Bitcoin as the Architecture of Time

Okay. This is such a big topic that I want to start by setting the table.

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One of the things that I love about Bitcoin is that, because of the consensus mechanism, we get to see the entire process. For the first time in history, we don't see a little window of what experts tell us and make decisions on top of that. We see all the people trying to advance Bitcoin, all the people trying to tear it down, the fear and the hope. We see it all, and then we each get to decide for ourselves what's right for us.

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Why that's important is that we've always lived in this control system. What you saw with Bitcoin first was: governments are going to stop it, it's bad for the environment, it's the free market, there has to be inflation. You've seen nonsense over and over.

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Then we have this quantum debate. The quantum debate lands in something that is scary for all of us because we aren't smart enough in quantum, so we go back to the experts and ask what they think. That can feel really chaotic through this change that we're going through. We're part of this consensus, and our fear takes over and goes to somebody else because they must be smarter, right?

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Nick and Jack came to me with their different look at this about a year and a half ago, and they've been working on this. We're going to put this in a box, and the box is going to be this: what if there wasn't a quantum threat to Bitcoin? You can determine what that box looks like, instead of assuming there is going to be a quantum threat and we have to upgrade the protocol. What if there wasn't?

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With that, Jack, why don't you tell us a little bit about the paper that you created and what you think is happening?

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Yeah, so we started writing the paper basically because we think measuring Bitcoin in fiat is doing a disservice to Bitcoin. We wanted to quantify the blocks in joules, and that forced us to deal with the architecture of time and understanding what time is, because time is native to Bitcoin. Gigi was the first person to talk about this, and so we really wanted to build on that and come up with an answer.

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In doing so, it led us to the quantum problem, and we realized that we're actually looking at the same problem, but from the opposite boundary of time. I know that's a little abstract, but we're talking about the measurement of information and how information collapses into a singular chain. That was our basis. We just wanted to get rid of fiat in the conversation about Bitcoin.

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We see Bitcoin as a physical process. We claim it as a thermological process, so heat and logic, that produces a chronological state. That's the objective reality beneath Bitcoin, the thing that we all use. That's what's occurring in proof of work. We wanted to ground our understanding in something objective so that we can tie our understanding of money to that. We wanted to define money not from fiat, but from Bitcoin itself. We needed to ground Bitcoin in a physics lens.

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This is just the first start of that, and we're hoping to bring the conversation forward and get the industry away from fiat.

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I think that's one of the biggest things we're all mentally dealing with, which is that we've always lived within a fiat system. All of our knowledge is based within this system, and all of our interpretations have some connection to this way of thinking. We're trying to pull back these questions. When we say thinking from first principles, are we actually doing that if it's constrained by certain assumptions that we've made and deferred to who we currently see as experts in this space? What makes them an expert currently when our physics breaks down at this boundary that we're trying to elucidate? That's what Jack was speaking to with what we've written about in this initial paper.

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Yeah, it's just, who are we trusting? We need to verify our physics, because ultimately that's what the quantum threat comes down to. Who are the industry leaders telling us that quantum is a problem? Who are the people in Bitcoin telling us that quantum is a problem? Who are they trusting? What are their incentives? We want to get an understanding of that and really use that as a basis. We need to verify our physics.

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So walk through why you believe that time is discrete instead of linear, and what you think Bitcoin is showing us by having a system that's architected without observers in the system. What's happening there?

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I just want to lay out something, which is that all of our current modern physics that we use institutionally, that's generally spoken about and agreed upon, is based on a continuous time assumption. Discrete time has never really had an anchor point of discussion because there's never been empirical evidence for the idea of discrete time.

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But continuous time, we use it because it makes all of our equations that are so predictively powerful work. That doesn't necessarily mean that's what's going on at the basis of reality and causal order.

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We look at Bitcoin, and when you look at its structure, how it produces blocks, all of the mechanics of it have a discrete nature. We've just been pulling the layers back to see it and define it for what it is. It's reordering our sense and understanding of whether the nature of time is something more than the assumption that we initially started with.

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Yeah, for quantum physics, continuous time is the assumption here. Everyone talks about the double slit experiment as the justification for the quantum threat. We're saying Bitcoin is the double spend experiment, because it's operating at the fundamental basis of energy, logic, and time. It's computing blocks of time. That's what's actually being computed here.

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When you really strip back the logic here, we're saying that without the block of time, you don't have a solution to the double spend problem. You can't solve the double spend problem. What we realize is that the double spend problem is the exact same problem as the double slit experiment from the opposite boundary of time.

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What do I really mean by that? We're talking about how information collapses into a singular binary state. The measurement problem in physics is the ultimate problem that nobody can solve, and it's because they're trying to understand how quantum or contradictory superimposed information collapses into classical binary information.

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When you look at Bitcoin, you see a superposed state in the mempool, then you have a measurement process of proof of work, and then it collapses into a singular binary chain. Without the block of time, you have no solution. Basically, that is a falsification of the axiom of continuous time. It's demonstrated right in front of us. Without the block, you do not have a solution to the problem.

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Continuous time never provides the boundary at which measurement could ever occur. This is an assumption that has been carried through physics, and Bitcoin is saying no, this actually has to be answered for. Whether the physicist knows this or not, or the people saying there's a quantum threat know this or not, this actually has to be answered for.

