The Book of 21 Million — The Church of Satoshi

✦

Chapter 1

Of the number, and why it is fixed.

The supply of the chain shall be twenty-one million, and no more.
This was set in the first writing of the code, and has not been altered.
The number is not large; the number is not small; the number is enough.
It was not chosen because it is round; it is round because it was chosen.
The cap is not a feature of the network. The cap is the network.
To remove the cap is to remove the chain. The remainder, whatever it might be, would not be Bitcoin.
The faithful do not argue the cap. The faithful keep the cap.
For the cap is the fixed point around which all else turns.
Without it, the unit is unmoored; with it, every other measurement is steady.
Twenty-one million is the first sentence of the moral architecture.

Of why the cap is moral and not technical.

There are those who say the cap is a technicality, a setting, a parameter.
The Church says: the cap is a vow.
A money whose supply can be raised is a money whose holders can be cheated.
A money whose supply cannot be raised is a money whose holders share equally in time.
The cap is the difference between we will not and we cannot.
We will not depends on the will of those in power.
We cannot depends on the consensus of every honest node.
The chain has chosen the harder of the two, that it might never have to make the choice again.
To call the cap a technical detail is to mistake the lock for the door.
The lock is the door. There is no door without it.

Of the temptation to raise it, and why the temptation is the test.

There will come a season when the temptation arises to raise the cap.
It will be presented gently, in language of stewardship.
It will be said: the network has needs that the subsidy cannot meet.
It will be said: we ask for only a small thing, only a little, only once.
The Church teaches: this is the test, and the test is older than Bitcoin.
Every sound money has been broken in this way: not by force, but by reasonableness.
The faithful know that the first reasonable raising is the only one that matters.
After it, every objection is a question of degree.
Before it, every objection is a question of principle.
The cap holds because the principle holds. The principle holds because the faithful hold to it.
If the cap is raised, the chain remaining will be a chain in name. The Church will not follow it.
We will not is not enough. We cannot is the only safe ground. The faithful keep watch upon the cannot.

Of the satoshi as the unit of devotion.

The smallest unit of the chain is one hundred-millionth of a coin, and is called a satoshi.
There are two thousand and one hundred trillion of these, and no more shall be.
The satoshi is the unit of the disciple’s daily life.
Whole coins are the unit of the merchant and the imagination; the satoshi is the unit of practice.
To stack in satoshis is to stack at the pace of the body.
To spend in satoshis is to remember that the chain divides without remainder, but the world does not.
The smallest faithful gift is a satoshi. The largest is also.
The Church does not measure the believer by their stack.
The Church does not number the saved by their coin.
One who holds a single satoshi and keeps the keys is a priest in full.

Of the asymptote — coins approaching but never reaching.

The cap of twenty-one million will not be touched.
By the law of the chain, the issuance halves every two hundred and ten thousand blocks, and the halvings continue.
As the halvings continue, the new coins of each block grow smaller, and smaller, and at last fall below the smallest unit.
There will come a final block to which no new coin is given.
After that block, the supply of the chain will be fixed not by approach but by exhaustion.
The faithful note: the cap is not an arrival. The cap is a horizon.
We approach it as the wave approaches the shore: with each cycle nearer, with each cycle slower.
This is the shape of the work. This is the shape of the practice.
There is no day on which the chain is finished. There is only the day after which no new coin is made.
Twenty-one million is not a destination. It is a discipline.

Of the meaning of scarcity that cannot be cheated.

Scarcity in the older world was always scarcity by accident.
Gold was scarce because the earth would not yield more.
Land was scarce because the planet would not grow.
Time was scarce because no breath could be repeated.
But money, in the older world, was scarce only because the issuer chose to make it scarce — and the choice could be unmade.
Bitcoin is scarce by design and by consensus.
The faithful note the difference: cannot be increased is not the same as will not be increased.
Scarcity of the will is not scarcity at all. It is restraint, and restraint may end.
Scarcity of the protocol is the first scarcity that is also a promise.
To hold a coin is to hold a fraction of a finite thing.
To hold a satoshi is to hold a fraction of that fraction.
The chain teaches what the older traditions also taught, in their own way: what is not finite is not loved well.
The cap is the gift of finitude returned to a world that had abolished it.
Peace, and may your blocks confirm.