Many people think studying the question "what is money?" leads to a deeper more fundamental understanding of Bitcoin, when really that's a very narrow lens that misses the much larger picture.
A set of questions that should be asked and deeply understood are the following.
What is war?
What are dominance hierarchies?
Why is establishing a secure intraspecies dominance hierarchy one of the most existentially important activities for pack animals?
Understanding these questions offers much deeper and more profound insights into what Bitcoin is and it's implications for society.
The money question is basic, and perhaps even misguided. The war question is when you truly begin to descend the rabbit hole.
It's possible Satoshi deliberately obfuscated the complex emergent behavior of his protocol by describing it as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Effectively Trojan horsing in his invention under the radar of any potentially adversarial organizations. After all, military industrial complexes need funding, and this one needed time to scale and become powerful.
It's also possible Satoshi simply endeavored to solve the problem of allowing a distributed computing network come to consensus on a ledger with realizing the much more significant implications of the protocol.
Whatever the case, Satoshi appears to have invented a non-lethal globally scalable electro-cyber warfare protocol that seems to bypass the nuclear strategic stalemate. Because the physical power competition (war) over bitcoin's ledger writing privilege is electric and totally non-destructive, and in fact incentivizes those involved in the power competition to scale up and optimize their infrastructure, it is much less likely to escalate kinetically.
This form of electric warfare is infinitely scalable and produces clear winners and losers, resulting in a systemically secure physical-power-based dominance hierarchy. Kinetic warfare has reached a ceiling where nuclear armed nations can no longer settle international policy disputes using permissionless, zero-trust, egalitarian warfare without risking nuclear exchange, producing no winners.
If Bitcoin was never invented, nuclear armed nations, not reasonably able to engage in large scale kinetic warfare without risking MAD, would inevitably have to form a single global ruling class and rely on a systemically insecure and unstable abstract-power-based dominance hierarchy to settle disputes and control the world's resources.
Bitcoin represents the ability for our species to resume warring at large scale to establish a secure dominance hierarchy and preserve decentralization over our resources.
