Thin Air

I hate when people say things like:

"You knew Bitcoin et al. were created out of thin air (or less)..."
 ~ Javert Chip

If this person used "out of thin air" in a sense evoking the process behind how most commercially produced nitrogen is made - which is to say "out of thin air" - then I have no qualms with their use of that expression.

But no one uses that phrase like that.

What is super ironic though, is how right they actually are in their wrongness.

'Bitcoin et al.' were created out of the nearly unlimited digital possibility constantly provisioned by networked computers atop which, methods from several distinct fields of cryptography, game theory, software engineering, programming and a few other fields were pulled together and combined in just the right order.

Being able to mine the first bitcoin on 3 January 2009 and not on 2 January 2009 is no different than how nitrogen was unable to be harvested from the atmosphere before chemistry had advanced enough to where knowledge and techniques could be applied to the atmosphere in just the right way.

If you think deep enough, ever since the atmosphere first formed, or from the time that the first networked computer system was set up, the possibilities of both nitrogen harvesting and bitcoin mining had always existed. It's just that those possibilities were concealed.

Because those possibilities were concealed, they were 'impossible'. Every possibility that has not yet been revealed is by definition impossible.

Pulling something out of thin air used to be impossible, and then one day, it was possible - it became true. In Greek 'aletheia' means truth. It's literal translation is 'unconcealed'. Truth is just the revealing of possibility.

So when someone mocks another's idea by saying it is 'impossible' because they are too thick to realize that concealed possibilities are continually being revealed, just tell them to go fuck themselves. That is, after all, how their life literally ceased being an impossibility and became possible to begin with.