As we all know, there is an address suspected to be the mining address of Satoshi Nakamoto in his early years, which has accumulated about 1.1 million BTC. At the current market price, this is a considerable fortune. Satoshi Nakamoto never promised that he would not sell these BTCs and make a profit after the later ones raised the price. There are also those old miners in the early years who hoarded a large amount of BTC at an extremely low cost. Many of them either disappeared like Satoshi Nakamoto, or lay down early and lived by selling BTC.
Okay, now let's take a look:
Why don’t the miners who are now spending a lot of money to mine compete with these early participants, thinking that you just sit back and do nothing while I spend a lot of money to run the network, but still invest heavily to participate in the mining competition?
Why don't Wall Street institutions such as MicroStrategy, which are now spending very high costs to buy and hoard in the secondary market, feel that early participants obtained a large number of chips at extremely low prices, but now they have to spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to buy them, but can only get a small share. Why should they spend so much effort on publicity and promotion?
Obviously, if Satoshi Nakamoto has the greatest influence in the entire BTC ecosystem, followed by early participants, and finally Wall Street who have only entered the market in the last two years, then BTC will definitely be doomed.
The success of BTC lies in the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto alone held 1.1 million BTC and disappeared. Early participants and a large number of retail investors hold the vast majority of BTC, but they cannot do anything particularly big at this stage. The Wall Street institutions that entered the market in the past two years have spent huge sums of money to build some positions. They have both funds and capabilities, and are fully motivated to push for the listing of BTC ETFs, and to use their financial sales capabilities to promote BTC. This is what makes BTC younger and younger, thriving, constantly setting new historical heights, and writing new legends.
Don’t take BTC’s success for granted. In fact, the vast majority of projects are the opposite. Because human nature is to be lazy, wait for others to work hard, and then grab the credit and profits. “Wait”, “rely”, and “ask” for everything. This is a bad habit that is deeply rooted in our bones.
Only if you deeply understand this inferior nature of human beings, can you be surprised at the success of BTC and marvel at its greatness.
Some people like to look for so-called "strong market makers" when investing in stocks. This extends to the crypto circle, where they look at the project owners. If there are no project owners, they look at who is the market maker. To put it bluntly, such people and such thinking are centralized thinking. From the beginning, they positioned themselves as "little pigs" and all their hopes were to follow the "big pigs" so that they could get a share of the profits and make money when the "big pigs" were doing things and pulling the market.
This is the famous Pigs game.
In the abstract pig game model, there is a big pig and a small pig trapped in a cage. There is a feeding trough in front of them, but the control pedal for adding feed to the feeding trough is at the other end of the cage.
To get the feed, the pigs need to run to one end of the pedal, step on the pedal, and then run back to the feed trough.
But there is a problem:
If the little pig steps on the pedal, by the time it runs back, the big pigs guarding the trough will have eaten up all the feed. The poor little pig gets nothing for his hard work.
If the little pig and the big pig step on the pedal together, then they run back to eat. The little pig eats slowly and only eats 1/3, while the big pig eats quickly and eats 2/3.
If the little pig waits for the big pig to step on the pedal, when the big pig comes back, the little pig waiting in front of the feed trough will start eating in advance. However, because the little pig eats slowly, the big pig will still be able to eat the remaining 1/3 when it comes back.
This highly simplified model roughly describes the business model of such a company:
The company boss is a capitalist and does not participate in the business. He relies solely on his employees to work. All profits go to the boss and the employees do not get any benefits.
The boss of the company does the business himself and works with the employees. In the end, the boss takes 2/3 of the money earned and the employees take 1/3.
The boss of the company supports the entire company by himself, while the employees just sit back and do nothing. When the company makes money, the boss takes 1/3 and the employees take 2/3.
Do you see the problem? This is why before BTC, human organizations were all centralized and managed from top to bottom. Only by giving bosses the right to manage employees can we prevent employees from lying down and slacking off, thus "exploiting" their bosses in disguise.
Because the Nash equilibrium of the game of smart pigs is that the little pig does not work and just waits to eat the fruits of the big pig's labor. This is the best solution for the little pig. As for the big pig, although it will not be taken advantage of by the little pig if it does not work, it will be hungry. For the big pig, the sad thing is that although 2/3 of its labor fruits will be taken away by the little pig, at least it can still eat 1/3, which is better than being hungry.
This strategy of the piglet is also called the "free-rider" strategy.
People discovered early on that if a company is composed entirely of small shareholders and no one person holds absolute control, then this "ownerless" company can easily fall into a deadlock, where everyone is a piggy and everyone adopts a "free-rider" strategy, causing the company to stagnate in development.
Before BTC, people could not imagine that organizations and businesses without centralized management and control could survive and progress.
It is a miracle that BTC has not fallen into the deadlock of the game of smart pigs despite its highly dispersed holdings.
Satoshi Nakamoto holds 1.1 million BTC, which is only 5.23% of the total 21 million BTC. From a corporate and centralized perspective, he is a typical minority shareholder.
When people's cognition is still stuck in the centralized mindset, once they encounter problems, difficulties and deadlocks, they will involuntarily seek centralized solutions.
This is totally wrong.
What we should really do is to carefully study why BTC can break the deadlock of the smart pig game without relying on centralized management and control under the decentralized situation.
This is an interesting topic worthy of serious study.
The relevant research results will hopefully raise people's cognition and theory in human organizational behavior to a higher level, thereby greatly enhancing human social organizational capabilities.
Author: Liu Jiaolian