Bitcoin is not immutable — an atheist perspective.
For a long time, Bitcoin has been marketed as immutable, even if the protocol has never spent a single dollar for marketing.
Far from being appealing to institutional investors because of its pseudonymous characteristics, the key feature that accounts for most of its value accrual, i contend, is its predictability.
Big capitals don’t like big surprises: and bitcoin is quite likely not going to give any. In other words, a good Bitcoin is also a boring Bitcoin. According to Aristotle, immutable is:
“ώς τής τοιαύτης φύσες άιεί σωζομένης”
or “what is always safe”. Which is a really good thing to be if you are a digital asset.
But is Bitcoin really immutable? And what does immutable even mean?
In this article i will briefly explain how humans invented the concept of immutability, how nothing is immutable and that the myth of an immutable Bitcoin is based on a misunderstanding between immutability at blockchain level, and immutability at protocol level.
We will see how Bitcoins blockchain is not hardly immutable, but still extremely safe. The last part will focus on the so-called immutability of the protocol: this will allow me to draw some conclusion to, i hope, “finally” make things clear.
Bitcoin is made of stories.
What is Bitcoin? The simple and clear answer is that Bitcoin is a protocol, a digital currency and an accounting unit. And what is it made of? Bitcoin is made of logic (its code), it’s made of its peer to peer network (the nodes) and it’s made of hardware and data centers (the miners).
But the more you think of what bitcoin really is, the more confused you could get. It is something that you cannot really grasp. Defining Bitcoin is hard: Nick Land tried in his Cryptocurrent but either I am completely blind to his genius, or he has failed. That’s why we need metaphors, images, Alice and Bobs to explain it.
“Bitcoin is hard to grasp because it’s almost like a technology from an alien civilization” — Ian Bogost
The whitepaper, the people, two 5.000 BTC pizzas, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, GitHub discussions, mailing lists, IRC channels, a lot of gossip, all the technical knowledge one could possibly accumulate about the code and the possibilities around it plus some science fiction, dreams and nightmares. All of this makes what Bitcoin is to the world.
Stories shape code which shapes stories which shape code.
Try to explain the bitcoin code without using some form of storytelling. You will soon start speaking C++. Bitcoin is most certainly its code, but its not just its code.
Historically humanity has always needed myths and, just like Homer, many of us are natural storytellers. Satoshi might not have been the greatest in comparison with Elon Musk, but he was not immune to it.
I am convinced that the Bitcoin code is structured following Satoshi’s assumptions over our world or, we could say, his philosophy. Satoshi was a human with fears and desires, and he must have had his role models: we all have some. All the great architects were inspired by imagination.
These assumptions — desires, fears, expectations — and the code which is their result have fueled other narratives, or myths, which in turn have shaped Bitcoin as we know it today.
Some might be skeptical about the power of narrative. Those individuals must have not seen what happened in last two years. Even before memes like Doge and Shiba Inu, we have many examples of how imagination and fiction has been of heuristic value to engineers and scientists alike.
For example, the electrical sliding doors we are all used to now, come from an idea of a Star Trek author. And some years ago Mark Zuckerberg said that he is looking for so called “perfect communication”, from thought to thought, with his technologies. Science fiction inspires inventions.
The ideas of Timothy C. May and the culture of cypherpunk newsletters, as well as (quite likely) Austrian school economics have definitely shaped how Satoshi designed its architecture. Of course, along with a meticulous research on all the attempts at building a digital cryptographic currency before him.
But most of the myths of Bitcoin today do not come directly from Satoshi. Instead, they have emerged from the inventive community that congregated around him at first in mailing lists, and then in the forums and on reddit and 4chan. Of course an apple never falls far from the tree, but nevertheless this is how community create cultures.
Fantastic Beasts
Many fantastic beasts inhabit the blockchain world today: stories that are constantly being told, again and again. The myth of going to the moon, that of the hero who picked the right coin at the right time and became a millionaire, that we are all gonna make it and so on and so forth. As Jim Talbot said in an Up Only podcast episode: “The top alt-coin is a fucking fiction”.
In the case of Bitcoin, i want to stress that I’m not referring to myths as it is commonly used in the sense of “false belief”.
What I’m talking about is the great narratives that are partially inscribed as code in the protocol, and for the rest a product of the imagination of the community. The shared fears and desires of many great folks who built on and around it. All the great minds in cryptocurrency that i have met love to talk about science fiction.
I’ve been in the Bitcoin community since 2013 and i know I’m walking on thin ice touching the foundations of Bitcoin, so i will name just one of the main narratives upon which Bitcoin thrives. The fact that it is, allegedly, immutable.
One might argue that this is true, and I would partially agree with him. But to be fair, this statement is imprecise at best.
