Bitcoin will advance science and technology
The center cannot hold: 7
The origin of the word is a Latin number. Numbers: finger, toe. Humans have been using their numbers to count for thousands of years. It may be that our modern decimal system, or base ten number system, an extension of the Hindu-Arabic counting systems, originated from counting on ten fingers. There are other base number systems, such as the Roman numeral system that uses an intermediate base of five. Numbers consist of data and are used to represent it, a method of collecting and organizing data from the physical and virtual worlds. The important thing to remember about the evolution of numbers is that all measurements require interaction.
Likewise, Bitcoin is a way of collecting and organizing data from both the digital and virtual worlds. It must be emphasized that before Bitcoin, it was impossible to correlate events with points in time in decentralized systems. Bitcoin raised funds as a token for its reference: work. This is the work that connects Bitcoin with the digital asset and energy with the physical world. (Although one could argue that the physical world and the digital world are of the same status, this is a discussion for another time.)
Since its appearance, we are still learning the full effects of the first definitive rare form of properties and energy that can be stored indefinitely. The important thing to remember is that bitcoin is the only monetary metric, or a decentralized and ungovernable accounting system. This means that as an economic measure, and as a store of value, bitcoin is the least corruptible. It is the only form of money, energy, and property not subject to judgment at once.
For centuries our best interpretations of the physical world have been severely limited by the empirical fallacy. This means that our methods of measurement and understanding were limited by what we could immediately observe and experience. It wasn’t until the 15th century that Copernicus established that our solar system is heliocentric, not geocentric. However, without this knowledge, many people today live with the empirical misconception that the observable universe appears to revolve around the Earth.
Think of the empirical fallacy as a false frame of reference. We know, in fact, that our solar system and our sun move and revolve around the Milky Way, which itself is involved in the complex motion. Everything is moving. Although there is a limited frame of reference, this does not appear to be the case.
Imagine you are dragging files from your computer desktop to the Trash icon. You notice that this is the case I threw these files away, although this is by design. It is an empirical error of observation. There is a better explanation, and it is at the back end of the user experience. Our knowledge of our environment in general is always limited in this way.
All central systems are subject to the empirical fallacy. While centralized systems can be viable on some scales over what seems to us for a long time, they operate on what is ultimately a flawed frame of reference.
Bitcoin can link events to points in time from a decentralized advantage. The full implications of this new perspective on the financial world and beyond are not yet fully understood. Humans cannot fully understand Bitcoin as a central and isolated consciousness. But it is certain that all that is known about Bitcoin can be absorbed by the cellular brain of the Internet.
Now, think about which scientific path you want. Take science to mean method, a process of measurement that gives us the best explanation for the way things are. There is no reason to believe that humans evolved to do good science. That is, in our present case, the vast majority of events in this universe are too fast or too slow, too large, too small, too distant, or invisible to our central and empirically limited frame of reference.
We have done a good job expanding our frame of reference and breaking out of the empirical fallacy on many fronts in science. But even with Bitcoin, it is worth repeating that it was impossible to connect events to points in time in decentralized systems. Our financial and constitutive frames of reference were limited in the same way that empiricism restricted us to a one-dimensional tunnel view of the universe.
Bitcoin emerged, in part, from an attempt to work around trusting third parties to sealing digital documents. Central time servers are inaccurate to degrees that might seem accurate to humans, but in terms of ordering transactions on the ledger, a lack of variance is essential. Remember that even stretching the time between a person on the ground and a person on an airplane is enough to make a ledger request inaccurate, which is why Bitcoin does not rely on any third-party time-keeping server.
Bitcoin is the first non-governable monetary system that provides depth and dimension through decentralization not only to our financial world, but to our scientific understanding in general. Bitcoin allows anyone to accumulate property and allocate resources without restrictions. Bitcoin’s ultimate scarcity ensures competition in the market. This means, knowing that Bitcoin is scarce, and the demand for it continues to grow, you should probably be careful about the projects to which your hard-earned Bitcoin is dedicated. The opportunity cost of spending bitcoin is very high, and in its current stage many find that there is no asset they would prefer to hold, and as a result, don’t spend bitcoin at all.
Science today is not competitive because it cannot fail. Entire sectors of innovative subjects are financially supported by government printing. Through mass adoption, Bitcoin enables the freest marketplace we’ve known, where transactions are unstoppable and can be assigned to any project one chooses.
What does this have to do with science? Central systems stimulate a catastrophic rise in misplaced power. We’ve seen this over and over again. Within our universities and scientific communities, it is centralized issuance and reliance on government funds that allows all energies to be misplaced and undue emphasis on the increasingly obscure and soft science subject matter. Any study funded by a centralized system has an overwhelming bias in the results. Government and its myriad central institutional branches lead us down what we can best describe as a misguided path of societal and technological progress.
