---
title: "Bitcoin is a Living Organism 🍄 Brandon Quittem"
description: "I believe Bitcoin’s best characteristics are simply reflections of successful evolutionary strategies found in nature. Enjoy this exploration of Bitcoin as a Living Organism."
url: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/canon/bitcoin-is-a-living-organism/
---

# Bitcoin is a Living Organism 🍄 Brandon Quittem

I believe Bitcoin’s best characteristics are simply reflections of successful evolutionary strategies found in nature. Enjoy this exploration of Bitcoin as a Living Organism.

---

I believe Bitcoin’s best characteristics are simply reflections of successful evolutionary strategies found in nature.

Enjoy this exploration of Bitcoin as a Living Organism.

**Brandon Quittem** ([@bquittem](https://twitter.com/bquittem))

“Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of life. It lives and breathes on the internet. It lives because it can pay people to keep it alive. It lives because it performs a useful service that people will pay it to perform. It lives because anyone, anywhere, can run a copy of its code. It lives because all the running copies are constantly talking to each other. It lives because if any one copy is corrupted it is discarded, quickly and without any fuss or muss. It lives because it is radically transparent: anyone can see its code and see exactly what it does.” - Ralph Merkle

Attempting to answer the question “what is Bitcoin,” I found exploring parallels to the natural world to be particularly illuminating.

From this vantage point, Bitcoin appears to be a living system constantly evolving based on environmental stimuli.

- [Bitcoin is The Mycelium of Money](https://www.brandonquittem.com/bitcoin-is-the-mycelium-of-money/) (Brandon Quittem): Exploring Bitcoin through the lens of Fungi.
- [Proof of Life](https://dergigi.com/2019/08/07/proof-of-life/) (Gigi): Gigi is one of my favorite writers and this is a must-read essay arguing why Bitcoin is a living organism. "Life is like fire, not water; it is a process, not a pure substance"
- [How Bitcoin is Like a Giant Cybernetic Meta-Brain](https://tomerstrolight.medium.com/how-bitcoin-is-like-a-giant-cybernetic-meta-brain-204fef9c0b08) (Tomer Strolight): Decentralization, social media graphs and full nodes in the Bitcoin ecosystem resemble the structures of and communications between neurons within a brain.
- [Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species](https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/bitcoin-is-a-pioneer-species-38f42ecdbb88) (Brandon Quittem): Exploring Bitcoin Mining and the Energy Industry through the lens of Ecology. The main takeaway here is that Bitcoin miners and energy producers are symbiotic and their partnership produces positive externalities.
- [Planting Bitcoin](https://danhedl.medium.com/planting-bitcoin-56bd1459cb23) (Dan Held): Dan Held explains Bitcoin's origin story through an analogy of planting a tree. This essay gave me the courage to write the first "Mycelium of money" essay back in 2018.
- [Bitcoin & Biology](https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/ep-20-bitcoin-biology-brandon-quittem-gigi-svetski/id1482223406?i=1000502256341) (Aleks Svetski, Gigi, Brandon Quittem): Gigi, Aleks Svetski, and Brandon Quittem (myself) explore Bitcoin as a living organism. Get ready for a mind-bending podcast.
- [Bitcoin & Fungal Economies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifwUXSWVPQs&list=PLmduPIy_UCWv0fpuy1kZrhFc_tSj7bmP6&index=12) (Brandon Quittem, Toby Kiers, Michael Garfield): Discussing Bitcoin and Fungal Economies with an Evolutionary Biology (Toby Kiers). Toby studies Fungal economies for a living. Brandon is an amateur mycologist who loves Bitcoin.
- [Bitcoin is a Decentralized Organism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLDFdOS4sWo&list=PLmduPIy_UCWv0fpuy1kZrhFc_tSj7bmP6&index=18) (Brandon Quittem): June 26th, 2019 presentation at the Bitcoin 2019 Conference in San Francisco. The title of my talk was "Bitcoin is a Decentralized Organism."
- [Bitcoin: Two Parts Math, One Part Biology](https://hugonguyen.medium.com/bitcoin-two-parts-math-one-part-biology-b45ef48a0422) (Hugo Nguyen): Hugo explains how Bitcoin is a symbiosis between mathematics and Biology.
- [Bitcoin's Habitats](https://dergigi.com/2020/03/01/bitcoin-s-habitats/) (Gigi): Gigi explores how bitcoin fits at the center of cyberspace, meatspace, and finspace.