We live in a world made of rock and water. It is pelted by storms and starved by droughts. The fact that life emerged seems miraculous.

In a world of dollars, ruled by financial corporations, it seems miraculous that bitcoin could emerge.

The differences between life and bitcoin are large: Life is coded in DNA; bitcoin is coded in C++. Life is made of physical structures based on carbon; bitcoin is a digital file distributed around the world. However, the similarities between life and bitcoin are striking.

Metabolism

Metabolism is the absorption of energy and a key feature of life. Plants need sunlight and animals need food or they will die. Bitcoin needs electricity. If the bitcoin network was deprived of electricity it could not process transactions and all bitcoin would be useless. As bitcoin has grown, the network of computers feeding bitcoin has grown in size and quality, providing a source of energy that grows in reliability weekly. In bitcoin’s fifth year academics estimated bitcoin was using an amount of electricity similar in scale to that used by all of Ireland.)

Self-Regulation

All forms of life self-regulate. Humans regulate their body temperature by sweating or shivering. Humans regulate blood pressure by changing the heart rate — if pressure is too high, the brain tells the heart to slow down. Bitcoin regulates the rate at which it processes transactions — if the rate is too high the difficulty of mining is increased. In this way, transactions are always confirmed in approximately ten minutes.

Reproduction

Life is perishable; it decays and grows cancers. In order to persist life needs to reproduce. Reproduction also allows life to evolve its DNA, as so described by Darwin.

Bitcoin is a database of information, which is completely non-perishable. Bitcoin doesn’t need to reproduce in order to persist. Nor does it need to reproduce to evolve. (The volunteer engineers who run the open-source project occasionally modify the code if need be, after much discussion, many tests, and general agreement.) While bitcoin gains nothing by reproducing, it has spawned altcoins: modified clones of bitcoin. (No altcoin has been particularly successful. I only mention them to demonstrate that bitcoin can reproduce.)

Conclusion

Life and bitcoin have significant differences, but their similarities are striking. If bitcoin is a new form of life then all sorts of interesting questions will appear: How long will its adolescence be? How long will it live? How powerful will bitcoin become? I don’t know, but it will be interesting to see.