Bitcoin accepts humanity with its virtues and its flaws.
Stallman dreamed of free code by appealing to human goodness. Satoshi built free money by assuming human selfishness. This is the line that connects the hacker ethic of the 1970s with the game theory of Bitcoin: how individual ambition is channeled so that, without meaning to, it benefits everyone.
the GNU Project
Manifesto
the Bitcoin whitepaper
auditable in the code
Richard Stallman and hacker culture
This whole story begins with a man who refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement. To understand Bitcoin, you first have to understand why someone considered sharing the code to be a moral question.
THE FIGURE
Richard Matthew Stallman (rms), born in Manhattan on March 16, 1953. A Harvard physicist, programmer and the most iconoclastic figure in modern computing: the founder of the free software movement.
THE LAB
In 1971 he joins the MIT AI Lab. There he lives the genuine original hacker culture: a community that freely shared code, modified systems to improve them, and saw software as a common good.
The crisis of proprietary software · GNU is born
In the early 1980s, companies began to privatize software: nondisclosure contracts, bans on sharing or studying the code. For Stallman this was not a commercial change but a betrayal of freedom. His response founded a movement.
GNU/Linux: the free system is completed
Stallman did not just philosophize: he programmed foundational pillars of the computing ecosystem. Only one piece was missing, and it came from Finland.
Emacs
The extensible text editor, one of his signature works.
GCC
The essential compiler for translating code into executable programs.
GDB
The debugger used to hunt down bugs in the code.
By the late 1980s, GNU had almost all the pieces… except the kernel, called Hurd. The puzzle was completed in 1991, when the Finnish student Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel and released it under Stallman's GPL. By combining GNU's tools with the Linux kernel, the operating system we correctly call today GNU/Linux was born.
The 4 freedoms of free software
Stallman defined a program as free only if it respects four essential freedoms. And, very much like a programmer, the count starts at 0: the most basic freedom on which everything else is built. Tap each card to see why it is vital and its famous cooking analogy.
Free software ≠ open source
Although they sound alike, Stallman distances himself deeply from the "Open Source" movement. The difference is not technical: it is one of motive.
| Movement | Core argument | Nature |
|---|---|---|
| Free Software | Freedom, community and human rights. Sharing is an ethical duty. | A moral question |
| Open Source | Sharing the code produces better, cheaper software. | A technical / commercial question |
Over his career Stallman received the Grace Murray Hopper Award and the MacArthur Foundation fellowship. In 2019 he resigned from his positions at MIT and the FSF after strong controversy over personal statements, though he later returned to the FSF board to keep defending digital freedom.
The Cypherpunks: the missing link
Between Stallman and Satoshi a piece is missing. In the 1990s, a group of programmers, mathematicians and cryptographers took the idea of free code one step further: turning it into a weapon to defend privacy against governments and banks.
Their thesis: free software was not just a matter of computing rights, but the only tool to defend individual freedom. Satoshi Nakamoto was (or was deeply influenced by) a cypherpunk, and to create Bitcoin reused pieces that the movement had already built:
| Prior piece | Author | What it gave Bitcoin |
|---|---|---|
| Hashcash | Adam Back | Proof of work: spending computation to validate. |
| b-money | Wei Dai | The concept of decentralized digital money. |
Why Bitcoin had to be free software
If Satoshi had closed or patented the code, Bitcoin would have died in three days. Each of Stallman's freedoms is, literally, a condition for Bitcoin to work.
FREEDOM 1
Absolute transparency. Being open source, anyone can audit it. You know with 100% certainty that there will only ever be 21 million coins: the cap is in plain sight, with no fine print from any central bank.
FREEDOM 3
No hierarchies. If the community does not share the software's direction, it can copy the code and create a new version: a fork (like Bitcoin Cash). No one is trapped.
FREEDOM 0
Censorship resistance. Anyone, anywhere, can download the software and run a node without asking permission from any government, company, or even Satoshi.
Freedom 1 (studying the code) is not a slogan: it is what lets you verify the 21-million cap. Coin issuance is halved every 210,000 blocks (the halvings) until it runs out. Anyone can read this function in the Bitcoin Core code:
Idealism vs. incentives: the great difference
Bitcoin would not exist without free-code culture, but there is a fascinating philosophical divergence between its two spiritual fathers. It is the difference between trusting how we ought to be and designing for how we actually are.
STALLMAN · the idealist
- He believes we should share code out of altruism, morality and mutual aid.
- A premise close to the "new man": freed from corporations, we will cooperate for the common good.
- The problem: at large scale, sustaining a system on good will alone is fragile. People get tired and free-riders appear, who take advantage without contributing.
SATOSHI · the pragmatist
- He did not try to change who we are: he accepted our flaws — greed, selfishness, distrust — and designed the system around them.
- He knew game theory and the Austrian school of economics.
- The move: instead of asking for goodness, he offers reward. "If you validate transactions and keep the network honest, I pay you with new BTC."
