“Words are like keys; ears are like locks. Both morph and change over time, and if you’re lucky, one day you’ll hear a word or a phrase and it will hit just right. It will resonate. You will understand.”

Yes, this analogy gets close to how it feels, but as a reader of stories, I know that words can hammer at me and seep at me and change me until my ear fits the lock. I've had the feeling where I was reading along in some novel or other and then suddenly, in the space of a few pages or a paragraph or even a sentence, my view of the world changes and I am able to see things I didn't see before.

So ears are locks and words are keys that can hammer out the appropriate heights of the tumblers...and now I've gone and ruined Gigi's beautiful metaphor.

I know the feeling, though, of little few words, dropped in my ear like a handful of coins received in change. Words are the price and our ears are the money we use to pay -- rarely do we have exact change. But again, this is a piss poor metaphor compared to Gigi's.

I like it though. Perhaps we can say that ideas that do not come from our own minds all carry a price. And we cannot access them without payment on our part. But we almost never have the right amount of bills and so what we get back is change, because the idea is changed. Still not a great metaphor though.

So let's make it about bitcoin. You cannot send a utxo to someone else and they cannot send it to you without that it is changed (you often don't have a utxo of the right size, and even if you do, there's the mining fee). So no bitcoin leaves one person's control and enter's another without changing. And the same is true for ideas. Every attempt to convey something to another person necessarily involves changing what we say. Really, words are probably like payjoins.

But I don't think this is what Gigi was talking about at all. It's just how his words reached me.