# A Systems Engineer’s Guide to… Bitcoin By [Darth_Peebles](https://paragraph.com/@darth-peebles) · 2022-02-24 --- I’m a Systems Engineer. I work on multi-billion dollar aerospace and infrastructure programmes. At that scale, we’re thinking about broad systemic changes. Like how the flex of a warship’s hull in heavy seas moves its radar dish millimeters closer to its missiles, creating an alignment error between the two that can cause its weapons systems to miss targets. Butterfly effect stuff. But right now, I reckon the biggest systemic change the world is seeing is happening with blockchain technology. In my [previous article](https://medium.com/@bowick.nicholas/a-systems-engineers-guide-to-the-blockchain-52d2d112a67a), I outlined how the blockchain was a fundamentally new method of property ownership, disrupting a 5,000 year-old status quo. I think _that’s_ the real macro change, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t turn my systems engineering eye to the pioneer. So here goes: ![A tongue-in-cheek “advert” for the Bitcoin subreddit from 2013](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/2dd965bee7fc14b9d1c88df03caa00943c374f53f63de239181a6d127cd89310.jpg) A tongue-in-cheek “advert” for the Bitcoin subreddit from 2013 Magic internet money. [Bedford FC has been bought with Bitcoin millions](https://www.bedfordshirelive.co.uk/news/bedfordshire-news/bitcoin-investor-peter-mccormack-announces-6367920) and turned into the first “bitcoin standard” football club. [Bitcoin is the national currency of El Salvador](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador#Presidency_of_Nayib_Bukele_since_2019), alongside the US dollar. [It’s being mined in space as we speak.](https://blockstream.com/satellite/) [Pro-athletes are being paid in it.](https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/athletes/) [A hamster investor outperformed Warren Buffet](https://nypost.com/2021/09/27/crypto-investing-hamster-beats-performance-of-warren-buffet/), although in fairness Buffet has now outlived the hamster. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/8fc8202bb5f3663346e42acb2671f3061516affea76e3b3c6434afd45c7a580a.png) Michael Saylor (an ex-aerospace systems engineer and now one of the largest holders of bitcoin) [points out](https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-is-digital-energy) that while the internet created innovative new businesses like social media, much of its disruptive power came by digitising existing things. From maps to songs to videos, these all existed before the internet, but there was a great degree of friction, inflexibility and expense in transmitting them to users. The internet allows these all to be digitised, copied endlessly and delivered to users for free on a globally-standard network. Maps have been around since the dawn of time. I remember my dad’s A-Z road atlas, stuffed in the glove compartment of our family car. He had to travel to a shop to pay money to acquire it, and it was bulky and instantly out of date. All Google really did was digitise it, but it made the maps an order of magnitude more useful. Spotify, Youtube, Kindle, it’s all the same story. Old ideas, digitally transmitted. One area this \*hasn’t \*happened is money. Sure, we have internet shopping and banking. But those are still operating on the old analogue system of a trusted central party, emulated on computers. Banks are trusted to maintain an honest record of transactions and holdings. There’s nothing that physically prevents your bank from altering your balances. It’s the threat of prosecution by government authorities that keeps them honest. [Honest-ish](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/17/hsbc-fined-64m-failures-anti-laundering-fca). The engineers and physicists amongst us will recognise this as a naturally unstable system. Like a dart thrown tail-first, it tends to move away from its initial state without constant corrective action, which is provided in this case by the tension of regulating organisations (the police, the court system, FCO regulations, the Serious Fraud Office etc). ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/9bf53d9fd805225106a5d0f2e9d146daf104114cea706bfb221b025da4173594.jpg) The old banking infrastructure has been digitised, yes, but the Pound Sterling itself hasn’t. Your bank’s app is digital, the money behind it is analogue. The blockchain is a naturally stable system (like a dart thrown the correct way) and will revert to a steady path even in the face of destabilising forces. The decentralised nature and encryption means it cannot realistically be hacked, controlled or banned. Proper accounting is baked into the simple code, it needs no third-party intervention, regulation or enforcement. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/05869e7cf55de0249779deb52be258d0d21ba2cdfbc16183038d8d9e5930a79b.gif) On the topic of encryption, this stuff is _strong_. There are almost as many 256-bit encryption key combinations as there are atoms in the universe. A brute-force attack on the keys would take significantly more energy than that released by a supernova, and trillions of years. The encryption is theorised to be quantum-resistant. Any plans to confiscate hardware would appear to be unfeasible. Every piece of bitcoin hardware from Arctic Circle to low Earth orbit, from Texas to North Korea would have to be seized. A single iPhone still running a node would be enough for bitcoin to survive. ![That’s one small step for man…](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/590402b8429587e39ac2763b7053cd3ee81ad6d5e16380792b7f0f3d6aa18804.png) That’s one small step for man… And hijacking the network in what’s called a “51% attack” would require someone to acquire enough hardware and energy to overwhelm the existing global network, which is thought to be beyond the capabilities of even groups of nations like NATO. So bitcoin is digitised money, in a true sense. Native digital money. Now, I’m not someone who recommends bitcoin to everyone, nor am I certain it’ll keep increasing in value or even survive. Bitcoin could fail, or be overtaken by a better rival the same way other pioneers like Napster or MySpace did. But cryptocurrencies in general are a brand new, self-sufficient form of digital money, and we’ve never seen anything like it before. So if we look past all the hype and the clickbait headlines, we can see that bitcoin is a systemic change to our civilisation. Not just a meme. --- *Originally published on [Darth_Peebles](https://paragraph.com/@darth-peebles/a-systems-engineer-s-guide-to-bitcoin)*