Bitcoin: A Living Organism That Keeps Growing

The birth of the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism provides a groundbreaking solution to a long-standing consensus problem that has plagued humanity—the Byzantine Generals Problem. The core of this issue lies in how to achieve effective consensus in an untrustworthy environment, or in other words, how to create order out of chaos.

From a thermodynamic perspective, this is an entropy-reducing process. Generally, everything in the universe tends to increase in entropy, moving towards disorder and thermal equilibrium. However, living systems can create order and achieve entropy reduction by absorbing negative entropy.

The PoW mechanism achieves network consensus by incentivizing miners to participate in a competition for computing power, essentially creating an entropy-reducing system. This system continuously absorbs global computing resources, growing and expanding. From this perspective, the Bitcoin network is actually an entity with life characteristics, rather than just a form of digital currency.

Bitcoin (BTC) plays the role of an incentive symbol in this ecosystem, but it is not equivalent to the entire Bitcoin system. This system has independence, while also possessing social attributes, allowing it to interact with the external world and create greater value.

After more than a decade of development, the Bitcoin network still maintains strong vitality, while many imitators have gradually disappeared. Some other blockchain projects have abandoned the evolutionary model of continuously absorbing computing power resources and instead adopted a fixed cap staking mechanism, which may limit their development potential.

In the future, exploring how Bitcoin, this mechanically consensus-driven organism, can better integrate into human digital civilization may be a more valuable research direction in the blockchain field. How to enable this unique system to function in a broader social context will become an important topic for innovation and entrepreneurship in the Crypto space.