Bitcoin is a complex system that is a lot of things at the same time.

It’s interesting to understand them separately and together, and how they relate to each other.

We can for example think about in layers of added properties.

1-it’s a global permissionless p2p network

2-it’s a system for broadcasting messages globally

3-it’s rate limited by a variation of HashCash

4-it uses its own chain of hashes as a beacon to prevent pre-computation attacks

5-it uses the rate of its chain to adjust the amount of PoW required for “posting”

6-it allows for global consensus on a set of posted messages

7-it prevents reordering of messages

8-it allows for arbitrary restrictions to be imposed on top of the previous layers

So far I haven’t even mentioned anything about a ledger, and it’s already quite an impressive set of properties that are obviously useful.

What if we remove some properties?

I don’t see how any of the above could be removed without making it useless *for implementing a ledger*.

But what if we wanted other applications?

Then it might still be useful — and possibly less costly.

Many projects have tried to reuse the insights in Bitcoin by piling other features on top of it.

I think *removing* things first is a better approach.

If you want to use the “underlying technology” for something that isn’t financial — the first thing that should go is the token.

Yet how many projects have done the exact opposite?