The Shining City

In 2022, Michael Saylor described Bitcoin as “a shining city in cyberspace.”

The phrase endured because it suggested something larger than a network, a protocol, or a monetary system. It suggested a place — somewhere digital that could be entered, understood, and inhabited in the imagination.

Years later, that image remained. It became part of the intellectual lineage that eventually led to another question: What if Bitcoin had been invented not as money, but as a world?

BitPangea did not arise from that sentence alone. But somewhere in its ancestry, a city was already shining.