Bitcoin as Story and Social Consensus

In Chapter 4, we noted that money is a story and a social consensus in a similar way that the Constitution of the United States is. Just as the Constitution lays out the basic principles for the governance of the nation known as the United States, the Bitcoin whitepaper lays out the basic rules underpinning the Bitcoin network.⁹¹ In the U.S., the legislature (Congress) passes laws, the judiciary (courts) interprets them, and the executive (President and subsidiary departments) executes them. Over time this process creates the full and detailed implementation of the tenets of the Constitution. Similarly, the Bitcoin open-source software code is the actual implementation of the fundamental tenets of Bitcoin. These basic credos include Bitcoin’s openness to users who want to transact or support the network by mining, as well as Bitcoin’s limited and clearly defined supply schedule.

Just as amending the Constitution is very difficult, changing the Bitcoin consensus rules (such as the number of bitcoins created with each new block of transactions) has proven extraordinarily difficult. The underlying principles of Bitcoin, which are codified in the code that is run by its thousands of nodes, are continuing to gain an ever-growing body of adherents. Those adherents have come to expect Bitcoin to maintain certain principles, and the social consensus around those principles seems to strengthen with time.