Chaos is a controversial word for many people, as it inherently draws the idea into the minds of people who experience complete, unbridled chaos. This is not on any level what chaos means. It is simply a system that lacks rulers or central authority, and where all cooperation and coordination takes place on a purely voluntary basis among peers in the system. The original Greek word, anarhkia, literally means “without rulers.” That means without arkhiya meaning the rulers.
This concept is the foundational truth of why Bitcoin works as a distributed network and protocol. There is literally no one in charge of the network. If so, it would not be a distributed system consisting of sovereign individuals who voluntarily choose to interact with each other.
People tend to view Bitcoin as an objective fact that serves as a frame of reference for humans, and that it exists in the same sense as the laws of physics. this is not true. This idea blurs the boundaries between objectivity and subjectivity, intersubjectivity and subjectivity.
Objective truth is one that exists regardless of people's subjective belief in it. That is, the laws of gravity mean that a body with sufficient mass will exert its gravitational influence on all other bodies surrounding it. No amount of refusal to believe in this truth of the universe will change it. You can convince the entire human race, down to the last man, woman and child, that the laws of gravity do not in fact exist. This will not prevent gravity from exerting its influence on them all.
Now take for example the value of the dollar. Is the dollar inherently valuable? Is this an objective statement of fact? not. The only reason a dollar is valuable to an individual is because he or she values it personally. Why does an individual subjectively evaluate the value of a dollar? Because other individuals also value the dollar personally. this It is intersubjectivity.
It is simply a subjective point of view shared by a large number of individuals. This is what Bitcoin is, a self-distributed system. So what is the difference between Bitcoin and the dollar? Lack of rulers and coercion. The dollar system has people in charge of it: the Federal Reserve, the commercial banks that actually issue new dollars by extending credit, and the government agencies that regulate its use and who can interact with it. It has tax powers Authorization to use it to pay your tax obligations.
Bitcoin has no such equivalent rulers. It does not have a Federal Reserve Board, nor does it have commercial banks that dictate when and in what quantities dollars are put into circulation. It does not have any taxes that you are forced to pay by anyone. It is simply a distributed group of economic actors that voluntarily run a piece of code in order to interact with each other.
“But Bitcoin has rules.” Yes it is. That people choose voluntarily. There is no power structure or governance structure involved in creating those rules. They were brought into the world by Satoshi Nakamoto, and Everyone Who joined the network from that moment Choose freely to adopt those rules. There is no structure that says “these are the rules.” There is simply a set of rules that everyone has voluntarily chosen to follow entirely of their own volition.
Even the changes to these rules over the years, and there have been a fair number of them, are purely voluntary in nature. There was no governance structure or authority to impose on anyone. There are no “rules to change the rules.” Anyone at any time can enter the social arena and propose a new rule to be added to the Bitcoin protocol and network. At any time people can choose to adopt this new rule, and if a critical mass of people do so, it is now a rule for the network.
People often think that because the protocol and network itself have rules, there is some sort of “meta-rules” framework surrounding that. These descriptive rules must be followed in order to change the rules of the system itself, or they are a kind of binding requirements to achieve some purpose or the nature of the system that cannot be changed or developed over time. This completely fails to capture the reality of what an anarchic system actually is. There are no rules except what people voluntarily choose to follow on their own.
Within the confines of those rules, it's chaos. Anything a person can voluntarily do in interaction with another person within the confines of those rules is permitted. Even those rules themselves are simply the result of a consensus reached through a process of pure chaos, that is, people interacting voluntarily within their chosen framework. That's the thing, no matter how much you want to twist and twist the definitions in your head to fit some other framework.
There is no authority for appeal here. There are no rules to require people to follow other than the rules of consensus themselves, and Even this cannot be demanded or implemented. All you can do is Hopes That people choose to continue following them out of their own self-interest. At any time a persuasive individual or group can persuade others to change even those. If that happens, There's nothing you can do about it except try to be more persuasive.
This is what chaos is. Freedom to associate is free from any kind of authority, coercion, or control over other people with whom they associate, or under what terms they choose to associate. Bitcoin is a mess, and if that fact bothers you or makes you instinctively want to argue against it, the truth is that you never understood Bitcoin in the first place.
