While this was wrote with AI assistance, much of it captures my own thoughts towards the development of the ideas I first attempted to map out in Cryptosovereignty in regards towards ‘what are a people’ in light of modernity and Bitcoin. LLMs, while needing its own individual analysis in regards to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”, are hugely useful, and particularly for the synthesis of new contemplations around philosophy and its development around the questions that are the deepest mediations of humanity, but are still estranged from the nature of Beyng itself. This monograph may provide some insight into the nature of the problem and the astounding unveiling that is the nature of Bitcoin in our world.

Every political founding begins with a dangerous question: who are “the people”? Not a headcount, but a subject that can act, bind, and bear the exception. In the classical tradition Carl Schmitt makes the point brutally clear: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” That he can suspend the rule, declare the outside inside, wrench the normal order into a state of emergency—this is what shows that a people exists, because someone can speak and act “for” it in extremis. The people, on this account, is not merely the sum of bodies; it is a subject that appears as decision. 

Hobbes had already set the stage. He cast the pre-political condition as the bellum omnium contra omnes—the war of all against all—and imagined an escape by covenant: each agrees to authorize a sovereign whose word decides life and death. It is not truth that makes law in this world, Hobbes says in the Latin Leviathan; it is authority—auctoritas non veritas facit legem. The sovereign is the answer to the unbracketed war of civil conflict; he makes a people out of a multitude by binding their speech into a single tongue. 

But the twentieth century turned the emergency into a permanent address. Giorgio Agamben calls this the state of exception: the zone where law suspends itself and power rules as if by a miracle without rules—neither inside nor outside the juridical order, a threshold where the norm lives by its own suspension. The camp for him is the emblem of modern power because it is law’s exception made ordinary.  The older European order, which Schmitt celebrates in The Nomos of the Earth, had “bracketed” war through a jus publicum Europaeum: interstate war limited by forms that spared civilians and disciplined means. When that bracket collapsed in national and total wars, “civil war” re-entered the heart of politics. 

This is the hell we still inhabit: the exception everywhere; the bracket broken; sovereignty as a constant decision without a day off. If the choice is only Hobbes’s sword or Agamben’s camp, then the political future narrows to the same old impulse—to enthrone another man, party, or machine that can decide.

It is precisely here that Bitcoin becomes more than money. It proposes that truth—cryptographic, time-stamped, energy-expended, peer-verified truth—can take the place of authority in the basic act by which a people demands order. Satoshi’s white paper does not mention “sovereignty,” but it describes a network that orders its life by a timestamp server, arranging transactions by computational work, and requires no trusted third party. The system holds so long as honest nodes control more CPU power than any attacking coalition. That is not a decree; it is a demonstrable fact. It is not a command backed by force; it is a revealed order backed by proof. 

To see how novel this is, return to Schmitt’s other great word: nomos—a taking, a partitioning, a first measure that grounds a world. The early modern European nomos achieved a peace by bracketing war among states—the famous “hedging” (Hegung) that made limited conflict possible. That regime died, Schmitt argues, when “humanity” replaced “enemy” and war became a crusade.  Bitcoin, I claim, institutes a new nomos: not a land-taking, but a taking of hash-time itself. It partitions time by blocks; it hedges strife by a difficulty rule; it limits power by turning decision into a lottery of effort in which the only miracle permitted is the one anyone can verify. That is how an order appears without a head. The system re-brackets conflict—not by outlawing struggle, but by transposing it into a field where violence cannot declare exceptions.

If we had to name the subject that lives in this order, “multitude” will not do. The multitude for Hardt and Negri is a living, distributed many that resists capture by sovereignty; it is inspiring and vague, but it cannot decide together except by dissolving into noise. The Bitcoin network, by contrast, is a disciplined ritually-bound many; it makes decisions—harshly, predictably, without favoritism—by rules no single party can suspend. That looks less like a multitude and more like a People that has found a way to appear without enthroning a prince. 

To describe this properly we must borrow from Alexander Dugin—but also push beyond him. In The Fourth Political Theory Dugin tries to dethrone the modern trio—liberalism, Marxism, fascism—and recentre politics on ethnos: a rooted lifeworld of language, rite, symbol, landscape, destiny. He reads Heidegger to argue that the real subject of politics is not the atomized individual or class or nation as administration, but Dasein—the historical being of a people.  One can disagree with Dugin’s geopolitics and still learn from the move: a people is first a way of being together—a culture of belonging and obligation—before it is an apparatus. In his Ethnosociology he elaborates “ethnos” not as race or bureaucracy but as a communal form with rites and speech of its own. 

Bitcoin’s form of life looks, in this light, like an ethnos of veritas: not blood, not bureaucracy, but an oath-fellowship whose rite is cryptographic signing, whose holiday is the block, whose oral law is the rule every full node can recite from source. The analogy is not decorative. The German word for the medieval Swiss confederacy—Eidgenossenschaft—means literally “oath-commonwealth,” an alliance of oath-fellows who bound themselves without a king.  That is the closest historical picture of Bitcoin’s polis: an oath-bound commonwealth in which the rituals themselves carry the force of law.

