Lindy Effect
Also: Lindy
philosophy · intermediate
Heuristic: the longer a non-perishable thing has survived, the longer it's expected to survive. Time is the strongest filter.
Named after Lindy's deli in New York where comedians supposedly noted that a comedian's career length predicted their remaining career length. Popularized by Taleb: for non-perishable things — books, ideas, technologies, institutions — additional age is positive evidence of further longevity, not negative.
Applied to Bitcoin, the argument is: a monetary network that has survived 16+ years of relentless attacks, regulatory hostility, mining concentration scares, internal forks, and three or four "Bitcoin is dead" macro cycles is structurally stronger now than at any previous point. Each year that passes raises the prior that Bitcoin keeps existing.
Lindy is a heuristic, not a law. Things die. But it's a useful counter to the framing that "Bitcoin is new and untested." By the standards applied to historical monetary innovations — from clay tablets to gold standards to central banking — sixteen years of mainnet uptime is not nothing.