I read Brecht's Life of Galileo over Christmas, traveling by train between cities. The slim Suhrkamp edition fitting easily in my coat pocket. Something about reading Brecht on public transport feels appropriate for me. His didactic intent meeting commuters scrolling phones, nobody particularly interested in questions about truth and power.

Though I actually love reading and writing on trains. There's something calming about it, cozy even. Watching the world go by outside while sitting there contemplating. The movement creates a kind of productive distance.

The questions in the play persist anyway. What happens when you can verify something yourself? What changes when truth becomes accessible outside institutional authority?

I keep thinking about Bitcoin while reading Galileo. I'm writing a book at the moment – Bitcoin and important cultural theory texts of the 20th century. There are a lot of problems that appear in different forms. But for now let’s stick to Brecht. What does authority do when verification becomes possible?

Galileo builds a telescope. He points it at Jupiter and sees moons orbiting that planet instead of Earth. The observation contradicts Church doctrine but it's reproducible. Anyone with similar equipment can look.

The Church doesn't deny the observations but disputes whether observations matter. They have two thousand years of theological tradition and a carefully constructed cosmology. Galileo has a tube with lenses and some marks on paper.

Who decides which counts as knowledge?

Galileo said "the gentlemen really only needed to look through the instrument!" The cardinals responding that looking isn't the point. They have frameworks for understanding the cosmos. Direct observation without proper context is dangerous.

They're right that democratizing truth-claims has consequences. Just wrong that those consequences can be prevented.

Running a Bitcoin full node creates a similar experience. You download the software, let it sync with the network, watch it check and validate the entire chain.

Strange process. You're watching your computer verify monetary history without asking anyone's permission. The blockchain isn't something you have to trust authorities to maintain honestly.

Institutions don't let you do this. They announce monetary policy and you either trust the announcements or don't. You can't audit the money supply yourself. The verification is gatekept. Central banks claim gold reserves exist in vaults. Fort Knox or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. When did anyone last verify? Who's allowed to check? The gold might be there. But you're taking their word for it.

Bitcoin removes the permission requirement. Anyone can verify, because the blockchain is public.

This terrified the Church about Galileo's method. His claims about planetary motion were one thing. The precedent was another. Truth-determination accessible to anyone with the right tools.

Galileo faces the Inquisition. They show him the instruments of torture. He recants. Signs the document saying he was wrong, the Earth doesn't move.

Brecht doesn't make this simple. Galileo isn't heroic. He's terrified and he wants to live. So he chooses survival.

His student Andrea is devastated. He believed Galileo would stand firm, become a martyr for truth. But he watches him fold. Sees it as betrayal.

Galileo survives. Continues working in secret. Completes the Discorsi and smuggles it out of Italy. The knowledge persists even though he publicly denied the method that produced it.

Was this right? Brecht leaves the question hanging.

Bitcoin's creator faced a different version. Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper, launched the network, participated in early development. Then disappeared. Erased their identity.

There's a certain bravery in this that's easy to miss. Being a developer or activist under pressure from states and institutions takes courage. We are seeing that again right now in different areas.

But Satoshi recognized that the work matters more than anything and his symbolic gesture takes a different kind of courage. By disappearing, Satoshi removed the single point of failure. No one to subpoena. No one to prosecute or who could be pressured to change the protocol.

There's something Galilean in this. Effective preservation by refusing to provide a target for institutional power.

Galileo recanted but heliocentrism spread anyway. Satoshi disappeared but Bitcoin continues operating. Strategic retreat sometimes accomplishes more than personal fame or symbolic martyrdom.

The Church in Brecht's play isn't anti-rational. They employ sophisticated theology and consistent argumentation. What they resist is direct observation trumping authorized interpretation.

Their objection is structural. Of course the cosmos has an order. The question is who gets to determine what counts as understanding. Who has authority to verify truth-claims.

Galileo's telescope threatened this authority structure. The Church could have accommodated different claims about planetary motion. But suggesting that anyone with equipment could verify cosmological claims themselves – that was different.

