Like a Bitcoiner Litany Against Fear, “Bitcoin is trustless” is a mantra soulfully and sincerely recited by acolytes of the technology. And it is true – Bitcoin is trustless. No single entity can control or force changes onto the Bitcoin network. With enough intension, insomuch as you can access to the necessary tools, no intermediary can prevent you from buying, selling, spending, holding, or otherwise using bitcoin, even under the most repressive of circumstances.
Bitcoin is trustless, but bitcoining...bitcoining is all about trust! Across self, family, friends, and community, bitcoining forces trust dynamics to the surface and forms a lived experience of reimagined and rebuilt interpersonal and social trust structures that extend far beyond the timechain.
Developing Trust in Self
Bitcoining is, first and foremost, a practice of radical self-trust. As a bearer money, any and all mistakes resulting in loss of bitcoin rest squarely at the feet of the individual holder and, after the fact, can only be worn like a heavy iron dunce cap by the same. As such, bitcoiners must first conquer their inner doubts and develop an unshakeable internal trust in self. This is the foundation of personal responsibility required to take full control of one’s financial life and to shoulder, without fear or doubt, the sobering awareness that the wealth (and perhaps freedom) of one’s self, family, and future progeny may well hinge entirely on the “rightness” of one’s decisions around bitcoin today.
Rebuilding Trust in Family
A few months ago, I found myself explaining the nature of bitcoin self-custody for inheritance to a senior private wealth management executive. As the implications became clear to her, in a moment of unfiltered horror, she exclaimed “you mean as I get older, I would have to trust my children with this?” My response, of course, “Who else but your own children should you trust to secure your bitcoin wealth as you age?” Confronted with my rebuttal, she did not have an answer, but I could tell that it was being digested as food for thought.
The sad truth is that the fiat world orchestrates a pervasive and never-ending psyop to estrange us from family – and to thus divorce us from the powerful benefits of intergenerational family economics. Bitcoin fixes this. Bitcoining with a focus on long-term and generational wealth is a strong catalyst for us to reject the unbalanced, scorched-earth consumerist "individualism" that now increasingly pits young against old. With our new bearings as bitcoiners, we realize that it is time to heal generational rifts in our families and that many priceless things are regained from rebuilding lost bi-directional familial ties of economic support and care. Bitcoin wealth being “stacked” today will mean very little unless there are associated immediate and extended family units with strong bonds of shared trust and trust-distributed risk in place to shepherd keys far into the future.
Deepening Trust in Friends
While bitcoin’s monetary network might make us “free” (at least from time-theft), it is parallel human networks that must ultimately make us happy and give our lives meaning. It is best that we understand that happiness, more than anything else, is the opposite of loneliness – and that this is one of the few things that money truly cannot buy. The double-edge sword of bitcoining is that without strong supporting bitcoiner friendships, bitcoin’s promise of extreme future wealth threatens to bring an even more extreme isolation along with it for many. And humans die in insolation...It’s dangerous to go alone, as they say. Who will you be able to turn to when the world sees you as little more than a walking sat symbol?
The preemptive remedy here is seeking out and cultivating meaningful friendships with other bitcoiners and, like Noah before the flood, working to get your most important nocoiner friends on the boat before it’s too late. Bitcoiner friendships form the social layer of bitcoin wealth protection and can provide a broad range of “social insurance” against catastrophe – economic or otherwise. As such, bitcoiner friendships are integral to one’s wider “real-world” bitcoin security model and must not be overlooked. Ask yourself – what’s the point of having nice things if you have no one to share them with?
Leveraging Trust in Pseudonymous Community
Scenario: You arrive in a foreign country. An anon that you “know from the internet" suggests you to reach out to another anon who supposedly lives in city you’re visiting. Upon making contact, you receive GPS coordinates – I repeat, coordinates, not an address – via an encrypted chat set to “burn after reading” mode as an invite to come hang out with a group of local bitcoiners.
Totally normal stuff, right? 😅 Well, this is essentially the situation I stumbled into not long ago whilst traveling in Asia. Ultimately, I felt comfortable joining this meetup because of the nature of the larger bitcoiner community. All of us in the room might have been nyms to each other but we shared mutual friends who could cross-verify us without divulging unnecessary private information, of course. In bitcoin, and a few other very strange communities that I count myself a member of, meetings like these serve a critical function for broader, distributed reputation and trust building within what is otherwise a semi-transient, geographically dispersed, pseudonymous community.
In such situations, good behavior confers all parties with important trust-based social capital. The mutual friend gains reputation as someone who “does not associate with or recommend shitcoiners / bad actors.” The meetup attendees, if they behave, are more likely to be recommended by both the mutual friend and by each other the next time around. Thus, a positive social feedback loop emerges, with bitcoiners going around saying nice things about each other and having those things largely proven to be true in subsequent real world interactions. The implications here are far-reaching – as these positive vibrations flow through bitcoin’s living human terrain, they amplify and accelerate the chance meetings and serendipitous exchange of ideas from which the future household names of bitcoin tools, enterprises, and communities will certainly be born.
Conclusion
For most, certainly myself included, engaging with bitcoin forces a dramatic and comprehensive reshaping of both one’s understanding of and relationship with trust. Ironically, bitcoining, which starts out as an individual endeavor to harness the transformative power of trustless money in one’s life, all but requires the establishment of both internal and social trust models that are more robust and more meaningful, than anything our fiat-minded precoiner selves could have ever imagined. Bitcoin is trustless. But bitcoining is nothing without trust.