Everything about Bitcoin is counterintuitive and, therefore, requires the patience and humility to sit with an idea before jumping to conclusions.
It is counterintuitive because Bitcoin is synergetic. Synergetic behavior describes system behavior that is utterly unpredictable from studying individual components.
The principle of leverage, for example, is synergetic - it requires a fulcrum, beam, and force. Studying these individually does not tell you anything about the system's behavior.
If you told me that a sailboat can sail into the wind, I would quickly say, “That’s impossible!” But sailboats do behave like this. At first glance, it is entirely counterintuitive.
To understand why sailboats can sail into the wind requires looking at the whole system—boat, sail, ocean, wind, and keel—together, not just the individual parts.
For the same reason, many qualified experts believed "heavier than air" machines could never fly.
Many experts dismiss the Bitcoin network because they do not understand the synergetic behavior of the network outside of their domain of expertise.
A "wind" expert will be utterly convinced that it is impossible to sail into the wind.
Synergetic behavior is, by definition, always a surprise!
