Was Bitcoin Really A Black Swan?

To start with, what exactly is a black swan event?

The agreed definition is that a black swan event is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. Nassim Taleb author of The Black Swan describes how such an event is completely unexpected by everybody and then rationalized as something that was obvious after it happens.

The event itself is often caused by possibly countless variables multiplying the effects of each other, each event a ball in a large pinball machine where the laws of physics are corrupted. Each time a pinball hits another they both increase in momentum until the pinballs get too chaotic to contain and the machine explodes creating a grand event that to the onlookers in the retro arcade where the machine was located seemingly happened out of nowhere.

If you remember the news headlines over the years about bitcoin and cryptocurrency, in general, it was first treated as a joke, a pipe dream that may be fun for nerdy crypto enthusiasts to play with their fake internet moneyz. No government or bank even saw it ever possibly threatening to tear down their centuries strong government-backed authoritarian control on the worlds money supply.

First came ignoring its existence then came the mockery and when it really started to flex its incentive-based muscles and increased in price the "It's a scam" hysteria came on blaring on all fronts of the media. Despite this its anti-fragile economic model made it gain from attacks with its solid foundations and now we are here today with bitcoin at 9.2k after peaking at a crazy 20k dollars.

The question is, was this really a completely shocking event? To those who grasped its complex nature, the answer would be no. They expected and still expect bitcoin to reach millions. Those who never really researched it or had their bureaucratic head up their own self-contained idealogical ass, it was impossible to fathom.

They could not grasp the power of exponential growth, growth completely different to a business stock or commodity, growth that multiplies like a social networks user base translated into raw price action. Those that could, whilst not able to settle on a timescale, could predict the exponential increase in price and capitalize on it.

So the exponential increase in price wasn't that surprising, the ridiculous speed at which it happened might have been, but that could be attributed to its nature of being a digital idea that could easily spread across the world with no need for new infrastructure.

This isn't even a backward rationalization of the past, it's simply the vast majority of people not understanding the ramifications of the technology when it was released. For it was such monumental idea, that should it work, it would definitely shake up the world as we know it.

This is where we come to where the real black swan event occurred.

The 2008 financial crisis and Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper for a digital currency.

Seemingly unrelated variables such as the cyclical financial crashes, authoritarian government policies, invasion of privacy by the government, rising inflation, the advent of the internet and the information age and finally groups of anonymous experts on cryptography trying to use technology to solve the problem. Once the idea was formed the die had been cast and the future was almost inevitable.

The rise of bitcoin and the fall of global banks started from events in true poetic irony they caused themselves by being too comfortable in their control of the economy.

Which lead to a black swan event, a whitepaper -

"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"