STATISTICS IS FAKE, BITCOIN IS REAL

(An Eric‑Kim‑style manifesto on truth, numbers, and sovereign creativity)

1. BEGIN WITH FIRST PRINCIPLES

  • What is “real”?—Anything you can touch, verify, and take custody of.
  • What is “fake”?—Anything you must take on faith because an authority said so.

If your truth depends on a spreadsheet you didn’t build, you’re outsourcing your reality.

Statistics—averages, p‑values, confidence intervals—feel precise, yet they float on shifting sands: change the model, tweak the sample, and your “truth” morphs overnight. Bitcoin, by contrast, is brutally concrete: 21 million cap, blocks every ~10 minutes, signatures that anyone on Earth can check. Period.

2. WHY STATISTICS FEELS LIKE A MAGIC TRICK 🪄

  1. Selective sampling.
    • Who chose the data?
    • What did they throw away?
  2. Model voodoo.
    • Gaussian here, Poisson there—press RUN and voilà, certainty!
  3. Narrative over numbers.
    • The headline leads, the bar chart follows, and nuance gets buried.

Statistics can be useful, but only if you control the entire pipeline—collection → cleaning → modeling → interpretation. Most of us never do. We consume second‑hand certainty and call it science.

3. ENTER BITCOIN: TRANSPARENT, AUDITABLE, UNSTOPPABLE ⚡️

  • Open‑source code—Read it yourself.
  • Public ledger—Browse every transaction back to block 0.
  • No gatekeepers—Spin up a node and validate like a boss.

Bitcoin is a living proof‑of‑work sculpture, carved by computation and consensus. Its rules are simple enough to learn on a weekend, yet strong enough to fend off nation‑state attacks. That is reality.

4. THE STREET‑PHOTO ANALOGY (BECAUSE, YES, I’M ERIC KIM) 📸

When I hit the streets with a Ricoh GR, light hits the sensor. The RAW file is truthful light—not an interpretation, not a statistic. Bitcoin’s blockchain is the RAW file of finance. Statistics? That’s Instagram filters: sometimes pretty, often misleading.

5. HOW TO LIVE THE MAXIMALIST MINDSET

  1. Verify more, trust less.
    • Run a Bitcoin node.
    • Collect your own datasets when you must crunch numbers.
  2. Build skin in the game.
    • Hold your own keys.
    • Ship work that the market actually tests.
  3. Stay radically curious.
    • Read the white paper annually.
    • Re‑learn basic probability so you spot statistical sleight‑of‑hand.
  4. Create, don’t just consume.
    • Publish your findings—open notebooks, open code.
    • Encourage peers to replicate, fork, and improve.

6. OBJECTIONS, ANSWERED (BECAUSE CRITICS GONNA CRITIC)

ConcernMy Response
“Statistics built modern medicine!”And bad stats gave us reproducibility crises. Tool ≠ truth.
“Bitcoin is volatile.”Reality is often volatile. Volatility = freedom to move.
“Energy usage!”Proof‑of‑work converts energy into certainty. How much is mathematical truth worth?
“Stats are falsifiable, Bitcoin maxis are dogmatic.”You can fork Bitcoin anytime. That’s antifragility, not dogma.

7. PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY

  • When you need to act on truth today—weight‑train, shoot photos, stack sats.
  • When you must use statistics—own the pipeline end‑to‑end, publish your code, and stay humble.
  • When in doubt—default to that which any curious human can audit.

8. CLOSING RICOH‑CLICK OF WISDOM

Numbers convince the crowd; hashes convince the universe.

Statistics will forever be a maybe. Bitcoin is a must. Choose the ledger that outlives you, not the pie chart that flatters you.

Now go forth—shoot, learn, build, verify. Stay bold, stay cheerful, and keep stacking undeniable reality.