Bitcoin and Epistemology: Rationalism versus Empiricism



The block size limit debate has given birth to an epistemological question: How do we know Bitcoin’s nature? Can its nature be deduced a priori from our innate knowledge, the rules defined in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, and the protocol encoded into his reference software? Or can it only be known a posteriori through observation and experience? The purpose of this thread is to examine the question of Bitcoin’s nature from the perspectives of rationalism and empiricism, in the context of the block size limit debate.



Rationalism holds that some propositions are known to be true by intuition alone and that others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions. The Rationalist may hold the view that Bitcoin has a 21-million coin limit or a 1 MB block size limit, based on deductive reasoning from the rules enforced by the Bitcoin Core source code. Such a Rationalists might believe that the code represents some immutable truth and then his understanding of Bitcoin follows from axiomatic deductions from that premise.



The Empiricist rejects the Rationalist’s intuition and deduction, believing instead that knowledge is necessarily a posteriori, dependent upon observation and sense experience. The Empiricist questions the notion that Bitcoin has a 21-million coin limit, instead observing that its money supply grew by 50 BTC per block for the first 210,000 and then 25 BTC per block ever since. The Empiricist rejects the idea that Bitcoin has any sort of block size limit, having observed previous empirical limits at 250 kB, 350 kB, 750 kB collapse in the face of increased demand.



To the Rationalist, the Empiricist promoting a block size increase might appear as an enemy intent on ripping apart the truth that he took as self-evident. To the Empiricist, the Rationalist appears irrational because the Empiricist has never accepted (nor rejected) the premises that the Rationalist holds as foundational (there was insufficient empirical data). Indeed, the block size limit debate is a debate over the very nature of Bitcoin. What is Bitcoin’s nature? Was it carved into stone or is it a creature of the market?