Once established, these establishments don’t go really nice. Yet it does not serve the world in exchange for funding. That is, if you put any central enterprise in a free market, it will quickly go bankrupt. Institutional success is at comedic odds with the products they offer. (This is something Kafka knows instinctively.) Thus, all central institutions suffer from entropy, and must search for increasingly obscure topics, or the birth of new branches to raise more debt, and invent entirely new areas of study that serve no real-world application.
The dollar has no way to stave off entropy except through the charade of crisis reparations. The dollar will fall indefinitely because it is not tied to our physical world, and it has no supply ceiling. Instead, dollars are haphazardly tied to institutions governed by the will of a few. Imagine a world in which everyone can vote whether or not the dollar should fall in value. In that world, broad and fully representative financial democracy is still no better than the present monetary system because the will of the few or the will of the many still dispossess individuals through inflation. If you consider your dollars to be property, it’s common ground at best. Governance will always infect fiat systems. This is not the case with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the only system that allows you to keep your holdings, no matter what changes the majority choose. Without technology built on decentralized money and property immune to governance, our understanding of what is going on in the universe would remain extremely limited, and myopic in scope.
On a smaller scale, our genes vary randomly as we evolve to enhance their own production, not necessarily to advance and perpetuate our species or prevent our individual destruction. We did not evolve to perceive the universe as it really is. Not by a long shot. Almost everything that happens at any given moment goes unnoticed. What if it was any legion moment? (If we were to regard our existence as an ancestral simulation, it would be computationally difficult to present reality where it is not perceived. It would take the energy of solar systems to render any given simulation completely “totally” for a moment. This of course begs the question of what and from his experiences are perceptive? All questions for another time.)
What Bitcoin offers us is a way to measure experiences and events distributed through a non-physical network of interaction with the world. Bitcoin is a particle, wave, property, and energy.
Without decentralized technology built on decentralized money, our understanding of what is happening in the universe would be severely limited in scope. Without dumping knowledge into texts and computers, we don’t have an accurate or large enough memory to process a lot of data.
Most of us have virtual extensions ourselves. Before the internet, two people communicating had nothing but the imperfect knowledge they each stashed in their own body to instantly create good explanations. Today we carry digital extensions to our brains. We have an expanding bandwidth to access knowledge. But bitcoin customers carry their holdings with them, too. Any amount of Bitcoin as property is free for individuals to hold and travel with, and can be transacted and finalized for the final settlement for a negligible fee. (The last part won’t always be the case, but that’s the topic of another article.)
Currently we are limited in our access to knowledge again due to an experimental error. Today our ability to retrieve digital knowledge efficiently is very limited by our numbers. Most of our daily interaction with computers is through our fingertips. This will not always be the case. Eventually we will get straight to the massive outflow of digital information into our brains. How will this complicate the brain-body relationship? What will this do to the language? These same questions can be asked of Bitcoin, which has materialized our access and relationship to property, money, and energy.
Binary number systems (the second baseline) are used in modern computers. One effective function of binary systems is that they can take many binary inputs (data) and produce a single binary output. The Bitcoin blockchain also condenses a wealth of monetary information and work into a single output, a ledger located across the network. It takes many real-world inputs and produces an electronic ledger that is distributed by mutual consent.
This condensation of information is partly why computers get smaller while their capacity to store information expands. By comparison, humans do not completely or efficiently store information in our heads, but our bodies produce a small amount of electricity. Our cells use electrical signals to communicate.
Although we have never been able to store knowledge perfectly in our bodies, we have created digital languages, scripts, and computers to offload this task. Without these tools, much of what we do in a day would be impossible. Our phones and virtual existence store knowledge, evidence of the past, images and text in a way that our bodies cannot. Similarly, Bitcoin allows us to store physical energy as monetary value in a way that was not possible before. One day, much of what we do in one day, both technically and financially, would be impossible without Bitcoin.
September 26, 2021
Bitcoin Language Read: 6: “Interview with Michael Saylor, CEO of MircroStrategy: The Predator Prey Dynamics of Bitcoin”
Read Bitcoin Language: 5: ‘Bitcoin Has No Competition’
Read Bitcoin Language: 4: “Bitcoin and Existential Risks”
Bitcoin Language Read: 3: “Bitcoin: The First and Last Rival Money”
Read Bitcoin Language: 2: “Bitcoin Eases Uncertainty in the Future”
Read the Bitcoin language: 1: “BTC is the best explanation for how money is made.”