And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing." —Marcus Aurelius

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing." —Marcus Aurelius

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing." —Marcus Aurelius

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

My first order of business in this space is to spearhead a community of npubs who share this goal. Everyone who is interested in note-taking or list-making or bookmarking is welcome to join. I have created an INVITE-ONLY relay for this very purpose, and anyone is welcome to reach out if they wish to be added to the whitelist. It should be freely readable in the near future, if it is not already, but for now will remain a closed-to-post community to preemptively mitigate attack or spam. Please reach out to me if you wish to join the relay. https://logstr.mycelium.social/

I am eager for someone to fork HedgeDoc and employ Nostr sign-in. This is a small step toward managing information together within the Nostr ecosystem. I will attempt this myself eventually, if no one else does, but I am prioritizing my development in this way:

Now, on to Joplin. I have never used this, because I opted to study the FOSS market and stayed free of any reliance on a paid solution. Many people like Joplin, and I gather the reason is because it has allowed itself to be flexible and good options that integrate with Joplin seems to provide good solutions for users who need that functionality. I see Nostr users recommending Joplin, so I felt it was worthwhile to mention as a case-study option. I myself need to investigate it more, but have found comfort in other solutions.