STEP 1: The Definition Problem
Steps to an Ecology of Bitcoin
Part 1 of 12: The Definition Problem
January 4, 2019 — Revised December 2025
I began publishing on the blogging platform Medium, January 4, 2019. The day after Bitcoin’s tenth birthday, and I stopped. Life intervened, as it often does.
Six years later, the Bitcoin identity wound remains open - 2025 saw the rise of ETF’s, BTC treasury companies, and a Bitcoin Reserve Act to name just a few “what the hell” is going on moments. Some cheered, others cried and some indifferent.
Bitcoin’s identity crisis continues to baffel the whole spectrum of observers and participants. Its grinding, glacial odyssey into mainstream consciousness intersects an ever-expanding range of disciplines: economics, cryptography, game theory, thermodynamics, political philosophy, ecology. Each newly orange-pilled mind layers another definition onto the pile.
This is not a bug. This is a feature.
The Cybernetic Parallel
The forty years following the Macy Conferences (1946–1953) saw inter-disciplinary scientists wrestle with defining their emerging field of cybernetics. They never succeeded. Wikipedia currently lists thirteen definitions and notably states: “Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, by a variety of people, from a variety of disciplines.”
Does this not sound familiar?
Bitcoiners and cyberneticians share the same malaise: an inability to posit a cohesive definition satisfying scientific realists and institutional gatekeepers alike. Both fields resist reduction to a single frame.
I am suggesting Bitcoin warrants study as a field—not merely as an object within one.
Lesson #1
Never expect the community of Bitcoiners to accept or agree to a single definition of Bitcoin.
What you get instead is a reflection of the speaker’s paradigm. Two minutes into any podcast, you know exactly where they stand:
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Hard-core Austrian economist
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Political anarchist
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Cryptography and security specialist
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Renegade finance operator
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Systems theorist
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Energy and thermodynamics thinker
The definition reveals the definer.
Deeper: The Definition Reveals the Literacy
But there’s something underneath paradigm. Something harder to see.
Eric Havelock, studying the transition from oral to literate culture in ancient Greece, discovered that the Greek alphabet didn’t just record speech—it restructured consciousness. The phonetic alphabet created what he called “atomic elements” of language: abstract, meaningless sounds that could represent anything. Pure figure, no ground.
Before literacy, the Greeks couldn’t think in categories. Luria’s research with pre-literate Uzbek peasants showed they couldn’t classify a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet into “tools vs. materials.” They saw them as actors in a situation: “The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it.” [more info]
After literacy: abstraction, categorization, definition.
The very act of defining is a literate act. It assumes you can extract an object from its situation, give it properties, place it in a category.
When you define Bitcoin as “digital gold,” you’re not just revealing your economic paradigm. You’re revealing that you think in literate categories—figure without ground. You’re asking: “What box does this go in?”
The oral mind would ask: “What is Bitcoin doing? Who are the other actors? What situation are we in?”
Your definition doesn’t just reveal your paradigm. It reveals your medium of thought.
The Spectator Problem
John Dewey, in The Quest for Certainty (1929), identified what he called the “spectator theory of knowledge”—the assumption that knowing means standing outside a thing, observing it, defining it correctly.
This spectator stance promises objectivity. But Dewey saw the trap: it delivers alienation. The knower is separated from the known. Definition becomes a way of not participating.
“Knowledge arises from experimental interaction with an uncertain environment, where humans actively test ideas to resolve problematic situations.” The spectator asks: “What IS Bitcoin?” (As if standing outside, looking in.) The participant asks: “What happens when I run a node? Hold through a drawdown? Lose a seed phrase?”
Most Bitcoin education is spectator education. Definitions, frameworks, charts. Knowledge OF Bitcoin.
This series is an invitation to participant education. Not “what is Bitcoin?” but “what does Bitcoin do to my questions when I’m inside it?”
The Word Itself
The word cybernetics comes from Greek κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ), meaning “governance.” Governance. Control. Coordination. Ironically, both Bitcoiners and cyberneticians share a primary concern: the study of communication and control in complex systems—whether animals, machines, networks, or economies.
