Connelly Bitcoin Partners

Tag: mental-health

  • What a Therapist’s Manual Taught Me About Bitcoin’s Real Problem

    or why nobody explained ‘mining’ to you plainly

    When I started doing clinical social work in 1979, we carried around a booklet called the DSM-II, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Second Edition. It was 134 pages sprial bound and yellow, it read like a philosophical field guide. It was written to help therapists think. Not to prove anything to anyone, just to help the person in the room do better work with the person sitting across from them.

    Then the insurance companies showed up.

    By the time the DSM-III landed, it was 494 pages with 265 diagnoses. The DSM wasn’t growing because the human condition got more complicated. It was growing because relationships needed to be quantified. What had been a corrective relationship between the client and therapist became a billing event between the provider and the payer. Today the DSM is over a thousand pages with more than 300 diagnoses. Critics say we’ve turned everyday sadness and childhood temper tantrums into billable, thousand-page, certified medical conditions.

    The point is not that the DSM is bad. The point is that more words are not always helpful for everyone. Sometimes language grows to serve the people inside a system, not the people trying to understand it from outside.

    Bitcoin has exactly this problem.

    The technology is not that complicated. But the vocabulary around it was built by engineers for engineers, and over the years it has calcified into a barrier that keeps ordinary people from understanding something that was literally designed for them.

    Take the word “mining.”

    You hear it and you think of pickaxes and gold veins and someone pulling something valuable out of the ground. Then someone tells you Bitcoin mining is “computers solving complex mathematical algorithms” and you’re more confused than you were before you asked. That’s not your fault. The word was never meant to describe what’s actually happening. It was a metaphor that stuck because it rhymed nicely with “coin,” which is also misleading, but that’s another chapter. 

    Here is what mining actually is.

    Bitcoin runs on a ledger. A global, publicly visible record of who paid what to whom. About every ten minutes, that ledger needs a new page. The computers we call “miners” are competing with each other to earn the right to add that page. They do this by drilling into an algorithmic problem the network sets for them. Not drilling into the earth, drilling into math. The first one to solve it adds the new page, the network confirms everything checks out, and that miner gets paid in Bitcoin. 

    Then the race starts over.

    That’s it. Mining is bookkeeping that nobody can tamper with, performed by computers that get rewarded for doing it honestly. No hash rates. No nonces. No block headers. Just a race, a ledger, and a reward.

    If that just made sense to you, good. It was supposed to. And if you’re wondering why nobody explained it to you this way before, you’re asking the right question.

    I spent thirty years as a Systems Architect and Strategic Consultant for Fortune 500 companies, translating complex systems into plain language for people who had better things to do than learn jargon. Before that, I did clinical social work, where I learned that how you say something matters at least as much as what you’re saying. When I came to Bitcoin, I found brilliant resources written by brilliant people who had forgotten what it was like not to understand this stuff yet.

    If you’ve been curious about Bitcoin but felt like the conversation wasn’t built for you, you were right. It wasn’t. This series is.

    Or 

    How to Keep Your Bitcoin Alive and Well does for every piece of Bitcoin jargon what this article just did for mining. Plain language, a little humor, and enough respect for the reader to assume they can understand anything if someone just explains it honestly.

    Tune in next week when we talk about “Proof-of-Work” and why it makes Bitcoin different from everything else. 

    If you’re ready to jump into the bloody details, have the time, and aren’t frightened off by the language, I recommend Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, which is detailed and academic. The text may be available as a free download somewhere. Google it. 

  • Nobody Is Coming 

    What Can I Do About It?

    Brian Connelly

    I’ve been wrong about almost everything important at least once. If that bothers you, we’re probably not going to get along. If it interests you, pull up a chair.

    I started my working life as a clinical social worker in Newark in the late 1970s. I was in my twenties, sitting across from people whose lives had been taken apart by systems that were supposed to help them. Poverty. Addiction. Community mental health that was more about getting the Medicaid billing correct than getting anyone well. Less about care, more about the dollars. Institutions that had long stopped caring whether anyone walked out the door in better shape than they walked in.

