Spiral Dynamics, Bitcoin, and the Cypherpunk Lens

I first came across Spiral Dynamics in 2018, and I never really forgot it.

Back then I was reading everything I could about why smart people disagree about the same facts. Why one person sees a central bank as essential and another sees it as theft. Why one person reads the Cypherpunk Manifesto and nods, while another reads the same words and worries about national security.

The standard explanations never satisfied me. “They’re uninformed.” “They’re brainwashed.” “They’re evil.” These are not explanations. They are ways of ending a conversation you don’t want to have.

Spiral Dynamics gave me a different frame. Not a weapon, but a lens. I want to be clear upfront: this is not a claim about empirical truth. I am not a psychologist. I have no data to present. This is simply the framework that has most helped me make sense of the world, shared in the spirit of curiosity.

What Spiral Dynamics Is

The model, originally developed by Clare Graves and later adapted by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, proposes that human psychology develops through stages — not in a linear, ladder-like way, but as a spiral. Each stage represents a different way of seeing the world, a different answer to the question “what matters most?”

The stages are often represented by colors:

Beige — Survival. Basic needs. Instinct.
Purple — Tribal. Animistic. The group is safety.
Red — Egocentric. Power. The world is a contest.
Blue — Ordered. Absolutist. There is one right way.
Orange — Achievement. Rational. Science and success.
Green — Communitarian. Egalitarian. Care and inclusion.
Yellow — Systemic. Integrative. Seeing the whole.
Turquoise — Holistic. Global. Unity of all systems.

The key insight is not that one stage is “better” than another in any absolute sense. It’s that each stage solves problems the previous stage could not see. And each stage has its own blind spots.

Most people operate from a mix, with a “center of gravity” in one or two stages. And crucially, you cannot skip stages. You integrate each one as you go.

This last point is where the model humbles me the most. If I find myself frustrated with someone operating from Blue or Red, I have to ask: did I truly integrate those stages myself, or am I looking down from a stage I have not fully earned the right to judge from?

The Bitcoin Lens

Bitcoin is one object seen from many stages.

This is what makes it so fascinating to watch. The same protocol — a set of rules enforced by code — is experienced completely differently depending on where you stand on the spiral.

From Orange, Bitcoin is the best-performing asset of the last decade. Sharpe ratios, portfolio allocation, dollar-cost averaging, ETF flows. The data is clear. Get in, stack sats, watch number go up. This is where most of the capital lives. It is also the shallowest understanding of what Bitcoin actually is. The irony is not lost on me: the Orange perspective is what drives the price, and the price is what brings people in — but the price alone will not tell you why Bitcoin exists.

From Green, Bitcoin is about financial inclusion. Unbanking the banked. Sending remittances without Western Union. Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, grassroots adoption, helping the Global South opt out of inflation. These stories are real and they matter. But Green can struggle with the hardness of Bitcoin’s incentives — the fact that the network does not care about fairness, only about proof.

From Blue, Bitcoin becomes a doctrine. The one true money. Maximalism as faith. “This is the way.” This lens is useful as a defense against the chaos of scams and altcoins, but it can tip into something rigid. Blue wants certainty, and Bitcoin offers a kind — but treating it as a religion misses the point that the protocol is not a creed, it is a mechanism.

From Yellow, Bitcoin is what it actually is: a decentralized settlement network secured by proof of work, maintained by thousands of independent nodes, with no leader, no office, no CEO. A system designed not to require trust because its incentives are aligned so precisely that trust becomes unnecessary. This is the same philosophy behind choosing constraints over convenience — the hard cap, the proof of work, the network that no one controls.

Satoshi was clearly operating from Yellow. The synthesis of distributed systems, cryptography, game theory, Austrian economics, and incentive engineering — all at once — is exactly the kind of systemic, multi-perspectival thinking Yellow describes. The Bitcoin whitepaper is barely nine pages. It does not argue. It simply presents.