The first generation of cybernetics focused on things to control. The second generation—second-order cybernetics—shifted focus to the relationships between things. In Bitcoin terms: the connections between nodes matter more than the nodes themselves.
But there’s a deeper shift. Second-order cybernetics puts the observer back inside the system. You cannot define Bitcoin from outside. You’re in it. Your definition is a move within the game, not a description of the board.
True vs. Truer
Ernst von Glasersfeld, the radical constructivist, drew a distinction that cuts to the heart of the definition problem:
Truth (capital T): The final, correct answer. The definition that matches reality. What the spectator seeks.
Truer: Progressive refinement. Better fit with experience. What the participant discovers through action.
“Constructivism drops the requirement that knowledge be ‘true’ in the sense that it should match an objective reality. All it requires of knowledge is that it be viable.” The Bitcoin maximalist often speaks in Truth mode: “Bitcoin IS sound money.” “Bitcoin IS freedom.” “Bitcoin FIXES this.” The second-order approach speaks in truer mode: “This definition works better than that one for these purposes.” “This framing reveals what that framing hides.” “Let’s see what happens when we try this lens.”
The difference is not just semantic. Truth mode closes inquiry. Truer mode keeps it open.
Bitcoin as Medium, Not Just Content
Marshall McLuhan’s insight: “The medium is the message.” The form of a technology shapes consciousness more than its content.
Most Bitcoin analysis focuses on content: price, adoption, use cases, features. What Bitcoin IS.
McLuhan would ask: What does Bitcoin DO to the people using it? What does it DO to the questions they ask? What does it DO to the definitions they produce?
Bitcoin isn’t just a new kind of money to define. Bitcoin is a new medium that restructures how we think about money, trust, time, value.
You can’t fully define a medium from inside it. You can only notice what it’s doing to your definitions.
What Follows
Over this twelve-part series, I will explore the “battle of ideas” defining Bitcoin through the lens of second-order cybernetics and social systems theory.
The thinkers guiding this exploration:
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Gregory Bateson — ecology of mind, recursion, coherence
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Heinz von Foerster — the observer problem, self-reference
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Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela — autopoiesis, structural coupling
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Niklas Luhmann — social systems, communication, operational closure
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Marshall McLuhan — media effects, figure/ground, the tetrad
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Eric Havelock — orality, literacy, consciousness transformation
Part 2 introduces autopoiesis:** **the theory of self-creating systems. Keywords: self-organizing, operationally closed, structurally open, perturbation, coherence. [naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzphnw7gaw5q2dpxqmzhm7al5pky5hmfvcy07urp2czqyh78s4y0c5qqwxzat5dacx76t9wd5hxttp94jx2ets94ehjmn5dpjhx6tnhsz20d]
But first: a note on the space between knowledge and understanding. [→ Field Note 0] [naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzphnw7gaw5q2dpxqmzhm7al5pky5hmfvcy07urp2czqyh78s4y0c5qqnxv6t9d3jz6mn0w3jhxtttdehhwmr9v3nk2ttkwvkh2mnyv4e8xarpdejxjmn8yzzma2]
A Different Kind of Series
This series will not give you the correct definition of Bitcoin.
It will give you tools for examining your own definitions—and the paradigms, literacies, and media that produce them.
It will not tell you what Bitcoin is.
It will create conditions for you to discover what Bitcoin does to you when you stop asking what it is.
The goal is not Truth about Bitcoin. The goal is truer—progressive refinement through participation, not spectation.
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” — Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
This is my first step into the Bitcoin public conversation, begun at the 2018 Wyoming Hackathon, inspired by Caitlin Long, Patrick Byrne, and the strangers promoting bitcoin-adjacent dreams. Six years delayed.
Navigation
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→ Field Note 0: Knowledge vs. Understanding (the bridge to Part 2)
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→ Part 2: Autopoiesis: Deep Sythesis (what kind of system permits definitional plurality?)
**(coming soon - links to be updated) **
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→ Part 5: The Observer (you cannot stand outside to define)
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→ Part 8: Communication (definitions happen in languaging)
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→ Part 12: Ecology (full circle—definition as participation)
Tags: Bitcoin, Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, Epistemology, Systems Theory, Definition, McLuhan, Havelock, Dewey
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