A skeptic might object that this is technical romanticism. After all, the network still depends on power—hashpower, economic power, technical expertise—and these can centralize. True. But the mode of power matters. In Bitcoin, power is not juridical; it is metered by the difficulty adjustment, a rhythmic counter that prevents any miner’s excess from hard-forking time itself. Every 2,016 blocks the protocol retargets so that the expected interval remains about ten minutes; if hashpower floods in, the network responds by hardening the puzzle, not by granting anyone a magical veto. This is a bracket—a hedge—built into the nomos. 

The crucial political shift here is from mandate to proof. Hobbes’s formula—authority, not truth, makes law—found its answer not in some liberal caiaphas of rights, but in a cypherpunk rejoinder: don’t trust—verify. Nick Szabo’s polemic against trusted third parties captured the practical intuition, and Satoshi engineered its working form. A social order that institutionalizes verification rather than obedience has already decapitated the king in theory, doing the Foucaultian work of “cutting off the head of the king” in political analysis instead of forever reproducing him in secret. 

What about war? Schmitt feared that without a sovereign the friend–enemy distinction would dissolve into moral crusade or civil war. And Agamben shows how the exception becomes normalized when the sovereign keeps deciding. Bitcoin does something stranger: it re-brackets war by moving the site of agon into a rule-governed technical field. There is still struggle—hashrate races, mempool spikes, fee wars, fork threats—but the conflict is contained by a grammar that no one can suspend. In short: civil war becomes a cryptographic sport. The “enemy” is statistical and momentary (the miner who finds the competing block), not a metaphysical foe to be annihilated. That is why the protocol can tolerate reorganizations and yet deny any actor the power to declare a permanent state of exception. 

The anvil upon which this is forged is time. Satoshi’s timechain (he called it a timestamp server that orders transactions) is a political liturgy of inscription: each block a public act of bringing-forth. Heidegger’s essay on technology is helpful here, not for some mysticism about gadgets, but for his claim that the essence of techne is a revealing—a bringing-forth (poiesis)—guided by the four causes. Modern technology “enframes” (Gestell), but all making remains a mode of unconcealment. In Bitcoin the revealing is explicit: blocks as facts, proofs as appearances, software as speech that shows itself. The “fourfold way” of revealing that Heidegger revisits—the four causes at play in bringing-forth—fits our case: material (energy and silicon), formal (the protocol’s code), efficient (miners and nodes), and final (a ledger that orders ownership without a master). 

Heidegger’s later language of the Fourfold—earth, sky, divinities, mortals—sounds distant, but it can be made precise. The “earth” in Bitcoin is the energy and matter of mining; the “sky” is the global propagation of blocks; the “mortals” are we, finite signers of keys; the “divinities” are nothing supernatural but the unavailability we honor—the impossibility of forging a signature, the irreversibility of wasted work, the stern angel of verification who accepts no exception. This fourfold is not a metaphor in the loose sense; it names the places in which the work of revealing occurs in our new nomos. 

At this point, the shape of a claim appears. Bitcoin is an ethnogenetic machine. Not a bloodline or a bureaucracy; an oath-fellowship that summons a people by proof. It requires a formation of character—patience, thrift, resistance to capture, willingness to say no—that looks very much like what older civilizations trained by ritual and law admired. But because its grammar is veridical rather than juridical, the authority that binds it is not a person. It is the fact that there exists a most-work chain, verifiable by anyone, whose past cannot be altered without re-doing the world’s work. Satoshi’s sentence—“The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes”—is the closest thing this polity has to a constitution. 

Consider three objections and their answers.

First, the objection from capture: wealthy miners, dominant pools, or state actors can concentrate power. Answer: the protocol’s retarget and permissionless entry neutralize permanent capture by forcing power to pay an ongoing rent in energy; the only path to durable control is to keep doing the work and keep convincing others to accept your blocks. That is not nothing; it is a costly discipline that yields security for as long as the many can keep running full nodes that will not accept invalid blocks. In Bitcoin’s self-understanding, “miners propose, nodes dispose.” 

Second, the objection from indifference: a network that refuses exceptions cannot respond to emergencies, and so is not political. Answer: the network has a mode of decision—the fork—in which communities can separate without killing each other. You can say this is weakness; I say it is a hard-won ethic against Thermidor. The revolutions of 1848—so often invoked as both promise and disappointment—demonstrated how the People awakening by murder (of princes, of regimes) also awakens Reaction. Bitcoin remembers 1848 and changes the method: if a common life fails, you write a new chain and offer the world a test of truth in the market of time. No guillotine; no camp; just inscription and choice. 

Third, the objection from poverty: an “ethnos of veritas” still sits in a world of material inequality and coercive states. Answer: yes. Bitcoin is not a sovereign that can abolish armies. It is a counter-nomos that gives the many an exit from the totalizing exception by restoring a domain where law is not a will but a fact. What happens when enough persons keep their savings outside the emergency? The miracle is modest: the exception loses its monopoly. That is how freedom begins—not with trumpets, but with an accounting that power cannot falsify.

