One thing I quite firmly believe is that there will always be an opposition. It doesnât matter what you build, what you believe, what you discover, or how compelling the evidence appears to you. There will always be someone on the other side of the line.
What I find more fascinating isnât necessarily the question of who is right. Itâs that humanity somehow continues to function despite the fact that we have constructed ourselves around disagreement.
Science has it. Politics has it. Religion has it. Economics has it. Technology has it. Even within individual fields of study, people can spend entire careers arguing over interpretations, methodologies, assumptions and models. Sometimes the opposition is wrong. Sometimes it is right. Sometimes both sides are looking at different pieces of a much larger problem.
And yet, we continue building.
The internet is probably one of the greatest examples. TCP/IP doesnât care whether the person using it agrees with your politics, your religion, your scientific worldview or your economic philosophy. The protocol doesnât ask whether you are morally correct before routing your packet. It simply follows the rules.
That distinction is important.
A neutral system doesnât have to eliminate disagreement. It can actually make disagreement irrelevant to the operation of the system.
Bitcoin falls into this category for me. The underlying mechanism doesnât need everyone to believe in Bitcoin. It doesnât need everyone to agree with the philosophy behind it. It doesnât even need everyone to like the people building on it. If the rules are deterministic and the network accepts the transaction, the system doesnât care about the ideology of the person signing it.
Bitcoin SV fits into that same question.
Someone can disagree with BSV. Someone else can believe passionately in it. Someone can think the entire concept is misguided. Another person can build something useful on it. The protocol itself doesnât have to resolve any of those disagreements.
That is where I think blockchain has the opportunity to become genuinely interesting.
Instead of asking, âHow do we eliminate the opposition?â
Maybe the better question is:
âHow do we build systems where the opposition doesnât matter?â
If two people fundamentally disagree but can still transact under the same rules, exchange value, verify the same data, execute the same program and independently reproduce the same result, then the system has accomplished something humans often struggle to accomplish themselves.
It has created a common ground without requiring common beliefs.
Iâve been part of the opposition myself. There have been plenty of situations where I believed I was right and someone else believed they were right. Thatâs simply part of being human. We arenât detached observers. We have experiences, incentives, assumptions and identities that influence how we interpret the world.
The danger begins when disagreement becomes an identity rather than an investigation.
You can see it everywhere. Someone becomes so deeply invested in a narrative that they can spend days mechanically repeating the same argument to an opposing audience, hoping that repetition itself will eventually produce agreement.
But perhaps agreement isnât actually necessary.
A builder doesnât need everyone to believe in their architecture. A scientist doesnât need every hypothesis to survive. A protocol doesnât need everyone to agree with its philosophy.
A blockchain certainly doesnât need everyone to believe in it.
It needs rules.
Rules that can be independently verified.
Rules that apply consistently.
Rules that donât change depending on who is using them.
And perhaps most importantly, rules that allow people who fundamentally disagree to participate in the same system without requiring them to surrender their beliefs.