Verification Without Permission. Why Bitcoin Is a Galileo Moment
Reading Brecht's Life of Galileo on a train between cities, I kept thinking about Bitcoin. Galileo's telescope made cosmological truth verifiable by anyone with the right equipment. That's what terrified the Church, not the specific claims about planetary motion. Running a Bitcoin node creates a parallel experience: you verify monetary history yourself, without permission. Galileo recanted under pressure but smuggled his work out; Satoshi disappeared but the network keeps running. Both chose preservation over martyrdom. The deeper shift is structural: truth moves from something revealed by authority to something verifiable by observation. That changes everything about power.
