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Bitcoin is essentially Batman, according to philosopher Craig Warmke.
Well, maybe I’m taking a little liberty with Warmke’s point.
This article is taken from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily recap of the most crucial stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can sign up to receive the full newsletter here.
The assistant professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University and a member of the crypto-focused research collective Resistance Money has an upcoming article that argues that Bitcoin is a collective story that everyone in the network is involved in writing.
We all keep discussing “What is Bitcoin?” And it doesn’t seem that even the maximalists have settled on a consensual response.
Warmke’s conception of Bitcoin as collective fiction is, to say the least, new to the body of explanation.
Note that the argument here is not saying that Bitcoin is like a story.
He says it’s a story, a story that also has value in the real world. It’s not that hard to figure out, as we’ll see.
Bitcoin is a story and Bitcoin is the main subject of the story. As the stories go on, it’s pretty boring. It’s the story of issuing new bitcoins and then switching from one wallet to another forever. The plot is this: Bitcoin moves inside Bitcoin. Sparkling!
The Bitcoin network uses writing (code) to describe something with no external correspondence, and yet it has value. This is fiction. As Warmke puts it towards the end of the article, “If the piece of code in the Bitcoin blockchain that describes a movement of bitcoin is not itself that movement, where the movement, the transaction, is it? location ? Nowhere or everywhere, depending on what you think, Bitcoin is a dummy substance.
In its design, miners are editors and nodes are arbiter. Wallet owners have the right to write, but only as long as they have dummy bitcoin to compose a sentence on, and the only thing that sentence can say is how much bitcoin is going to a certain wallet.
But fiction?
So let me give you my take on Warmke’s article going through the Caped Crusader: it helps explain why Bitcoin is like Batman ™. Batman is also a fictional object in a story. It’s an extremely valuable story, in fact. The 1989 “Batman” sparked a worldwide pop culture sensation and grossed over $ 400 million at the box office. The “Dark Knight” film trilogy brought in $ 2.5 billion in revenue for Warner Bros. only at the box office, and these are only recent receipts, only movies.
The Caped Crusader has been printing money for its owners through books, toys and other media since 1939. Beat that, Satoshi!
What non-comic fans might not realize is that Batman’s value has persisted in part because his story keeps growing (much like Bitcoin’s).
Batman’s story continues every month, everywhere in the pages of DC Comics where he appears an impossible number of times in many titles, new story pieces are coming out every week.
Bob Kane and Bill Finger are credited with inventing Batman, but his legend has grown as countless writers, artists, and publishers add to Batman’s massive mythology.
Each Batman story effectively becomes a bit of the “real” story. In fact, every thing that happens in any DC comic is part of the history of the world Batman lives in, and these stories frequently merge.
Once a DC superhero comic is released it goes canon and any other writer can pick up where that story left off, even if it’s done in the pages of an entirely different title. The art term in comics for this is “continuity.” This is another way of saying “story of a fictitious world”.
We love a story in which a character surprises us, but only if they surprise us in a way that always feels right to us.
In other words, writers and artists have something like writing rights in the collective history of a comic book universe but, like in Bitcoin, there are limits too.
Writers and artists are like the portfolios in Warmke’s design, adding phrases to Batman’s ledger.
But publishers are like bitcoin nodes. Part of their job is to guard against continuity errors in Batman’s story (making sure that a new story doesn’t contradict an old one, for example) and to ensure that a consensus is reached. maintained around Batman.
There are an infinite number of Batman stories, but this infinite set is not unlimited.
If a writer ever came up with a storyline in which Bruce Wayne decided to open a flower shop rather than fight crime, I would expect the publisher to reject that story.
Such a story, one might say, would shatter the consensus on the character of Batman. We love a story in which a character surprises us, but only if they surprise us in a way that always feels right to us. This is the consensual part. “Batman: Caped Chrysanthemum Curator” would hardly surprise readers.
Continuing Warmke’s framework here, obviously DC Comics is the publisher of Batman, its equivalent of a (much more centralized) mining network. Diamond Comics Distributors is its internet, Batman’s distribution network.
Both very precious
This network advances what Batman ™ is, a story that keeps growing. It’s a much more interesting story than reading the Bitcoin ledger.
And for various reasons, these stories have real value in the real world. But these are still stories.
Ultimately, this is an ontological argument about what it means to exist something, and Warmke has built a thought-provoking model here that could spark consensus around this “is” question on Bitcoin.
The next time people ask you, “What is Bitcoin?” You can tell them, “This is a story that is being written collectively by all bitcoin holders.” It becomes more valuable the more people know about it, help write it, and the more the story goes on. ”
Inevitably, they will answer, “How does that make sense?
To which, we are currently inclined to say something like, “Look, money is a collective fiction too. It’s generally seen as some sort of sophomore cliché that rings hollow every time.
But now you can say, “Obviously it’s like Batman. This should grab their attention.
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