Bitcoin: Apex Property
As Michael Saylor likes to call it…
Bitcoin is a revolutionary system for the sole purpose of proving human-ownership.
Because humans love to own things and let other humans know they own things. It’s instinctual — it’s built into your DNA.
The Concept of Property
Your car, your clothes, your electronics, your jewelry — they are yours. They are your property.
But why?
Well, because there is proof that you and a counter-party made this transaction. An agreement between two entities. A value transfer.
With every value transfer there is a record of the past. A record that you made a trade, handing over ownership of your money for ownership of something that you think will provide some sort of value to your life.
Conveniently, this proof can often be your memory of these transactions happening. This is a great system for insignificant artifacts in your life like your TV, couch, and sunglasses. In fact, these small things are assumed to be of your possession just from the fact that they are in your possession.
Not much is at stake so it’s not likely that someone will dispute these claims.
Possession is 9/10th of the law.
The Other 1/10th
When it comes to important things, like your wealth and your land, you will want significantly more assurance.
You will want to be able to rely on very strict protocols when it comes to the verification and settlement of these important transactions. When there is a lot is on the line — when there are a lot of bad actors that would want some of what’s on the line— you need something that can back up your claims. Something with a proven track record of reliability and legitimacy.
There are people that would jump on the chance to take everything you have — making their own lives better with no care for you and your family.
Nothing personal — the world is a tough place where everybody has to watch out for themselves, and some people have become a lot more desperate than others. Unfortunately, you might one day run into some these people. You might become one of these people.
Throughout history we’ve been coming up with solutions to this problem. Institutions create mandates and laws — hire people to supervise, enforce rules — to run the system of value by pulling levers and switches.
All of this to maintain society’s infrastructure of ownership, but at the time same, handing over a powerful responsibility — determining who owns what — over to mere humans.
Because of this, what has been created to protect your claim to ownership eventually became old, decrepit, and corrupted bureaucracies — It gave custody of your treasures to people you would never personally trust.
Analog to Digital
These were analog solutions to a problem that can now be solved digitally. Analog solutions, that involve way too much human intervention and oversight.
The underlying Cryptocurrency technology behind Bitcoin solves potential disputes in the ownership of capital by cleverly using computing power. It uses an infrastructure that is as vast and complex as the old bureaucracies we are used to, without the need for human intervention.
Verification of ownership is now the simplest it’s ever been in human history.
Bitcoin allows proof of ownership to be simple and straight-forward — ownership of private keys equals ownership of funds that are associated with that private key.
If you want to prove that you own something — in the situation that you want to trade what you own for what somebody else owns, or just to check out your balance — all you need to prove is that you have your private key.
What the Bitcoin network does is the heavy lifting — ensuring that everybody can trust the objective fact that only the person with a private key can move funds associated with it.
When computers all over the world run the Bitcoin software protocol, they become a node — they combine all their computing force to ensure this verification and enforcement of ownership.
They ensure all the participants are playing by this rule. Using only their private keys to manipulate their funds — by either storing or sending it.
Fairness
Your ownership of capital, along with your neighbors ownership of his capital — equally enforced under the eyes of the Bitcoin network, and it’s thousands of nodes: This gives the world an objective proof of the past, all of it’s transactions — no matter what any individual might believe or try to make other’s believe.
For a species that is so obsessed with the concept of ownership, this is an amazing innovation that has changed the world for the better.
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