Why You Can't Be Told About Bitcoin
field note id: 0.0
Part 1 (The Definition Problem)<---> Part 2 (Autopoiesis: A Deep Synthesis)
> "We can know more than we can tell." — Michael Polanyi
The Huxley Distinction
Aldous Huxley, in his later lectures, drew a line that most education ignores:
Knowledge explains the known with a known system of concepts, ideas, notions, and language. It can be communicated. It can be tested. It lives in textbooks.
Understanding is experienced, not communicated. It is the ability to make contact with the new as it perpetuates itself. It cannot be transferred—only awakened.
Knowledge is "knowledge OF." Understanding is "knowledge BY acquaintance."
You can have extensive knowledge OF wine—grape varieties, terroir, fermentation chemistry, vintage charts. But understanding wine? That lives in the mouth, accumulated through thousands of encounters, inarticulate until the moment of recognition: this is what they meant by "minerality."
The Wall St. Trader's Dilemma
I learned this distinction designing learning systems for traders.
Trading is very much like gourmet cooking. Somebody can give you all the steps and all the ingredients. They can show you exactly how they do it. Yet when you do it, your result is not the same.
There is something in what the master does that does not show up to the observer. Something invisible. It cannot be touched or sensed in any traditional way.
This is what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge: "We know more than we can see, and can see more than we can tell."
The struggling trader watches the successful trader execute. Copies the setup. Follows the rules. Gets different results. Concludes: "He must be hiding something."
He's not hiding anything. He's showing everything. The gap is not in what's shown—it's in what can't be shown.
The Mechanical Knowledge Trap
Mark Douglas, in Trading in the Zone, identified the trap:
> "The typical trader belief is that the more 'technical analysis' they learn, the better trading decisions they will make." More indicators. More patterns. More data. More knowledge OF the market. The result? Information overload, conflicting signals, paralysis—or worse, random success that reinforces the wrong lessons.
Douglas offered three principles that sound like madness to the mechanical trader:
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You don't need to know what will happen next to make money
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Anything can happen
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Every moment is unique
These cannot be understood through accumulation of knowledge. They can only be understood through the experience of trading itself—specifically, through the experience of being wrong and surviving.
Soros's Secret Hidden in Plain Sight
George Soros told the world his trading secret in 1987. Published it in The Alchemy of Finance. Repeated it for decades.
Almost nobody listened.
> "I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong... I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes." The mechanical trader hears this and thinks: "Okay, so I need a better system for cutting losses." They translate understanding back into knowledge. They miss it entirely. What Soros demonstrated was not a technique but a relationship to uncertainty. Not knowledge OF the market, but understanding expressed through action in the market.
His trading partner Jean-Manuel Rozan once spent an afternoon arguing with Soros about the stock market. Soros was vehemently bearish, with an elaborate theory. The theory was entirely wrong. The market boomed.
Two years later, Rozan asked if Soros remembered the conversation.
"I recall it very well," Soros replied. "I changed my mind, and made an absolute fortune."
The mechanical trader sees a flip-flop. A contradiction. Soros saw something that falsified his theory—and acted on the falsification rather than defending the theory.
This is not knowledge. This is understanding in action.
The Wrong Map Problem
Here's the trader's deepest trap:
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Do you have the right map?
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If yes, do you know where you are on the map?
In trading, it's easy to think you have the right map because random wins confirm it. Your short-term success "proves" you're right.
Worse: everyone around you uses the same map. There's no reason to question it.
But the map of traditional finance—mean reversion, equilibrium models, risk-adjusted returns—is the map of Miami. And Bitcoin is New York.
You can study the Miami map with great diligence. Memorize every street. Pass every test. And find yourself completely lost.
Why This Matters for Bitcoin
Part 1 established: Bitcoin resists singular definition. Your definition reveals your paradigm.
But this raises a question: If I can't give you the "right" definition, how do you learn what Bitcoin is?
The mechanical answer: Accumulate more knowledge. Read the whitepaper. Study the code. Learn cryptography. Analyze on-chain metrics.
This is necessary but not sufficient. You can have extensive knowledge OF Bitcoin and no understanding of it whatsoever.
Understanding Bitcoin is not knowing what it is. Understanding Bitcoin is acquaintance—the kind of knowledge that comes from running a node, holding through a -80% drawdown, executing self-custody, losing a seed phrase, waiting for confirmations.
The orange pill is not a transfer of information. It's an awakening of understanding that no amount of explanation can produce.
The Socratic Method
This is why the series proceeds through questions, not answers.
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"Is Bitcoin more like a herd of horses or an iPhone?"
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"Can you send a message to Bitcoin?"
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"Where would you stand to observe Bitcoin objectively?"
These are not quiz questions with correct answers filed away. They are perturbations—designed to trigger your own structural response, not to instruct you.
Von Foerster: "Ethics cannot be articulated." Neither can understanding. It can only be implicit in the dance.
Maturana: "You cannot instruct an operationally closed system." You can only create conditions for it to instruct itself.
Your axiom: "People cannot be talked out of illusions. Red-pilling is an internal phenomenon."
The Space Between
This Field Note sits in the white space between Part 1 and Part 2.
Part 1 ended with: Your definition of Bitcoin reveals who you are.
Part 2 will ask: What kind of system permits such definitional plurality?
But the transition is not automatic. The mechanical reader wants to jump from "definitions are problematic" to "here's the correct framework." Give me the right map.
The white space says: There is no right map to receive. There is only the territory to encounter.
Part 2 introduces autopoiesis—self-creating systems. But autopoiesis is not a better definition to replace your old one. It's an invitation to a different kind of seeing.
The question is not "What is autopoiesis?"
The question is: "What happens when you look at Bitcoin as if it were alive?"
From Knowledge to Understanding
Knowledge OF Bitcoin Understanding Bitcoin Reading the whitepaper Running a node Studying the code Contributing a PR Price analysis Holding through cycles "Digital gold" Self-custody Chart patterns Block height awareness Definitions Acquaintance Explaining Participating
The left column is necessary. The right column is sufficient.
You can traverse the left column indefinitely and never reach the right. The gap is not bridged by more content. It's bridged by action—by entering the system you're trying to understand.
A Preliminary Note on Method
The 12 Parts that follow are not a curriculum to master. They're not knowledge to accumulate.
They're perturbations—Socratic questions, conceptual reframings, thought experiments designed to disturb certainty and create conditions for understanding to emerge.
If you finish Part 12 and can recite the definitions of autopoiesis, structural coupling, and operational closure—but your relationship to Bitcoin hasn't changed—the series has failed.
If you finish Part 12 and find yourself asking different questions, seeing different patterns, making different decisions—even if you can't articulate why—the series has succeeded.
Understanding is not the reward for completing the knowledge. Understanding is what remains when the knowledge stops mattering.
> "Real learning gets to what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it." — Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
Field Note 0 — December 2025 The white space between Definition and Autopoiesis