A few days ago, someone asked me an interesting question: "Bitcoin transactions are slow and have high fees. How can it sell for $90,000 each and have a market cap surpassing $2 trillion?" That's a good question, but if you only see it as a payment tool, it’s hard to explain.

Looking at it from a different perspective makes everything clear — think of Bitcoin as a breakthrough in human cooperation at the institutional level, and the story becomes straightforward.

**1. It’s not about efficiency; its core is "a substitute for trust"**

From a technical standpoint, Bitcoin is actually quite counterintuitive. Look at its metrics: transaction per second is nowhere near Visa, mining consumes a lot of electricity, the entire network repeatedly broadcasts and records the ledger, protocol updates are painfully slow, governance costs are high… in almost all dimensions where speed matters, it can’t compete with traditional financial systems.

But there’s a detail many overlook — the real cost in traditional finance isn’t server hardware, but people. Banks, clearing intermediaries, regulators, auditors, legal compliance, judicial systems, cross-border coordination… these "human-level blockchains" are the most expensive, most problem-prone, and hardest to scale parts of the entire financial system. One radical thing Bitcoin does is: use大量 cheap computing power to replace those expensive and unstable human trust mechanisms.

**2. The bottleneck restricting human cooperation has never been technology**

Looking back through history, before modern institutions and technology, the upper limit of human stable cooperation was roughly around 150 people. The evolution of civilization has essentially been about solving the same problem: how to enable strangers, people who don’t trust each other, to cooperate stably over the long term.

The answer isn’t "raising everyone’s moral standards," but rather — clearly defining the rules of the game, keeping accounts transparent, and setting consequences for breaches. Institutional design is the real weapon to expand the scope of human cooperation.