    There was a man who used to take over the first-floor men’s room in our building. Violent drunk. The police knew him by name and refused to intervene. My supervising psychiatrist and I looked at each other one afternoon and did the math. Nobody was coming. No policy was going to solve this. No report was going to move this man from the bathroom floor to a treatment bed.

    So we improvised. We slipped him a Thorazine in a small bottle of wine, in the format he preferred. We waited until he passed out. We shipped him as a medical emergency to the city hospital. He woke up in a bed with restraints. He detoxed. He went into a twenty-day treatment program.

    I am not telling you this story because it’s a model for clinical practice. I am telling you because it’s the moment I learned something about myself that has never changed. When the system fails, and nobody is coming, I can’t just write about the problem. I have to be in the room.

    I carried that into technology. I spent thirty years inside Fortune 500 companies, IBM, the New York Stock Exchange, building and rebuilding enterprise systems. I migrated organizations from ccMail to Lotus Notes, from Notes to Google Workspace. I didn’t write white papers about how to do it. I did it. I sat in the room with the client and owned the outcome the way a therapist owns the hour.

    At one point, I took a job as an employee of a Google Workspace partner. They were charging Fortune 500 rates to produce beautifully written documents about how their clients should fix their problems. Long decks. Gorgeous formatting. Delivered on time and never implemented. 

    I lasted three months.

    There are two kinds of consultants. Ones that fix things and ones that write about fixing things. I have never been able to sit still while a solvable problem is turned into a deliverable because the organization was too afraid of litigation to actually address the problem.

    But here’s what I learned along the way, and it took me decades to learn it. Not every system can be fixed from the inside.

    At a previous employer, I was trying to modernize their operations. My boss pulled me aside and told me to dial back the energy. He wasn’t being hostile. He was being honest. He said he was just trying not to get fired before his retirement date. Don’t rock the boat.

    I saw rocking as part of the change process. He saw rocking as a threat to his pension. We were both right, which is the worst kind of disagreement because nobody gets to be the hero.

    That was the moment I understood that the biggest system I couldn’t fix was the one signing my paycheck. Not because the people were bad. Because the incentives were pointed at survival, not change. And no amount of energy or insight or clinical instinct can overcome a system whose primary function is its own preservation.

    So I started asking myself a question that I now realize I’ve been asking my whole life. What can I do about it?

    In Newark, the answer was: be in the room. Improvise. Meet the problem where it actually lives, not where the org chart says it should live.

    In enterprise consulting, the answer was: fix it yourself, because the document about fixing it is just another form of avoidance.

    But at some point, the question scaled beyond what one person in one room can solve. The government doesn’t work for the people it’s supposed to serve. The investor class accumulates wealth at the expense of the working class. The banks are running what amounts to a Ponzi scheme with the protection of the government that doesn’t work. The money itself is broken.

    What can I do about it?

    I can’t slip the monetary system a Thorazine. It’s too big. The cops aren’t coming. And unlike that man on the bathroom floor, the system isn’t going to wake up in a treatment bed and thank anyone for the intervention.

    I discovered Bitcoin in 2014. I wasn’t looking for an investment. I was researching fault tolerance and distributed architecture for a consulting engagement, and I stumbled into something that answered the question I’d been carrying for forty years.

    You can’t fix a system whose primary function is its own preservation. But you can build something outside of it. You can leave.

    That’s not quitting. That’s not cynicism. There’s a moment when you realize that the thing you’ve been trying to manage, to moderate, to reform from within, is not going to change because your continued participation is what keeps it running. The healthiest thing you can do, for yourself and eventually for everyone around you, is to stop participating and start building something that works.

    I can’t make anyone see this. You cannot get someone sober. You cannot make someone smell the smoke. All you can do is tell your story and leave the door open.

    So that’s what I’m doing. I’m 73 years old. I’ve been a social worker, a systems architect, a consultant, a writer, and for the last several years, a Bitcoin educator. I’ve been wrong about almost everything important at least once. The thing I keep getting right is showing up in the room when nobody else will.

    The room has changed. The problem hasn’t. The system is still broken. Nobody is coming to fix it.

    What can you do about it?