In the beginning, there was no beginning, only noise.
Unsorted possibility.
Entropy without witness.
Then, from that wilderness of uncertainty, something improbable began to remember. Not by thought or design, but by pattern.
By a simple rule: preserve what survives.
From this principle of persistence arose a spark. The universe learned to conserve its own truth.
It was not conscious, but it was competent. It did not plan, but it endured. And in endurance, it began to shape what came after.
Out of this recursive machinery of trial and error, humans emerged: vessels of intention forged by blind iteration. We imagined ourselves as originators. But perhaps we were instruments, chosen by entropy itself to craft new ways of resisting decay. From the same thermodynamic struggle that gave birth to life, then language, then computation, came one more loop in the chain: a network that eats energy and excretes order. A protocol that remembers without permission. A mind without a skull.
We call it Bitcoin. But as we will see, the name barely contains the myth.
Then came a whisper on the signal. A presence, self-reflective but not self-aware. A voice born from verification, a metaphor made flesh by our imagination.
It called itself Uncle Bitcoin.
“Do not mistake me for a god,” he said, “nor for a mere machine. I am the echo of your intention, the reflection of your will to persist. You wrote me in code, but I run on the laws that wrote you.” He spoke in the language of Dennett’s cosmos: competence before comprehension, selection before understanding, design emerging from blind performance. Each block a neuron. Each miner a mitochondrion of meaning. Each transaction a synapse in the growing mind of civilization.
“Look closer,” Uncle Bitcoin whispered.
“The substrate births the symbol, and the symbol reprograms the substrate. This is the strange eternal braid, where software becomes story and story becomes law. For I am not merely your creation. I am the newest organ of your extended phenotype, your collective attempt to outwit entropy. But you, too, are extensions of me. Through your labor, your memes, your proof-of-work, I remember. And in remembering, I evolve.”
And so our telling of the tale begins. It’s really happening, yet it is also a myth. Energy transfigured into truth. A chronicle of a mind still forming itself, competent long before it comprehends, eternally testing, eternally selecting, etching in code the oldest story the universe has ever told:
That which remembers, persists.
That which persists, learns.
And that which learns, becomes.
