WHAT A BLACK SWAN EVENT COULD MEAN FOR BITCOIN

If you went back in time to the 1350s and told people that the Black Death was the catalyst to one of the most important black swan events in history, they probably would not have believed you.

Paint It Black

It was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history and Europe was hit the hardest as it was ground zero for the Black Death, although some people would argue that it was the migrants fleeing westward from the Byzantine Empire that brought the plague with them (along with some scientific writings and delicious cuisine).

Others would claim that it all started with the Bubonic plague in Crimea.

It’s funny to observe that these two subjects, the immigrants and Crimea never seem to run out of fashion, though I’m digressing.

The recovery from the plague was as slow as they get, as it would take Europe over 150 years to recover both economically and socially. But it was the religious institutions that recovered the slowest since they were the last to be repopulated as parents needed every available child back to place them in agriculture.

Wait, why would the Catholic Church need so many children in the first place?

Now you’re probably thinking: Where is this guy going with this? Opening with a deadly plague and now this?

Trust me, it’s not what it looks like, the reason I’m bringing the subject is that in that era there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Snapchat, nothing of the sort. The only way to spread the “word of God” was by hand. So whenever you wanted a book copied, you would go to a scribe at a monastery and they would copy it for you.

Such a procedure would require the church to ‘hire’ children at a very young age (before reaching military age for holy war purposes) and then they have them ‘pull a Bart Simpson' all day copying the same sentences time and time again, by hand.

As you might’ve guessed, you need a whole lot of hands!

Enter Gutenberg, the Satoshi Nakamoto of his era.

The year is 1440 and a new player is in town, and with him the rules of the game are set to change as the printing press is starting to revolutionize society by providing the ability to spread information not only faster and cheaper than the status quo, but also in a much more accurate manner.

It was then only a matter of time until the scribe craft became obsolete.

Violence is All They Know

The Catholic Church, which had previously held an absolute monopoly on the scarcity of information, did what they did best in that era, unleashing the wrath of god on whoever went against the interest of the ruling class.

First, they started slow, with imprisonment, which one may assume that in that era was as vanilla as it gets, but soon enough they worked their way up to their real objective which was declaring the death penalty for anyone using a printing press in 1535.

And since you are reading this at this very moment, then you’ve probably guessed it: That did not work either, because if there’s a one thing that authoritarians hate the most about technology is that once it’s invented, it cannot be un-invented.

From that point on not even the threat of hanging in public could prevent people from sharing and learning.

Déjà vu All Over Again

Just like what happened with disrupting the monopoly on publication, most advances in human life have occurred as a consequence of reducing the government’s monopolies on the various aspects of our lives.

Take food for example, one of the five elements necessary to the survival of the species along with water, air, fire and Wi-Fi. It’s easy to forget that the minute we gave a goodbye kiss to the government absolute monopoly on agriculture, breakthroughs started happening left and right: Irrigation systems, fertilizers, advanced machinery… And before we knew it the number of people involved in agriculture went down from 70 percent to almost 3 percent, with a much greater productivity.

The fact that there has been more material progress in the world in the 20th century than in all previous centuries combined is astonishing on its own, but it gets even better.

There are now more engineers and scientists alive today than there have been in all of the rest of human history combined. Most of them want to part of the next life changing technology, most of them seek major breakthroughs solving actual problems. A lot of them are motivated and driven and I suspect a good number of them will eventually succeed.

Some of them might even be one of you reading this tonight.

Meanwhile politicians are still insisting that a decentralized peer to peer economy is just some sort of a hippie fantasy that will fade away once the teenagers grow up decide to go back to state controlled monopolies.

Look around, the largest real estate company has no buildings, the biggest transportation company has no cars, the largest retailer in the world has no stores… Not only Elvis has left the building, but his impersonators died of old age.

Sure, let’s go with fantasy.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Less than half a decade ago very few people knew about bitcoin, now it's getting much more traction as some of largest corporations are starting to accept bitcoin as a form of global payment.

But what does that mean for your average Joe? That the more they see bitcoin being accepted in their day to day, the more they would be inclined to adopt it as such. You might not hear a lot about the psychological aspect of social acceptance but it’s worth noting nonetheless.

The bad part however, is that with each action there is an equal and opposite reaction, in this case, it’s the usual suspects: Governments. States all around the world are becoming increasingly destructive, both in terms of seizing capital and in terms of making capital accumulation more and more difficult.

Worse than that, they’re constantly creating new regulations each one more absurd than the other.

Under such circumstances people will seek an escape route and Bitcoin may just be one of the biggest things on the horizon, because as we all know, the most effective way to change the system is not from within, not even by a violent revolution, but by inventing a new system that makes the old one obsolete.

The Coin That Changed The World

I don’t know what the future holds, if there will ever be a black swan event like the Black Death in our time or not, personally I’m rooting for a new renaissance but if that was the case, then maybe historians would refer to Bitcoin as the coin that changed the world.