Techno-Social Institutions

and the politics of the future

Bitcoin is not (just) a product.

Nor is it (just) a platform or a new operating system.

It’s much deeper and more impactful.

Bitcoin represents the emergence of a new social paradigm.

Few people truly understand these differences and their societal implications, even among libertarian Bitcoiners.

Bitcoin represents the evolution of our institutions from a political foundation to a technological foundation. It’s the intersection of tech and governance.

In recent years, the Internet has been seen as an infrastructure for creating consumer applications on the fringes of our institutions. However, slowly, the waves of these innovations are colliding with the legacy walls of the state and getting in through its cracks.

Bitcoin, a parallel monetary system, is just one example. We also have parallel systems for science, media, education, and even governance itself.

All of this is happening within the new social paradigm of decentralization, neutrality, and privacy through technosocial structures. It’s a global search for alternatives to our political institutions that are no longer compatible with the challenges of the 21st century.

But what exactly are technosocial institutions?

They are those whose execution and predictability depend on technological properties, not just social ones. For example, Bitcoin generates a new block every 10 minutes. Every 4 years, the software is programmed to halve the issuance of new coins. These are "monetary policies" made possible through cryptography, code, and other purely technological elements. However, there are also social elements that prevent these attributes from being changed through misguided updates in the Bitcoin core software (see the block size war).

In other words, it’s not a utopian future where everything is automated by software, and every law, regulation, and tax runs without human influence. However, there is a drastic reduction in individual influence.

When we look at this new type of institution, we realize that the influence of a single actor or group of people is almost irrelevant, especially in the short and medium term. In established political institutions, one person can sign a paper, approve a new decree, and impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people in an arbitrary, unpredictable, and non-transparent way.

This evolution is not easy for the general public to perceive, even among intellectuals and leaders. There is a clear institutional immune system that will repel any innovation that threatens the incumbents' position of power.

But because digital and decentralized technologies are hard to stop, as we can easily see with the crypto industry, year after year we will witness the slow disintegration of legacy systems and the adoption of internet-native models.

Therefore, understanding and building with technology is not just a way to create consumer products but to help design the political institutions of the future.