Nothing is immutable.
From a philosophical perspective the concept of immutability was born long ago, in ancient Greece, with Plato and Aristotle. For a long time before the genesis block was mined, Christianity and most of western philosophy attributed the property of immutability to God. It is fun to think about how, in the last ten years, I have heard this term only in relation to cryptocurrency.
Let’s dive deeper in what the term immutable meant before we talked about pumps and dumps. First of all we have Plato, which in the Republic talks about the perfection of God and how his attributes cannot change. His hyper uranium is inhabited by ideas, which are perfect and — therefore — immutable.
Then we have Aristotle, his idea being that the first moving object must be immovable and therefore never-changing. This is also represented in Dante’s Paradise: “Love who moves sun and other stars.”
Like St. Thomas said, “Faith makes use of Aristotle and perfects him”. And after him, many theologians wrote about this property of Immutability, including Aquinas, Boethius and St. Thomas, when considering the qualities of God.
So this idea of immutability, attributed by Greek philosophers to the immovable first mover and primary substances, which was born in Plato’s idealism and then trough Aristotle applied to the christian idea of God, became part of one of the greatest stories ever told. One of today’s most powerful narratives, protected by ubiquitous gatekeeping: Christianity. Nevertheless, even in theology, some arguments where put forth against the doctrine of divine immutability.
Immutability does not really work outside of Plato’s hyper uranium, but contemporary folks who think of themselves as modern atheists will likely find the corpse of God in the way they think about the world and, in this case, Bitcoin.
They might still think Bitcoin is Immutable, and get angry when you tell them they’re wrong. They might say “But hey! Maybe it’s not immutable from a philosophical, or physical perspective, but it could be from other points of view!”.
True, so let’s proceed.
Two kinds of Immutability
When talking about Bitcoin, there is always this huge misunderstanding between immutability at blockchain level and immutability at protocol level. I will show how neither of those is completely true. But first, some notes on what is happening when we use the word immutable in relation with Bitcoin.
Instead of misunderstanding, i might use the word equivocation. According to the Oxford dictionary, the “use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself”.
I’m not saying someone is actively concealing anything, but I like how the etymology of the term shows — similarly to the Italian for misunderstanding “equivoco” — what i am trying to explain.
Equivocation comes in fact from latin aequivŏcus, composite of aequus ‘equal’ and vocare ‘to name’: to use the same name for two distinct entities.
And the problem with how we talk about immutability in Bitcoin is exactly that we are using the same word for two things that are completely different: blockchain and protocol.
Bitcoin’s blockchain is not immutable.
Conceptually, we could dismiss the entire discussion by saying that when we append to the blockchain by making a transaction, the blockchain changes its state: that makes it not immutable.
But obviously anybody who believes in the immutability of the blockchain, does not use the term in this sense. What is immutable, to them, is the historical record of the blockchain, the ledger of the transactions. The past is set in stone. But is it?
Bitcoins blockchain is a distributed append-only database, and there are no modify or delete functions. Nevertheless, changing the blockchain is theoretically possible. It is just very, very expensive. In fact, any attack became so expensive that I personally consider any risk to be definitely out of sight, probably for good.
The question is, does this make the blockchain immutable? My answer is: why would you say immutable, which is a misleading term, when you could just say safe?
Immutable sounds good, but the term does not really fit. Especially when you think about chain reorganizations (re-orgs). If you run a node for years, you can expect to see some. Re-orgs happen, most of the times, when two blocks are mined at the same time. The rule is that the longest blockchain wins. But for around ten minutes, or until the next block has been mined, you have two concurring blockchains.
If the blockchain is split in A and B, and the next block is mined following B, then the chain A will revert its latest block to B, and append the new one. This actively changes the historical record of the chain. For more info on reorgs, check this article.
If you want to change the blockchain, you have to be able to recalculate the hashes of old blocks to change them, and then keep up with the new blocks, reaching a longer chain than the original.
This would be extremely expensive, so this is why the blockchain is considered “immutable”. Again, we should just say that it is safe. There is no need to say it is immutable, when it’s not. In fact, it did change in the past, like that time in 2010 or in 2013.
What we actually say when we say that Bitcoin is immutable at the blockchain level, is that it is extremely expensive to change the record of transactions in the distributed ledger.
Bitcoin’s protocol is not immutable.
It is likely that the Bitcoin protocol will never change. Everyone agrees on the fact that there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in circulation, but less would tell you that Bitcoin will never switch to Proof of Stake.
Ethereum is going to upgrade to PoS, probably, in the second half of 2022 and that is fueling some rumors that it might happen to Bitcoin as well. To be honest, it wouldn’t be easy at all. It’s also probably not going to to happen anytime soon, but it’s also not impossible.
