Victoria Collette Jones
From Dentistry to Bitcoin — and the questions that came afterwards
My name is Victoria Collette Jones, and looking back over my life, I realise that I have spent much of it asking questions about systems and why they sometimes produce outcomes very different from those they were designed to achieve.
I didn’t set out to do this. I originally trained as a dentist and spent around twenty years working within the profession. But dentistry turned out to teach me far more than how to treat teeth. It introduced me to the complicated relationship between rules, professional standards, incentives, institutions and human behaviour.
As a young dental student, I remember occasionally being horrified by some of the work we encountered in patients’ mouths. We were being taught how dentistry was supposed to be performed, and in the arrogance of youth it was difficult to understand how properly qualified dentists could sometimes produce results that seemed so far removed from those standards.
It wasn’t until I became a practising dentist that I began to understand the environment in which those outcomes were produced.
Working within the National Health Service (NHS) exposed me to the reality of providing treatment under limited time and financial constraints, while also managing regulation, patient expectations, and the everyday challenge of keeping a practice viable. Suddenly I became less interested in simply asking why an individual had produced a bad outcome and more interested in the system surrounding them.
That curiosity stayed with me and eventually led me to establish my own private dental practice, where I hoped to create an environment in which I could work differently.
Then my interests took an unexpected turn.
In December 2007, just as I was beginning to build my new practice, the financial world started to unravel.
From dentistry to money
Trying to establish a capital-intensive business during the Great Financial Crisis was an extraordinary education. Until then, like most people, I had used money throughout my life without thinking much about what it was or how the financial system worked.
Suddenly those questions mattered.
Why were banks failing? Where did money come from? Why was so much of the economy dependent upon debt? Why could governments and central banks create enormous quantities of new currency during a crisis, and what were the long-term consequences of doing so?
My curiosity took me into economics and, increasingly, into monetary history. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became by the relationship between money, political power and the rules societies construct around both.
Eventually, in 2016, that journey led me to Bitcoin.
At first, Bitcoin interested me as a new form of money and a potentially useful payment technology. As a business owner, I wanted to confirm whether I could accept it from customers.
But the further I went, the more interesting the ideas underneath Bitcoin became.
Here was a monetary system that didn’t simply ask governments, bankers or other central authorities to behave responsibly. Instead, Bitcoin attempted to establish rules that constrained what individual participants could do, using mathematics, incentives, verification, and decentralisation to create a system in which no single group could dictate the rules to everybody else.
For somebody who had already spent years thinking about how systems influence human behaviour, I found this irresistible.
Bitcoin gradually became a major part of my life. I invested in it, learned how to accept it in business, began speaking about it at conferences and eventually taught myself enough of the technology to operate Bitcoin and Lightning nodes and incorporate Bitcoin payments into my own website.
I wrote newsletters and produced talks and videos. I collaborated with others in the Bitcoin community and began developing educational material to help people understand and use the technology.
Eventually, I wrote a book about the journey.
Truth Decay – How Bitcoin Fixes This
Truth Decay – How Bitcoin Fixes This, grew out of my attempt to understand how the problems I had encountered in business, economics, and monetary history fit together.
By the time I wrote it, I was convinced that many of the problems I observed could ultimately be traced back to the rules surrounding money, and that Bitcoin offered an extraordinary alternative.
The book captures that period of my thinking.
I still stand behind much of the journey it describes. Bitcoin remains one of the most fascinating systems I have ever encountered, and learning about it transformed how I understand money, incentives, power, and decentralisation.
But an interesting thing has happened since I wrote the book.
I have continued thinking.
And some of the conclusions that once felt settled no longer feel quite so certain.
Recent controversies within Bitcoin have made me reconsider some of my assumptions about decentralisation and governance. They have forced me to ask whether decentralisation can simply be engineered into a system and then relied on, or whether it must be continually defended and maintained by the people participating in it.
I don’t yet know the answer.
But these questions have led me back to an idea that actually predates my interest in Bitcoin.
The book before the book
Before Truth Decay, I had imagined writing another book.
I was going to call it Bad Rules.
Throughout my life, I encountered systems that seemed to produce outcomes very different from what they were designed to achieve. Dentistry provided plenty of examples, but as my interests expanded, I began noticing similar patterns in economics, banking, government, regulation, and other institutions.
I wanted to understand why.
The problem was that Bad Rules seemed impossibly large. As a first-time author, I couldn’t see how I could fit the subject into a book.
Then I discovered Bitcoin.
Bitcoin appeared to offer me something more constructive. Rather than writing about everything wrong with existing systems, perhaps I had found a system built around better rules.
So I set Bad Rules aside and let Truth Decay take its place.
Years later, I find myself wondering whether I ever really abandoned the original question.
Perhaps Bitcoin was simply one particularly fascinating chapter in the investigation.
Because the more I look back across the apparently disparate subjects I have spent my life exploring, the more I see the same questions appearing underneath them.
Why do systems produce the outcomes they do?
What happens when rules alter people’s incentives?
Why do institutions sometimes drift away from the purpose for which they were created?
What happens when experts disagree?
How do we distinguish between a genuine challenge to established thinking and an attractive idea that happens to be wrong?
And perhaps most importantly, how do any of us recognise when the problem lies not with the system we’re criticising, but with our own understanding of it?
That last question has become increasingly important to me.
I have always been sceptical of authority. Scepticism has taken me down some fascinating paths and led me to question things I might otherwise have accepted without examination.
But I have also come to realise that scepticism isn’t enough.
Institutions can be wrong.
Experts can be wrong.
Dissenters can be wrong.
And I can be wrong.
That realisation has changed what I want Satoshi’s Page to become.
Where the journey goes next
Satoshi’s Page began primarily as a place for me to explore Bitcoin and the history of money. That history remains an important part of this website, and I have no intention of pretending that I didn’t once hold some views more confidently than I do today.
Quite the opposite.
I think there is value in leaving an intellectual trail.
If you explore the archive, you will find articles written at different stages of my journey. Some conclusions I still strongly agree with. Others I may now express differently, and some I intend to return to and investigate again.
Rather than quietly rewriting my past to make it agree with my present, I would rather ask what changed and why.
That is the direction in which Satoshi’s Page is now evolving.
Bitcoin will remain part of the conversation, but it will no longer be the boundary. I want to explore history, money, government, institutions, science, regulation and the countless systems human beings have constructed in our attempts to organise society.
I am particularly interested in the rules underneath those systems.
Why were they introduced? What problem were they intended to solve? What happened when people began adapting their behaviour around them? Did the rules achieve what their creators intended, or did something unexpected emerge instead?
Sometimes I expect to discover genuinely bad rules.
Sometimes I suspect I will discover perfectly sensible rules that produced unintended consequences.
And occasionally I may discover that something I have criticised for years exists for a much better reason than I appreciated.
I hope so.
Because I’m becoming less interested in proving what I already believe and much more interested in discovering what I have missed.
For years, I thought the destination of this journey was Bitcoin.
I’m beginning to think Bitcoin was actually one of the things that helped me discover the question I had been trying to ask all along:
Why do systems produce the outcomes they do – and how can we become better at understanding them?
I don’t know where that question will take me.
But if you’re interested too, you’re very welcome to come along.
Victoria