Pure capitalism on communal code
What's fascinating about Bitcoin is that it's a hybrid: it takes the infrastructure of one world and the engine of the other. It solved Stallman's great dilemma — making free software self-sustaining on a global scale.
The infrastructure is "communist"
- The code is free and has no owner.
- There is no private property over the protocol.
- The network belongs equally to all of humanity.
- No one can take possession of it.
The engine is "capitalist"
- Fierce competition between miners.
- Prices set by pure supply and demand, with no central bank to manipulate them.
- Each individual seeks their own economic gain.
- A free market inside a common infrastructure.
The Nash equilibrium in Bitcoin
To understand this sociological miracle you have to look at mechanism design. Satoshi combined cryptography and game theory to create a system where honesty is, mathematically, the most profitable strategy.
A Nash equilibrium occurs when no player gains by changing their strategy on their own, because they would lose. Satoshi achieved it by aligning four groups with potentially opposing interests:
What if one actor decided to break the equilibrium? Choose who betrays
Select an actor to see what would happen
What happens
The 4 actors of the network
Each group pursues its own selfish gain. The genius is that, in doing so, they check one another and keep the network honest with no need for a central arbiter.
| Actor | Its selfish interest | How the system aligns it |
|---|---|---|
| Miners | Maximize profit by accumulating BTC to pay for power and hardware. | If they tamper with the ledger, trust falls, the price collapses, and they burn millions to steal something that is now worthless. Honesty is their only profitable strategy. |
| Nodes | That no one sends them fake BTC or changes the rules of their money. | They run on a cheap PC and are the judges: if a miner creates a block that breaks the rules (e.g., minting >21M), they reject it. By defending their savings, they curb the miners' ambition. |
| Developers | Prestige, ideology, or seeing the value of their own BTC rise. | They write the updates but cannot impose them. If a change harms the community, no one downloads it. They must propose improvements that benefit everyone. |
| Investors | Protect their purchasing power and transfer value freely. | By buying and using BTC they give the coin value; that value finances the security the miners provide. More value means more miners, and a more secure network. |
The cooperation paradox: a positive-sum game
Here the maxim holds true: I benefit myself, but my benefit multiplies if it benefits the community.
| Selfish individual action | Unintended impact on the community |
|---|---|
| A miner invests millions in faster hardware to beat their competitors. | The network's total power rises → Bitcoin becomes more immune to external attacks. |
| A user HODLs for the long term because they want to get rich. | It reduces available supply → pushes the price up → benefits the wealth of all holders. |
| A company builds a fast payment gateway to collect fees. | It eases mass adoption → reinforces the value of the global network. |
Simulator: is it worth cheating?
Put yourself in the shoes of a greedy miner. Your only goal is to make money. Invest, mine, accumulate… or try to attack the network. Watch what happens to your fortune. This is the Nash equilibrium live: you'll discover that honesty is not goodness, it's the move that makes you the most money.
Your situation
Your decisions
The virtuous circle (selfishness → common good)
out of selfishness
rises
network
rises
everyone wins
Game log
No man is an island
Beyond Stallman, the cypherpunks, or Satoshi, this journey has a single underlying thesis about who we are as a species.
Humanity has not come far through the strength of the isolated individual, but through cooperation: language, science, commerce and free software are all collective works. No one builds a civilization alone. That is half the truth.
The other half is more uncomfortable. The problem appears when that cooperation is idealized — when it's taken for granted that people will collaborate out of pure goodness. That is where the dream turns fragile:
THE IDEALIST
Trusts only in goodness and builds beautiful but fragile systems: the first selfish free-rider unbalances them. It is the dilemma Stallman left open.
THE CYNIC
Trusts only in selfishness and builds efficient but cruel systems that end up devouring themselves. It is the law of the strongest, with no common net.
The ideal is neither extreme: it is balance. Neither denying human selfishness nor blindly trusting in virtue, but designing the rules so that cooperating is what suits us most. It is what Aristotle called the golden mean between two vices, and what Satoshi programmed into Bitcoin twenty-four centuries later: a structure where self-interest and the common good point, at last, in the same direction.
Sources and licenses
This document exists to be shared. Like Stallman's free software and Bitcoin's open source, it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, use it and improve it. Don't ask permission: use it.
CONTENT · CC BY-SA 4.0
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- Attribution: cite the source and link the license.
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CODE · MIT
The HTML, CSS and JavaScript of this page are free under the MIT license: use them, modify them and redistribute them while keeping the copyright notice.
- Reuse the design, the simulators or the diagrams in your own projects.
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| Third-party material | Author / source | Legal status |
|---|---|---|
| Quote "No man is an island" | John Donne, 1624 | Public domain |
| Quote from the Cypherpunk Manifesto | Eric Hughes, 1993 | Short quotation with attribution (fair quotation) |
Function GetBlockSubsidy |
Bitcoin Core | Adapted and simplified · MIT License |
| Definition of the 4 freedoms | Free Software Foundation | Concept paraphrased · GFDL / CC BY-ND (original) |
| Typefaces | Space Grotesk · Inter · JetBrains Mono | Open Font License / Apache 2.0 |