BTC's value highlights: the power of nothing

Source: Liu Jiaolian

BTC fell slightly overnight, opening at 104k and dropping below 103k. The overall market fell more than it rose, making people feel uneasy as if a storm is coming. This main upward trend has been running for more than three months, reaching a historical high of 108.4k on December 17, 2024, and a new historical high of 109.8k on January 20, 2025.

Meme, shanzhai, doomsday chariot, monsters and ghosts, all want to take a share from the market. Should we wash the disk on the weekly level? Just took a look, now the 30-week line has just run to 76k. To be, or not to be, that is a question.

Remember the joke, there was a story that said, a certain old leek repeatedly failed in battle, so he went up the mountain to seek advice from a high monk. The high monk gave him a brocade bag. When he opened it at home, there was a note inside with four words written on it: Buy low, sell high. When I was young, I thought this kind of story was purely funny. Who doesn’t know such a simple truth? But it’s not that easy to do! Later, after reading Wang Yangming’s works, I understood the relationship between knowledge and action. Only then did I understand the deep meaning of the high monk’s words, which was to let you seek true knowledge. True knowledge means to put it into practice. If you know you can’t do it, you won’t know until you don’t know. Wang Yangming realized the Dao in the Longchang, and taught the market of chains to realize the Dao. The greatest realization is to see through the noisy world, where 99.9% of people are full of themselves, thinking they know a lot, but in fact they don’t know at all, and they don’t even know that they don’t know, they are at the peak of ignorance without realizing it.

Going deeper, the teaching chain itself is also like this. Conscious of knowing this and that, maybe even knowing that you don’t know something, but there are always things that fall outside of your field of vision, in the blind spot of knowledge, the unknown unknowns. Knowing the questions you don’t know, as long as you consciously make an effort to learn and practice, you can gradually transform from not knowing to knowing. But as for the unknown unknowns, there is simply no way to reach them, let alone make up for them.

Knowing this, at least you can always remind yourself to have a sense of awe, not to have too much ego, not to be too self-righteous, and never be complacent. You need to know that you are just like holding a candle in the endless darkness of the universe, emitting a faint light to illuminate a child around you. Apart from the area illuminated by the candlelight, everything else is unknown, infinite, and boundless. Seek, learn, and explore along the path that interests you, and move forward.

Satoshi Nakamoto is our role model for life.

The paradigm of BTC is called “decentralization”. Decentralization is crucial, with the key being the word “decentralized”. The word ‘decentralized’ means to remove or eliminate. This makes BTC a very unique invention in the history of human civilization. While other inventions and creations are based on the logic of addition, from nothing in the past to something now, BTC is the opposite. It is based on the logic of subtraction, from something in the past to nothing now.

And after BTC, all the so-called cryptocurrencies that imitate it without exception are either adding something to BTC’s minimalist model or adding some creative idea.

BTC has no founder. Satoshi Nakamoto has disappeared, removing himself as well. Nakamoto’s disappearance is considered retirement, while the disappearance of project parties who raised funds through coin issuance is considered running away, because the latter took other people’s money. Nakamoto did not take anyone’s money, so he could let go calmly.

BTC does not have a dominant foundation. In the past, there have been attempts to form BTC foundations, but without exception, they have all failed. This is because such foundations do not have dominance. On the other hand, a foundation that can obtain chips at zero cost has dominance because it can sell tokens and force the secondary market to support it. This is a form of compulsion, not negotiation.

BTC was not pre-mined. The so-called pre-mining refers to the pre-casting of a batch of zero-cost token chips before the launch, and distributing them to some stakeholders according to certain predetermined rules. If the newly issued tokens are distributed according to the proof of work after the project is launched, it is called a one-time distribution. Then, pre-mining distribution can be called zero-time distribution. Zero-time distribution creates a division between insiders and outsiders, thereby planting the hidden danger of conflicting interests in the project from the beginning.

BTC has no insiders. BTC has no VC financing, no pre-mining, no issuance (token sales), so there are no insiders. This effectively ensures that BTC has no interest division and irreconcilable, structural interest conflicts. There are conflicts in BTC, but they are conflicts between users, not contradictions between the upper class and the lower class, let alone contradictions between users and projects.

BTC has no initial investors. As EduChain mentioned, having investors means having a boss. Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to be his own boss and wanted developers to be independent players. So he couldn’t take anyone’s money to do things, only then can he have the strongest backbone.

BTC has no office. An office is a symbol of credit. Financial institutions like to build luxurious office buildings because they do business on credit. BTC is a spot, not credit. A spot is a crystallization of value created by past production activities. Credit is a promise to create value through future production activities. Credit can go bankrupt, but a spot never does.

BTC does not have a website. Anyone can create a website about BTC. But no one can establish a so-called ‘official website’ on behalf of BTC.

BTC does not have a high-salaried executive team. BTC relies on consensus to unite people around the world. Everyone relies on spontaneous belief and autonomous action. BTC does not rely on the so-called ‘management’, nor does it need to hire any executive team for ‘management’, of course, there is no ‘dictator’ or board of directors to implement the hiring action, and decide on the selection of the executive team.

BTC has no marketing team. Everyone is a propagandist, everyone is a sower. BTC has no so-called official marketing team, nor a budget, because it has no so-called official. MicroStrategy can spend money to let the company’s marketing department promote BTC, BlackRock can spend money to hire marketing consultants to produce BTC promotional materials, but these are all their own voluntary actions. BTC does not require them to do so.

BTC has no salaried development team. It’s simple, because no one is paid a salary. Without anyone being paid a salary, everyone can pay themselves a salary - either do volunteer development for BTC or pay money to some developers to work on BTC for free. It’s the same model, BTC doesn’t ask you to do this, it’s all voluntary and self-directed.

BTC did not have an initial price. Most coin financing projects artificially set a price for the tokens at the beginning in order to sell them in the primary or secondary market and obtain startup capital. However, BTC started with a price of zero. For a long time, BTC had no market price. In May 2010, someone exchanged 10,000 BTC for 2 pizzas, which was considered a great deal.

BTC is not controlled by anyone. BTC is like an autonomous life, with its own will, not controlled by anyone or any organization. Almost all other projects have actual controllers, whether overt or covert.

BTC is the fairest money in the world. Fairness is like a circle. Humans can never truly draw a mathematically perfect circle, but we can easily know that one thing is closer to a circle, and another is not. BTC itself is certainly not perfect, but it may be the closest thing in human history to a fair currency in terms of value storage and transfer.

Most of the creations and inventions derive their value and highlights from the advantages and features that other benchmarking objects do not have.

However, the highlight of BTC’s value lies in its lack of this and that.

What no one has, has great value. What no one has, can accommodate countless high values.

Laozi said: The movement of the Dao is in opposition, the use of the Dao is in weakness. All things in the world are born from being, being is born from non-being.

There is something that can give birth to all things in the world, but there is nothing that can give birth to something.

This is the power of nothingness.