Most will agree on the fact that Bitcoin does not change its protocol, that this is a really good thing, and that this is what makes Bitcoin safer than Ethereum. But why?
Why doesn’t Bitcoin upgrade its protocol? Is it because there is no Vitalik Buterin as benevolent dictator, since Satoshi disappeared?
According to the bitcoin.org website:
It is not possible to change the Bitcoin protocol that easily. Any Bitcoin client that doesn’t comply with the same rules cannot enforce their own rules on other users. […] However, powerful miners could arbitrarily choose to block or reverse recent transactions. A majority of users can also put pressure for some changes to be adopted. Because Bitcoin only works correctly with a complete consensus between all users, changing the protocol can be very difficult and requires an overwhelming majority of users to adopt the changes in such a way that remaining users have nearly no choice but to follow. As a general rule, it is hard to imagine why any Bitcoin user would choose to adopt any change that could compromise their own money. — Bitcoin.org, FAQs
This means that immutability is not an innate quality of bitcoin: there is no magical property that makes the Bitcoin protocol immune to changes, other than consensus.
And consensus is built trough hierarchy, using propaganda and, of course, trough narratives. Consensus belongs very much to the social and political fields.
According to a Gemini blog post, the story of consensus begins with the last line of the whitepaper.
They [the miners] 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. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
- Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi probably held a strong belief in the fact that good governance would emerge from his code, because the voting rules where forever set in stone, like a clockwork.
Nakamoto was extremely intelligent. He made Bitcoin anti-fragile through Proof of Work in such a way that any infighting or external attack would result in a safer Bitcoin. But he never made changes impossible. Not even the 21 millions hard cap.
Here you can find a list of Bitcoin protocol upgrades that happened in the past, both in the form of soft and hard forks. Did you know that in 2014 a rule was introduced to fix a bug in the 21 million hard cap supply which will only become active in 23th century?
Bitcoin users have historically defended the so-called immutability of the protocol as an UNESCO Natural Heritage. When an upgrade was being implemented, the developers team has always relied on second-layer solutions, so that the backbone would not be affected by any unforeseen problem.
I’m not saying that is has necessarily been bad for Bitcoin: all I’m saying is that the protocol might rely more on its user base (and gatekeeping) than on pure, abstract, intangible mathematics in order to enforce its rules.
So, is the protocol immutable? No, it’s not. Is it safely maintained by a network of top-notch developers, in such a way that the core is preserved in its specifics? Yes, it is.
I’m not even touching the topic of forks, because that would require a a series of articles. But protocol changes have happened in the past and happen, they are just being forked off the main chain. And if “total” miner consensus would be reached, the fork would become the main chain. In fact, they happened in the past as we just saw.
Some may say that “Hey, but if it is so difficult to change, doesn’t this make it de facto immutable?” Well, hard forks happened. It is, at best, some form of soft-immutability. Bitcoin will stay the same as long as developers, miners and stakeholders in general want it to stay so.
Miner consensus is the only magic, along with narrative and propaganda, that keeps Bitcoin as it is. But stakeholders change, miners change and their stakes might also change. So does the world around them.
There is absolutely no reason to be 100% sure that the Bitcoin protocol will be immutable in the next decades. The Bitcoin protocol gives no guaranteed immutability of its own.
Conclusions
There is no “hard” or guaranteed immutability for Bitcoin’s protocol. It was just a meme.
We have shown how nothing can be immutable, and that bitcoin is not properly immutable neither at blockchain nor at protocol level. The historical record of transaction is safely stored, and the protocol is really hard to change because of Proof of Work and the size of the network. But none of the two is impossible and has in fact already happened in the past.
Many people want an immutable Bitcoin and proactively help maintaining it that way, including developers, bigger stakeholders and everyday users. They do so using code, GitHub issues, posts and replies, Medium, Twitter, memes and fan art. Ultimately, with narrative.
I think that if you are an atheist, you probably don’t believe in immutability: everything flows. Therefore you shouldn’t say Bitcoin is immutable. You can say positive things about Bitcoin: like that it is safe. Or even that is has “soft-immutability”.
If you are religious, instead, probably you wouldn’t attribute immutability to anything else than God: that would have been an heresy, centuries ago.
But if you still believe in Bitcoin’s immutability and you consider yourself an atheist, maybe you are not. Maybe, your god is Bitcoin.
I am strongly convinced that the myth of an Immutable Bitcoin has shaped not just how we think about it, but also how the code has been maintained. The vested interest in keeping it predictable is what makes it so, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if and when the stakes change, we could also see protocol changes.
Nothing is immutable, everything is becoming.
