CHAPTER 1 | Everything you believe about all present bitcoin is wrong. 

I don't mean to gaslight you. I'm not referring to Bitcoin, the protocol. I am speaking about the lowercase (b)itcoin, the unit reflected in the digits of an address balance.

I have spent the past year meditating on its overlooked spiritual and symbolic significance. What I found changed not only my perspective on the asset but also flipped my assumptions about who it most benefits. 

Yet, most surprisingly, this journey also revealed an opportunity to deliver that tool from the future hands of an immaterial tyrant. It led me to establish The Bitcoin Mint, a free and open standard for materializing bitcoin. 

This mint isn't a coin holding a private key or a physical imitation. It is a real incarnation of Bitcoin's unit of account - something never done before. But before I explain how it works, let me take you on the esoteric journey that led to this revelation.

Earlier this year, I discovered that bitcoin is neither bits of internet gold, electronic cash, or freedom money. It isn't even digital. I realized that none of these definitions hold weight because Bitcoin’s network doesn’t require consensus on a definition of its unit of account. 

Any attempt to define it outside that network is no more factual than a statement of faith. That's why the countless definitions mean nothing to the uninitiated. They scoff at them like they are unwanted gospel tracks.

Most understand that bitcoin is imaginary. But what they fail to see is that even the figment of imagination lacks any conceptual definition. It is formless and void. Once I saw this, I couldn't unsee it. I realized the unit's blockchain doesn't make it digital just as a book doesn't make fairy dust paper. 

However, bitcoin's lack of form doesn't make it worthless “air,” as Elizabeth Warren so condescendingly calls it. Unlike classical fairy tales, the effort required to possess bitcoin bridges the imaginary to the material world in a way that books can't. It makes this formless imagination scarce, valuable and verifiable.

This conceptual framing of Bitcoin was difficult to grasp at first. Regardless of your opinion, you can't deny that bitcoin has value—even if it is imaginary. This value opens it to a world of utility. It, like gold, can be used as money even if it isn't explicitly defined one way or the other. This honest acknowledgment sent me on a path to reconcile imaginary value with my materialistic assumptions of the world.

At first, I borrowed the popular conceptual framing from Michael Saylor and other Bitcoin advocates and argued that bitcoin must be energy or at least the cost of energy. This definition, though, is logically inconsistent. How can the effort to possess something be the thing you possess?

I realized that the material effort required to mine and own bitcoin is really the bridge you have to cross to acquire it. This conceptual framing is more consistent, but it got me thinking. What else lies on the imaginary side of that bridge?