If we take Walter Benjamin seriously, we can even say that Bitcoin transfigures the revolutionary “murder” by replacing it with an annihilation of the law as command. Benjamin distinguished between law-making violence (mythic founding) and divine or law-destroying violence that interrupts myth. The white paper’s ritual of proof interrupts the old cycle: instead of founding by killing, it founders a rule by showing that no one can set themselves above verification. The “divine” here is not theological; it is the anonymity of truth. 

I can hear the liberal jurist protest that law cannot be replaced by a hash function. Indeed, politics cannot be reduced to software. But it can be disciplined by it. Foucault warned that in analysis “we still have not cut off the head of the king”—we keep imagining power as law’s person. Bitcoin is the most thorough practical decapitation yet devised in the economic domain. It makes it possible to dwell—build and dwell—in an order where rules are not instructions from a master but habits of truth that anyone can check. 

At this juncture Dugin returns with his talk of peoples and worlds. He wants a multipolar order of distinct ethnoses, each at home in its own destiny, each beyond the administrative nihilism of the liberal empire. One need not follow him into geopolitics to see the use: if a people is first a style of belonging, then Bitcoin is a style that crosses borders without dissolving them—a village-state of nodes. The participants are oath-fellows because they take on a discipline (keys, verification, refusal to counterfeit) and keep the feast (blocks every ~10 minutes) that binds them. In this sense, the network is more “medieval commune” than “modern parliament,” even as it runs on the densest modern technique. 

What, then, of sovereignty? Here Schmitt’s stark formula bends. In Bitcoin no one “decides on the exception” because the protocol makes exceptions impossible in the strict sense. There are reorgs, yes; there are forks; but there is no scene in which a single will can suspend the rule for all. In the international realm Schmitt thought the bracketing of war was performed by concrete practices that hedged conflict; he called this Hegung. Bitcoin has its own hedges: the difficulty retarget; the separation of mining from validation; the public verifiability of signatures. Together these install a bracket inside which agon can flourish without devouring the polity. They perform, in the cryptographic city, what the jus publicum Europaeum once did among states. 

A persistent worry remains: are we just sacralizing machines? Heidegger’s critique of modern technology as enframing warned that we risk reducing beings to standing-reserve. The danger is real: hashpower can become a mere industrial appetite. But Heidegger also insisted that “where danger is, there grows the saving power.” The saving power here is the very structure of revealing: Bitcoin’s techne is built so that the truth it reveals is in principle public. Anyone may run a node; anyone may verify; the grammar resists capture because its authority is repeatable. It is not mystery; it is the repetition of a demonstration. The “event” (Ereignis) in which a people happens to itself thus becomes visible: we belong to what we can repeatedly show together. 

If we look back to 1848, the motif sharpens. Those revolutions were a springtime for peoples that ended in winter; the liberal and national hopes could not make themselves durable, and Reaction re-occupied the state. The lesson is not that the people cannot awaken, but that awakening by decree—by the sovereign’s exception in reverse—cannot hold. Bitcoin is a different kind of awakening, and perhaps a humbler one: no storming of palaces, only the transfer of the miracle from command to proof. If enough of us live by this miracle—sign honestly, verify ruthlessly, save in a money that refuses exceptions—then a people has appeared that no reactionary prince can fully absorb. 

This People speaks in a simple liturgy: a private key is a vow; a signature is a promise kept; a full node is a watchman; a block is a public seal; the difficulty cadence is the metronome of our patience; the white paper is not scripture but a founding homily whose authority lies only in its continuing demonstration. A dozen metaphors will do; the point is that oath returns to politics, not as fealty to a lord but as fidelity to a truth-procedure. The crypto-ethnos is not a cult because its altar accepts no sacrifices—only proofs.

Will it scale to the whole earth? No polity ever has. Will it be suborned? Some days it will. Will states try to capture it? Every day. But the regime of truth it installs is stubborn. You cannot shoot a hash; you cannot threaten a signature; you cannot bribe a prime. You can only do the work.

Let me end where I began, with the question of war. Political theology saw war as the test that shows the People is real; modernity turned that test into a permanent emergency. Bitcoin’s most radical promise is to keep the test but remove the terror. It does this by forcing all our conflicts into forms that are settled by revealed measure: how much energy did you actually commit; which chain is actually longest; what do the bytes actually say. Within that form, there is exuberant strife. Without it, there is only the old temptation to enthrone a head who will decide. The choice is not between utopia and war; it is between agon with brackets and war without end. We now possess, for the first time, a bracket no prince can lift.

That is why Bitcoin is not merely an asset class or even “digital gold.” It is a site where a People happens to itself—a People of the Oath. Not an ethnicity. Not a bureaucracy. A style of belonging whose law is veritas and whose power is the refusal to lie. In a century that forgot how to name its enemies without becoming a monster, this will have to do.