Satoshi Was a Farmer

In this article I want to explain Bitcoin from the perspective of a farmer. I love learning things through analogies because it helps me to better understand concepts and to become a better teacher.

Why was Satoshi a farmer? In short, Satoshi came up with the novel idea of growing corn (bitcoin) protected and harvested by miners (farmers) on one, big, self sustainable farm (The Bitcoin Network).

Before I continue with my analogy, I need to try and simply explain what Bitcoin is. Simply explain Bitcoin?!?! Hahaha! That is quite the endeavor, nevertheless, I will make a valiant attempt.

Bitcoin is a 13 year old decentralized, unchangeable, global ledger protected by thousands of special computers who are awarded for their protection with bitcoin. There are thousands of copies of this “13 yr old Bitcoin ledger,” known as Bitcoin nodes that verify and agree that all transactions on the ledger are legit.

The word Bitcoin, spelled with a big “B” refers to the network. The word bitcoin, spelled with a little “b” refers to the money. I will consistently use these versions of the word from here on out.

Now let’s continue our story about Satoshi and why he was a farmer…

On a farm, one of the most important things to have is fertile land. If you don’t have fertile land, you can’t grow beautiful, sweet corn (bitcoin).

Unbeknownst to most people, one handful of fertile soil contains millions of living organisms. These organisms are constantly doing their individual jobs to keep the soil fertile. There is a delicate balance that the farmer must work on to keep his soil healthy and productive. An example of this balance is when corn grows, it sucks out a lot of the nitrogen and other nutrients from the soil. After the corn is harvested, the farmer must rotate his land and plant another crop in place of the corn. This crop is known as a cover crop, which can be some type of legume. A legume serves as a nitrogen regulator. The legume will introduce the nitrogen back into soil that the corn sucked out.

Fertile soil takes amazing engineering efforts by the farmer because he must correctly engineer the right balance of oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sodium and so many more variables so that he can grow strong, nutritious, sweet corn.
It takes many years of experience, consistency, trial and error, and perseverance for a farmer to get their farm to operate in a self sustainable manner.

The key to engineering a self sustainable corn farm comes down to first principles:

• Fertile soil
• Water
• Sun

Satoshi engineered the perfect money using the first principles of:

• Math
• Computer Code
• Economics
• Security
• Social Engineering
• Monetary policy
• Anti-fragilty

Satoshi knew that if he made his farm too big that he would give up security because there would be more area for bugs/pests to attack and possibly kill his corn. This is why he only made his farm (block size) to be only 1 MB in size.

Other farmers grow artificial crops known as shitcoins that do not practice the first principles of farming. Instead they try to make their farms too big, they plant everything they can think of without properly rotating crops and tending to the soil. For these reasons, these artificial crops (shitcoins) will die over time because they will not be able to survive insects, drought, viruses and many other external attacks.

Satoshi’s farm, the Bitcoin Network, is perfectly engineered fertile soil that is programmed to self-regulate and produce a perfect amount of corn (bitcoin) over a set amount of time.