From Principles to Analysis
Last week I published the final post in my series on George Mobus’ principles of systems science.
Writing the series was a great experience that served to give me some structure as I embarked on the journey of writing a weekly newsletter. The process gave me the freedom to explore abstract theoretical concepts about “systems” by applying the principles to studying real-world systems that I care about.
As I enter the next phase of System Explorers, I’ll be focusing less on introducing theory via the principles, and more on demonstrating how concrete methods of systems analysis can help us gain a deep understanding of any system of interest.
Over the past couple of months I’ve been applying the method of “deep” systems analysis from George’s second book, Systems Science: Theory, Analysis, Modeling, and Design, to Bitcoin, the original blockchain. Even though I’m still in the early stages of the process, I’m finding it to be an incredibly powerful structured framework for reasoning about important questions that I’ve been grappling with for years.
For example, why exactly did Bitcoin evolve from being perceived and used as a peer-to-peer digital cash system to being widely adopted as a speculative asset, “digital gold”?
Here’s a quick peek at what I’m working on, more to come soon.
