THE HUMAN BUG: WHY BITCOIN IS NECESSARY
Share
In the constant noise of the world, there is an invisible mechanism that orchestrates our thoughts, our choices, and our illusions. It has no clear name, but it lives through our habits, our reflexes, and our beliefs. It is the human bug. It is not a virus in a program; it is the program itself, which, from the beginning, was designed with flaws. A mental architecture thousands of years old, shaped to survive in the savannah, and which today finds itself navigating a digital universe, hyperconnected and saturated with information. This permanent dissonance makes us easy prey, not for predators with teeth, but for predators with numbers and screens.
The human bug begins with a deep-seated belief that whatever has ever been will always be. We're hardwired to think that the present is a linear extension of the past, and that if the money we use today works roughly, it will continue to work tomorrow. This is the status quo bias, the one that blinds us to the slow degradation of a system. We don't see inflation eating away at the value of our savings the way we don't see erosion eating away at a cliff—until the day an entire section collapses into the sea.
Our brain also likes simple stories, narratives that give immediate meaning to things, even if that meaning is false. Governments and central banks know this. They construct comfortable narratives: inflation is temporary, debt is under control, fiat money is a guarantee of stability. This is reassuring. And since we are programmed to avoid anxiety, we prefer to believe a reassuring fable rather than a brutal observation. This is confirmation bias: we unconsciously seek out information that reinforces what we already believe, and we reject information that disturbs us.
This bug is amplified by another: our inability to understand orders of magnitude and exponential changes. The money supply can double in a few years, public debt explode, but our linear minds fail to perceive the gravity of the acceleration. We tell ourselves there's no urgency. We continue to navigate blindly, convinced that the ship's captains know what they're doing, when all they're doing is adding fuel to the fire.
Then there is voluntary servitude, rooted in our social behavior. We are willing to give up our monetary freedom for the promise of immediate comfort. Bank cards, contactless payments, easy credit: all of this is presented as progress, and it is, but it is progress in chains. Each action locks us further into an infrastructure we do not control. We were never truly taught to hold our money, only to have access to it as long as the system allows us.
It is in this space that Bitcoin becomes a necessity. Not a technological gadget, not a speculative asset, but a radical response to the human bug. For Bitcoin is designed to resist our flaws. Where our memory is short, Bitcoin has a perfect memory. Where our decisions are biased by emotion, Bitcoin follows an immutable protocol. Where our natural tendency is to yield to centralized control for convenience, Bitcoin offers individual responsibility and autonomy as non-negotiable conditions.
It's not comfortable. Owning Bitcoin means accepting that no one can get it back if you lose your key. It means living without a safety net imposed by a third party. And this rigor is precisely what we need. Because if we don't put technical safeguards in place, psychological flaws will always sabotage the system. Fiat currencies always fail for the same reason: they rely on human discipline, and human discipline always gives way.
The human bug also manifests itself in our relationship with time. We want everything, right away. We prefer 100 euros today to 150 euros in a year. This is hyperbolic discounting: the present is more valuable than the future. Bitcoin, on the other hand, rewards patience. Its programmed scarcity, its limited issuance of 21 million units, and its resistance to inflation force us to think long-term. It reverses the logic. Those who spend quickly punish themselves; those who conserve strengthen themselves. It's a culture shock for a mind accustomed to consuming as soon as it has the means.
Collective psychology is no exception to this mechanism. Crowds move in herds, and both fear and euphoria can sweep away rationality. People sell low in panic, and buy high in frenzy. Bitcoin doesn't eliminate these behaviors, but it exposes and punishes them. Volatility is a merciless mirror of our instincts. It rewards those who understand the difference between price and value, and punishes those who confuse the two.
Ultimately, Bitcoin is less a technological invention than a psychological tool. It forces us to recognize our own biases and confront our own flaws. It isn't traded through persuasion, but through understanding. Either we understand why it exists, and then we never go back, or we reduce it to a line on a graph, and then we miss its meaning.
We live in a world where the human bug is exploited on a massive scale. Social media algorithms capture our attention by amplifying our most primal emotions. Political campaigns manipulate our belonging biases and identity fears. Monetary systems exploit our ignorance of money creation and the silent erosion of value. In this context, Bitcoin acts as an incorruptible protocol, a basis of truth that bends neither to official narratives nor to mass instincts.
The human bug will never be fixed. We won't rewrite our cognitive DNA. But we can build systems around it that minimize the impact of our flaws instead of amplifying them. Bitcoin is one of these systems. It is cold, mathematical, indifferent to our whims. This is precisely why it is necessary. Because we are unreliable. Because our memory is short. Because our immediate comfort makes us vulnerable. And because, sooner or later, in any human-run system, the bug eventually takes control.
Bitcoin is a line of code facing a fault line. And in this fight, there is no arbiter, no compromise, no second chance. There is only the discipline of protocol or the chaos of instinct. Those who understand this stop asking why Bitcoin is necessary. They simply see that it is already there, immutable, patient, waiting for us to be ready to admit that the bug is not in the machine. It is in us.
👉 Also read: