Most people recoil from the same horrors. But the agreements are not universal. They shift. They contradict across borders and across time. What one age calls righteousness, another calls barbarism.

Bitcoin is indifferent to them all.

They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis.6

It does not care about your ethics. It processes the transaction or it does not. The block confirms or it does not. The ledger records it all without judgment.

Someone always has the incentive to stay neutral. To follow the protocol. Because the protocol is where the value lives. Break it, and you break your own stake. You cannot cheat Bitcoin without cheating yourself out of Bitcoin.

This is not morality. This is not goodness. This is math. This is self-interest aligned with the thing itself.

For Bitcoin to be truly neutral, it doesn’t need good people.

It needs people with skin in the game.

It needs the structure itself to be indifferent to manipulation.

And it is.

Bitcoin does not care what you wanted it to be.

Rare

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