The tension in Bitcoin today is that it was built from Yellow but is mostly consumed from Orange. The Orange layer calls it “digital gold” without fully grasping that gold itself was a Yellow invention. The surveillance state is another layer — Blue demanding order, Red demanding control — that Yellow sees as a systems problem to be out-maneuvered, not fought head-on. Both are trust-minimized technologies. Both were built by people who understood systems, not by people who optimized portfolios.

The 21 million cap makes no sense from Orange. Why limit the supply of your own asset? From Yellow, it makes perfect sense: the cap is the incentive. It creates the conditions for adoption. The hardest money attracts the most value.

Where Cypherpunks Stand

The cypherpunks were operating from Yellow before the framework existed.

Read the Cypherpunk Manifesto (1993) by Eric Hughes:

“We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy.”

That is systemic thinking. Not a demand for reform from within. Not a retreat to the hills. A recognition that the incentive structures of surveillance states are baked into the architecture of power, and the only durable response is to build alternatives that make the old system irrelevant.

Tim May, Eric Hughes, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo — they were not activists in the conventional sense. They did not march. They did not petition. They wrote code. They designed protocols. They thought in terms of game theory and cryptographic guarantees, not appeals to conscience. The synthesis of this cypherpunk ethos with faith is where the deepest freedom lies — the recognition that technology and submission to truth converge on the same path.

Nick Szabo’s 1995 email to Wei Dai: “Be your own bank.” Four words. A whole worldview.

This is what Yellow does. It sees the system clearly, understands why the system behaves the way it does, and builds a parallel system that makes the old one optional. It does not fight Red with Red. It does not argue Blue against Blue. It renders the entire debate irrelevant by changing the substrate.

The Internet itself emerged from this kind of thinking. The protocols that power the web — TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP — were designed with a specific philosophy: permissionless innovation at the edges. No central authority needed to approve a new application. This is Yellow architecture.

Bitcoin is the same idea, applied to money. A permissionless network for value transfer that no one runs and no one can stop.

Why This Framework Matters

I find Spiral Dynamics useful not because it is correct in any scientific sense, but because it quiets something in me.

When I encounter someone whose worldview I do not understand — a Bitcoin skeptic, a maximalist, a central banker, a cypherpunk — I can ask: “Where might they be on the spiral?” instead of “Why are they wrong?”

The first question is curious. The second is combative.

This is not about moral relativism. Some stages produce more suffering than others. Red, left unchecked, becomes tyranny. Blue, rigidified, becomes authoritarianism. Green, unmoored, becomes a weapon against the very systems that enable its existence. These are real problems.

But the spiral helps me see that the person operating from Red is not defective. They are operating from a genuine stage of human development that solved a real problem (survival under threat) and has not yet been asked to solve a different one.

The same applies to me. My own center of gravity is not fixed. I have days where I see the world from Orange — optimizing, achieving, measuring. I have moments where Green rises — empathy, connection, belonging. I have glimpses of Yellow — the feeling of seeing a system whole.

I have not earned the right to claim Yellow as my own. I visit. I do not live there.

What I Keep Coming Back To

The thing about Spiral Dynamics that I cannot shake is that Bitcoin itself is a kind of spiral. It did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from decades of prior work: public key cryptography, Hashcash (a proof-of-work system that inspired Bitcoin), b-money (Wei Dai), Bit Gold (Nick Szabo). Each layer built on the ones before. Each solved a problem the previous layer could not see.

The protocol is a spiral of its own. And the people it attracts reflect every stage of the human one. The sovereign individual who runs their own node and the sovereign individual who runs their own OS are the same person at different layers of the stack.

Probably that is why I keep thinking about this framework, seven years after first encountering it. It is not the only lens. It is not the correct lens. But it is the one that has helped me most to see — and to stay humble about what I think I know.

If you are curious, the original work by Clare Graves is worth seeking out. Don Beck and Christopher Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change is the most accessible entry point. And if you want to see Yellow architecture in its purest form, the Bitcoin whitepaper is nine pages long and free to read.

The rest is just my opinion. I share it because sharing frameworks is how we refine them. If you see something I do not, I would like to hear it.

Hajisatoshi