Everything you know and think about Bitcoin was fed to you by a screen; by a podcast; an influencer recycling ideas they saw on a screen or heard on a pkdcast. You might have even made friends through it. That's wild. All these things you feel are so authentic and true and revolutionary are PURELY based on pure simulacra.
Discussion
This is where you might say "Go touch grass", but that is JUST A MEME, itself also symbolic communication. We can't even approach the subject of authenticity without employing the tools of the cultural construct we've trapped ourselves in. "GO GET SOME REALITY BRO!" REALLY? WHERE?
Nah. Things get more real when you use specialized instrumentation to explore the bytes stored in a disc. Bitcoin is just bytes with rules. Bytes are are represented physically by arrangements of matter. Of course, matter is mostly empty space and probably just a different layer of information.
On flash media, bytes are just an arrangement of electrons trapped between a source and a drain. But you can't observe that directly. The only reason you understand that is knowledge piled on top of knowledge that someone else proved. Bitcoin is symbols all the way down.
Lots of things which exist cannot be seen (if that's what you mean by "observe directly"), but they still exist. You could say the knowledge of their existence is really just a mental model or experience of simulacra, but that means everything is simulacra and nothing about bitcoin is special in that regard.
Bitcoin feels somehow uniquely simulacra. The closest you can physically get to viscerally "experiencing" bitcoin is physical miners. Outside of that, it is entirely people discussing symbols.
Does it make a difference if i read a variety of books?
All just symbols.
Symbols are just a reflection of our thoughts and ideas right? But we can’t see the world any other way except through our subjective minds. So even if we digest similar information, the lens we use is unique. The information and understanding can never be truly identical to another persons.