I think the “Bitcoin is mycelium / living thing” framing is a great analogy for how Bitcoin manifests in culture, memes, social networks, economic behavior. Where I’m hung up is when that analogy gets pulled one layer down and applied to the base layer itself. I haven’t yet seen a coherent argument for why the consensus rules should be treated as a “living polity”, rather than as an ossifying model of time and state that living systems grow on top of. When I look at Bitcoin, I see a fixed time and space substrate (global consensus on ordering and validity) and then money, data, and culture colonizing that substrate. Calling the whole stack “living” without separating substrate from emergent life feels like a category error mistaking the life of the ecosystem for the life of the protocol physics. By way of analogy, it’s like saying the soil and the mycelium are the same thing; they aren’t, and trying to change the chemical structure of the soil after it’s colonized can kill the network you’re trying to protect. From that frame, you fight invasives at the network layer, policy, law, client behavior, culture, not at the consensus layer. I could be wrong here, and if there’s a good piece that really makes the case for Bitcoin as living polity at the base layer level, I’d genuinely like to read it.

I think that was in 2021. 🤔