In the latest episode of the Freedom Footprint Show, Pietro Battistella and Knut Svanholm discuss the importance of timing and the human factor in technological discoveries and Bitcoin. Drawing from his book “Bitcoin Technics and Time,” Battistella explains how technics are becoming increasingly autonomous, and how this force exists in every field of human knowledge, not just technology.

Technics can be defined as the undefined increase of the ability to achieve goals through the deployment of means in a way that is always more efficient, always faster, and generally better. The idea is that given the right economic, political, and especially technological conditions, technics and innovations will emerge spontaneously, to the point that the individual who discovers them becomes less like a fundamental factor and more like a catalyst in the process.

This is the concept of inevitability of discovery: if somebody doesn’t make a specific discovery, given the right conditions, someone else will eventually get to the same result in a process that is much more autonomous than we can think. Battistella argues that we can observe this through history, in how discoveries have often emerged at similar times in very different parts of the world.

Now, let’s connect this idea to Bitcoin and Satoshi. The underlying techniques and ideologies that drive Bitcoin - encryption, a distributed ledger, and the need for a decentralized currency with a fixed supply - already existed. Could we consider Satoshi just a catalyst then? He brought together the ideas into the Bitcoin we know today, but hadn’t he done that, someone else could have eventually created something very similar. Or could they?

It's clear how specific the circumstances surrounding the emergence of Bitcoin are and the particular role that Satoshi played. Had he disappeared one day later or not at all, what would have happened? Had the fixed supply or block size been different, would it be the same? We must also consider the role played by humans in shaping Bitcoin. As Knut points out, we can’t ignore that there is still a prominent human component in the process of becoming and adopting Bitcoin since the system is built on a consensus.

Given the uniqueness of the parameters that shaped Bitcoin into what we know today, can we know that it would have worked under different ones? What do you think? Would Bitcoin be what it is today without Satoshi’s intervention?

To listen to the full conversation with Pietro, check out the episode on the Konsensus Network channel. https://youtu.be/AuRbHzvDC7Q