Part 1 of 12: The Definition Problem
January 4, 2019 — Revised December 2025
I began writing this on January 4, 2019—the day after Bitcoin's tenth birthday. Then I stopped. Life intervened, as it does.
Six years later, the wound remains open.
Bitcoin's identity crisis continues to fester. Its grinding, glacial odyssey into mainstream consciousness intersects an ever-expanding range of disciplines: economics, cryptography, game theory, thermodynamics, political philosophy, ecology. Each newly orange-pilled mind layers another definition onto the pile.
This is not a bug. This is a feature.
The Cybernetic Parallel
The forty years following the Macy Conferences (1946–1953) saw inter-disciplinary scientists wrestle with defining their emerging field of cybernetics. They never succeeded. Wikipedia currently lists thirteen definitions and notably states: "Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, by a variety of people, from a variety of disciplines."
Does this not sound familiar?
Bitcoiners and cyberneticians share the same malaise: an inability to posit a cohesive definition satisfying scientific realists and institutional gatekeepers alike. Both fields resist reduction to a single frame.
I am suggesting Bitcoin warrants study as a field—not merely as an object within one.
Lesson #1
Never expect the community of Bitcoiners to accept or agree to a single definition of Bitcoin.
What you get instead is a reflection of the speaker's paradigm. Two minutes into any podcast, you know exactly where they stand:
- Hard-core Austrian economist
- Political anarchist
- Cryptography and security specialist
- Renegade finance operator
- Systems theorist
- Energy and thermodynamics thinker
The definition reveals the definer.
The Word Itself
The word cybernetics comes from Greek κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ), meaning "governance." Governance. Control. Coordination.
Ironically, both Bitcoiners and cyberneticians share a primary concern: the study of communication and control in complex systems—whether animals, machines, networks, or economies.
The first generation of cybernetics focused on things to control. The second generation—second-order cybernetics—shifted focus to the relationships between things. In Bitcoin terms: the connections between nodes matter more than the nodes themselves.
What Follows
Over this twelve-part series, I will explore the "battle of ideas" defining Bitcoin through the lens of second-order cybernetics and social systems theory.
The thinkers guiding this exploration:
- Gregory Bateson — ecology of mind, recursion, coherence
- Heinz von Foerster — the observer problem, self-reference
- Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela — autopoiesis, structural coupling
- Niklas Luhmann — social systems, communication, operational closure
Part 2 introduces autopoiesis: the theory of self-creating systems. Keywords: self-organizing, operationally closed, structurally open, perturbation, coherence.
"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."
— Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
This is my first step into the Bitcoin public conversation, begun at the 2018 Wyoming Hackathon, inspired by Caitlin Long, Patrick Byrne, and the strangers promoting bitcoin-adjacent dreams. Six years delayed. The thesis aged well.
Tags: Bitcoin, Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, Epistemology, Systems Theory, Luhmann, Bateson