You can check Bitcoin's supply if you run a node. Query the UTXO set, see the total bitcoin in existence. While writing this text, there are 19,977,578.125 Bitcoin created as of now.

The number is verifiable. Anyone running a node can confirm it. You can check the entire monetary history yourself.

Institutional power resists this. Verification without asking permission.

When the Church controlled telescopes, or rather determined who could use them and how to interpret observations, they maintained authority. When telescopes became widely available, that authority eroded.

When institutions control ledgers, respectively determine who can audit them, what counts as legitimate verification, they maintain authority. But when the data becomes publicly verifiable, that authority erodes.

The resistance isn't to Bitcoin's specific monetary policy. It's the precedent that verification should be possible. That monetary truth shouldn't require institutional trust.

The play ends without moral closure. Galileo has recanted and his work survives. Andrea smuggles the Discorsi across the border.

But was Galileo right to recant? Should he have chosen martyrdom? Did his survival justify the compromise? Brecht presents the dilemma without dictating answers.

Some questions don't have answers but consequences. The choice Galileo faced wasn't between right and wrong but between different ways of preserving knowledge under institutional pressure.

He could have died for truth and become a symbol. But his specific work could have been lost.

By surviving through recantation, he completed the research and got it published beyond the Church's reach.

Was this strategy? Betrayal or effectiveness? Brecht asks without answering.

Satoshi's disappearance poses similar questions. Should the creator have stayed, defended Bitcoin publicly, faced legal consequences? Or was anonymity the right choice?

I don't know. I'm suspicious of people who think they know.

Galileo's recantation didn't stop the scientific revolution. Rather arguably enabled it because the Discorsi got published and his findings spread. The Church maintained doctrinal authority for generations but lost the war over who could make cosmological claims.

Once observation became verifiable, institutional authority lost power. Slowly at first but irreversibly in the end.

Bitcoin creates a similar condition. Most people still trust traditional financial institutions. Still accept central bank announcements without verification. But the alternative exists because the verification is possible.

One important part of running a node isn't about distrusting every transaction. It's refusing to accept that verification should be gatekept. That centralized authority over monetary truth is a choice.

Brecht understood that shifts like these happen slowly. The play spans decades. Galileo ages, recants, survives and his work continues. Meanwhile authority adjusts. Eventually heliocentrism becomes accepted because verified knowledge created different conditions for what counts as legitimate cosmological claims.

Bitcoin might follow similar trajectory. Gradual erosion of institutional monopoly on monetary verification. Verified knowledge creates different authority structures than revealed truth.

I'm still carrying the Brecht. Still thinking about what verification means politically.

Galileo's telescope didn't just add astronomical facts. Instead it changed the nature of truth itself.

Before: truth was revealed by authority.

After: truth became verifiable by observation.

That's a whole different structure of power. When truth requires authority to reveal it, you're dependent on that authority remaining honest. When truth becomes verifiable, you can check for yourself. Verification is independence from power. Not complete independence, because you still need the tools, the knowledge to use them. But you're not at the mercy of institutional honesty.

Bitcoin makes monetary truth verifiable. Anyone can check the supply or audit the history and confirm the rules. You don’t need to beg to verify anything.

Whether this matters, whether it changes anything fundamental – I've been thinking about this for almost ten years now and I’m thinking about it every day. I quit my research job at the university months ago to figure out how to articulate why this seems so important to me. Writing this book now that analyzes Bitcoin through cultural theory hopefully is part of this. And these connections between Brecht’s play and verification and what it means that truth can be reproducible is an idea that seems satisfying to me, at least initially.

I'm still not sure I’ll find the answers. But the question feels urgent in a way that's hard to explain. Something about living in a world where institutional authority is collapsing but we don't yet know what replaces it. Where verification becomes possible but we haven't figured out what that possibility means.

I close my Brecht and put him back on my shelf. The questions haven't been resolved. But maybe asking them clearly is enough for the moment.