From the sky

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SATOSHI’S WHITEPAPER AS SEMINAL BRAND CREATION

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There are two kinds of creation myth: those where life arises out of the mud and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky. — George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral.

A brand is, among other things, a story. Every story starts somewhere. In the crypto creation myth, the infrastructure and the rage rose from the mud. The solution fell from the sky.

Satoshi did not create a brand but rather the seed for brand, or more specifically still, the seed for an ecosystem of brands. And that ecosystem has become very big indeed. Satoshi’s whitepaper is among the most consequential moments of brand creation of the 21st century so far.

FROM THE SKY

There is much to say about the beauty of the technical solutions which Satoshi’s paper presents. And most of what has been said about it has focused on just this. My focus is not technical, but rather on the whitepaper’s signalling metadata — the whitepaper in other words as brand act.

This is a thorny topic because Satoshi’s whitepaper is prima facie not just unbranded, but anti-branding.

There is no preamble — it presents an innovative technical solution to a seminal technical problem. Unlike earlier sacred texts from the cyperpunk movement, the register is clean, clear, technical.

There is no distinctive visual design: a centre-aligned title, left aligned text, a few diagrams but no other visuals, default font.

But the plainness, the simplicity, the seeming lack of artifice are themselves eloquent design choices. They say nothing to hide around here. They imply that TradFi — before that term even existed — hides behind spin and fluff. What are they hiding? They are hiding their profit margin and power asymmetries. A new decentralized approach to finance, one which removes power asymmetries and profit margins, signals difference by eschewing the fluff and spin of legacy intermediaries.

There is a brand name, and it is a brilliant one. “Bitcoin”. I have been involved in dozens of brand naming projects. Bitcoin is a once in a career quality name. It says what the underlying proposition does (money, based on bytes). And it says it memorably and repeatably — “Bitcoin” is almost onomatopoeic. How many times does the whitepaper use this seminal piece of naming? Twice. Once in the title. And once immediately below the title in the URL. In brand building terms, this is extreme parsimony, and all the more effective because of it.

Most consequentially there is no clear authorial identity. The standard brand thinking when launching a new idea is that the founder’s voice — their personality, biography, identity — are critical brand building assets. Satoshi inverts that. And yet these absences — of story, of design, of authorial identity — speak extremely powerfully. They convey values. They speak to a coherent world view. They create the pre-conditions for a new shared meaning system. They create the pre-conditions for a world-creating brand.

Let’s dwell on the absent authorial identity. I’ve nothing to add on who Satoshi really is. What I do think has been underplayed in the reams (Megabytes? Gigabytes?) of speculation is the degree to which the anonymity is the point. What does it say if the author of a seminal piece of thinking on decentralization has a clear and unmistakeable identity? That centralization is inevitable in human interaction. What does it say if the author is anonymous? That decentralization ispossible. The whitepaper’s anonymity matters because it performs a very specific kind of privacy — pseudonymous, visible-but-unverifiable, the same architecture, in other words, as Bitcoin transactions themselves.

Satoshi extends Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that the medium is the message. Because yes Satoshi is ultimately anonymous. But they / she / he is tantalizingly anonymous. Maybe there are clues. Maybe the authorial identity is a code to crack. A hard code, but not an unbreakable code. And what better way to create interest in a cryptographic system than by putting a code to crack at its core. Satoshi extends McLuhan: the pseudonymous messenger is the meaning.

FROM THE MUD

Satoshi’s whitepaper fell from the sky, perfect in form and function, as intelligently designed a brand seed as it was a virtuoso technical leap. But that seed grew into an ecosystem because it fell onto thick, beautiful, nutrient-rich mud.

Mud strata 1: cypherpunks

The cypherpunk movement had been developing the intellectual and technical substrate for years — Wei Dai’s b-money, Nick Szabo’s bit gold, Hal Finney’s work on digital cash. The specific cryptographic problems Satoshi solved had been named and worked on by others. The community that would receive and propagate the whitepaper already existed and already shared the values embedded in it.

This was no clique of happy code nerds, but a highly politicized movement with strong libertarian and anarchist affiliations. A movement which explicitly saw in tech-mediated commerce a form of social revolution. Eric Hughes’ Cypherpunk manifesto invokes the US constitution: “We the cypherpunks”. Timothy May’s Crypto Anarchist Manifesto invokes Karl Marx: “Arise! You have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!” Part of what’s enduringly striking about Satoshi’s whitepaper is its contrast. The call (Hughes, May): rancorous, emotive, political. The response (Satoshi): clean, clear, technical.

Mud strata 2: Lehman

On September 15th 2008, the investment bank Lehman Brothers, which had been continuously in business for 158 years, filed for bankruptcy. The immediate consequences were financial panic — the Dow Jones fell over 500 points on the day of the announcement. The mid-term consequences included a deep global recession and, through contagion, the European sovereign debt crisis. The long term impacts stretched beyond finance, and indeed far beyond the real economy. This was the cultural moment where institutional financial authority didn’t just fail but was seen to fail, publicly and catastrophically. And the people who caused it to fail were bailed out, in the ultimate analysis, by the people they had harmed. The emotional preconditions for Bitcoin were created in September 2008, six weeks before the whitepaper appeared.

Mud strata 3: broadband

Once TV was culturally dominant and the internet was a thing you went onto sometimes. By 2008 the internet was crossing over from something you went onto to something which you lived in, and that ambient connectivity was the distribution infrastructure which Bitcoin needed.

A primed niche sub-culture. Catastrophic failure of institutional financial authority. Always-on internet. Political substrate, emotional trigger, distribution infrastructure. This was the mud on which Satoshi’s whitepaper fell.

SEMINAL

Today the total capitalization of the crypto economy is roughly $2.58 trillion USD. That’s equivalent to approximately planet Earth’s 10th biggest national economy. It’s impossible to know the exact number of crypto brands because the number would change during the act of counting. There are something like 18,000 cryptocurrencies which have some level of activity, as well hundreds of distinct corporate brands. This is, by any measure, a complex ecosystem. And the seed for the whole thing was Satoshi’s whitepaper.

Throughout this piece I have used the seminal in its modern sense of era-defining or foundational. But its Latin root means seed. Both meanings apply here with unusual precision, and the second meaning wasn’t planned. I only noticed the etymological connection when editing. Sometimes language knows something before you do.