From the "Physics of Bitcoin" introduction.

Bitcoin today is simultaneously several things to different people.
To investors, it is an asset with a sixteen-year track record of extraordinary but volatile returns. To technologists, it is the first successful implementation of a decentralized consensus mechanism — a solution to a problem in distributed computing that had been open for decades. To libertarians and civil liberties advocates, it is a tool for financial sovereignty outside the reach of state control.
To economists, it is an experiment in what happens when you remove the institutional scaffolding from a monetary system and see what value remains. To central bankers and financial regulators, it is a novel challenge to existing frameworks for monetary policy and financial oversight.
None of these perspectives is wrong. Bitcoin is all of these things simultaneously.
The question this book addresses is a different one: what kind of thing is it, at the level of its fundamental dynamics? And the answer the evidence suggests — which is the argument this book makes — is that Bitcoin is a complex physical system: a self-organizing network governed by the same mathematical laws as living organisms, cities, and earthquakes.
Understanding it as such changes what questions you can ask, what predictions you can make, and how you should evaluate the claims made about it.