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What Bitcoin Can Teach Us About Culture

How do we think about culture, how does it interact with the individual; bitcoin gives us a useful parallel

Rogue Missive #124 | Feb 3, 2026

I’ve been exploring the idea of a new ontology of the individual in economics. You can read more about that here. That line of thinking keeps pulling me back to culture, and to a familiar conceptual problem.

Culture is hard to think about clearly because it’s hard to say what kind of thing it is. Ontology is just a fancy word for that question: what sort of thing is this, and what is it made of? Culture is clearly real. It shapes behavior in real time and, over long horizons, creates selective pressure on genes. But it is not an object, a substance, or an institution in the narrow sense.

So culture must be something, just not the kind of thing we’re used to naming.

Thinking through this problem, it occurred to me that the Bitcoin network offers a surprisingly helpful analogy.

What Is Bitcoin?

From the beginning, people have argued about what bitcoin is. Satoshi called it “peer-to-peer electronic cash,” but that's a description, not an explanation. What is cash and what is it made of?

Is Bitcoin:

the UTXOs?
the blockchain?
the rule-set?
the nodes and miners?
the wallet software?
the price?

We can describe all of these parts. But none of them, individually, is bitcoin. And all of them together is not enough either. Bitcoin is something more than the sum of its parts.

This is the same problem we face with culture. We can point to language, dress, architecture, literature, rituals, flags, and laws. Yet, none of those are the active, operational culture, and all of them together fall short, too. There is an essential non-substantial quality they all lack.

"Where Is It?”

Bitcoin, like culture, is not a substance. Philosophers have long recognized that when an entity resists definition as a substance, ontology must shift from essence to instantiation; meaning asking where and how the thing exists. Not what the thing is but where.

Substances share a few basic ontological features. They are composed of parts, they occupy a location, and they persist independently of human participation. Take gold. What kind of thing is it? It is a chemical element with an atomic number of 79, composed of atoms with a specific structure, occupying space.

We can’t do that with Bitcoin, or with culture. So the ontological inquiry has to change.

For non-substantial things, inquiry is about the instantiation, or the how and where the thing exists. A law for example is not a physical object, it is exists when courts apply it, police enforce it, and citizens comply with it.

While researching for this post, I ran into John Searle's writing in the 1990s, particularly on money and institutions. Searle notes that asking what money is leads nowhere, because money is not a substance. We use substance as money, paper, gold, and silver, but the describing the concept of money and value are non-substantial. Searle reframes the question pretty much as I've done, namely asking under what conditions does money exist at all? His answer is that money is instantiated in ongoing practice amongst individuals.

This is why the definitional debates about what Bitcoin is never end. We keep asking a substance question of a non-substance entity.

For things like Bitcoin, the relevant ontological question is no longer what is it made of? but where does it exist, and how is it instantiated?

Where Bitcoin Exists

Bitcoin exists in nodes and between nodes.

Bitcoin exists in nodes as internally applied logic. Each node contains the rules that define validity, maintains its own independently verified view of the ledger, and applies computation and judgment to incoming information. Nothing external tells a node what Bitcoin is. The rules of the code are internal to the node.

But no node, by itself, is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin also exists between nodes as ongoing application of that internal logic. Nodes communicate peer-to-peer, propagate transactions and blocks, and continuously respond to one another’s behavior. Consensus emerges from repeated interaction under shared constraints.

Taken together, Bitcoin is a network of nodes and their interactions with a surrounding environment. That environment includes active, intentional participants such as other nodes and humans (and potentially AI agents); non-conscious but active constraints such as cryptography, markets, competing assets, and opportunity costs; and passive but necessary infrastructure such as the internet, electricity, and hardware. Bitcoin exists as a structured process instantiated across all of these elements over time.

Culture Works the Same Way

Once this structure is understood, culture becomes much easier to think about. Culture exists in individuals and between individuals, as well.

Culture is an internally applied order for the individual. It lives as internalized language, norms, habits, and moral intuitions; as memory, identity, and expectation. Culture shapes perception and action from the inside. It does not merely constrain behavior from the outside like a rulebook or a threat. Most times, it precedes conscious thought.

But no individual, by themselves, is culture.

Culture also exists between individuals as an ongoing application of that internal logic. It appears as shared symbols, institutions, traditions, prices, laws, rituals, and social expectations. These structures coordinate behavior, transmit meaning across generations, and persist even as individual participants come and go.

Taken together, culture is a network of individuals and their interactions within a surrounding environment. That environment includes active, intentional participants such as other individuals, families, leaders, and institutions; non-conscious but active constraints such as biology, geography, demographics, technology, economic scarcity, and historical path dependence; and passive but necessary infrastructure such as physical space, energy availability, food systems, shelter, and basic material resources. Culture exists as a structured process instantiated across these elements over time.

Conclusion

This analogy between culture and Bitcoin provides a strong foundation for thinking about what culture is and how it operates.

In both cases, they non-substantial, so we have to change our question from what kind of thing is it, to where and how does it exist.

Bitcoin and culture are both networks of individuals (nodes) and their interactions within a complex and interconnected environment.

This matters because it forces a reconsideration of the standard economic picture. If culture is part of the individual, but also something larger than any individual, then the idea of isolated individuals with purely subjective preferences is incomplete. Preferences are formed, filtered, and reshaped by structures that are more consistent than any one human mind and, as a result, can often be predicted.

In my recent work, I’ve been exploring new ideas in economics that take these realities seriously. My goal is to understand secular shifts, generational turnings, and major historical epochs at the macro and geopolitical level through the lens of these layered human structures. If that sounds interesting, subscribe and come along with me.

HODL strong. Thanks for being members!