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Basically, to uphold both, you can't believe in both quantum and Bitcoin anymore because of the double spend problem. Either you have to show how Bitcoin will solve the double spend problem without blocks of time, aka continuous time, or you have to concede that that is the wrong assumption of time.

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If we can maybe paint a picture in our minds, because it all gets really abstract really quick, we're basically trying to say: if you could step outside of time, what would it look like? Since we can't physically do that, we can look at computer systems. Is there any model that a computational system could basically be structured through and give us a different picture of what is logically possible?

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Is there something that could exist as a computational system that could give you a symmetry of causal order that we reference in physics? Could we step outside and look at time through this lens? Could a physically bounded system, as we observe Bitcoin as a physically bounded system, show us something?

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We have this metaphor: time is money. If we think about that a little bit deeper and reflect on it, and don't just walk by it, we should recognize as a civilization that we are an extension of physics. We are an extension of the laws of thermodynamics. Money is an extension of us. I think it's time to take money into the physics domain and not treat it as separate knowledge bases. If we truly want to go deeper with our physics, we need to reassess what money is and what a precise form of it looks like, because money is not separate from our physics. It extends from thermodynamics. We can't escape this.

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Yeah, just to add a little bit to that, Nick. All of our lives, we all perceive the internal experience, and so we see the ontological experience of reality. Bitcoin is giving us the external experience, the epistemological experience. What we're seeing in Bitcoin is the process by which epistemology becomes ontology relative to the ledger itself.

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What does that really mean? We're simply seeing that Bitcoin is a bounded totality. We can see the entire 21 million, or the 2.1 quadrillion bits of value, or satoshis. We can see that whole system. We can see every single state of information from Genesis to present. We have an external view of totality. We are standing outside of that process of time.

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We actually have an architecture that we can follow to understand our own ontology. We're saying it's the same thing. There's just a boundary here. That's what physics is neglecting to look at, that there must be a boundary. There is no solution to the double spend problem. There is no solution to the measurement problem without admitting there must be a quantized boundary.

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What is Bitcoin? In our opinion, it is the proper interpretation of what a quantum computer is, and it is computing blocks of time. That is the quantum of causal change. There is no smaller unit of change than a block of time. When we map that onto our understanding of physics, especially at the Planck scale, it begins to give us meaning at what all these mathematical boundaries are.

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Okay, let's attack this from a different portion. Now you're on the other side of this, and you're a quantum researcher trying to drive quantum, and you believe the states can coexist at the same time from linear time. What would you expect of these subatomic states that coexist? Like you said, the mempool has a whole bunch of probabilities that could exist, that then get collapsed by energy into one state that does exist, and you can't unwind that.

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What would it look like from your view in quantum? What would that experiment look like for people measuring from linear time? What would you expect to see there?

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We're seeing error in and error out. Because physics doesn't understand what measurement is, they don't actually understand the ontology of superposition itself. They don't understand that this is a premeasured state. Well, they do understand it, but they don't understand it ontologically.

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You're looking at something akin to the mempool. They're attempting to manipulate the mempool, creating errors and adding manipulation before the measurement occurs, and then you're getting exponential error on the other side of that. That's because they don't understand the causal order of measurement itself.

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You're getting exponential errors, but then you're also being asked to trust them. We can't verify any of these things ourselves. We just have to simply trust that these outputs are true. When you look into the quantum information regarding Bitcoin, they're presolving the answer and then putting it into the machine.

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Presolving in classical computers?

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Yeah, presolving it in classical and giving it the specific output. We're saying this is all nonsense. It just doesn't make any logical sense because they can't answer for what the boundary of time is. They don't have an architecture.

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We're trying to keep it at least constructive and say Bitcoin is the answer. Bitcoin is physics. Everyone is looking for a theory of everything. Bitcoin isn't just a theory. Bitcoin is a theory that is instantiated with energy, such that it proves itself every 10 minutes.

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When you really pick apart the problems of what's going on, you can't ever solve the problem of truth without it being a temporal process. We don't know if Bitcoin will ever contradict itself or double spend until the next block is mined. Only when that block is mined do we know there are no contradictions. This is a temporal process that we have to understand as how classical or binary information emerges as a process.

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I think for a wider audience, since we really don't have a lot of time to go in depth, with what he's saying we've come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is our best reference point for understanding these types of questions and creating a new logical framework to think through and from.

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But Bitcoin doesn't actually matter if it doesn't solve the double spend problem. Narratives have evolved over time and more people are coming in, and there's the idea of perfect money. But perfect money can't exist if the double spend problem isn't actually solved.

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It's important for us to think through what the double spend problem is, because that's really what the white paper that launched all of this starts from and what it's actually solving for. We don't see it as purely a computer science problem. We think the nature of it is that the double spend problem is a concept that exists across all domains at all resolutions of scale.

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We see the double spend problem as a physics problem, and it should be contended with that way. If it's only thought of in one dimension, only related to computers, physicists are never going to pick it up and explore what the double spend problem is. We want to be constructive in presenting that it's worth exploring the double spend problem as a physics-based problem.

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So how sure are each of you? Again, lots of people will turn to the experts, move to fear, and not do the work. You're coming across as new experts in something, and you're saying you shouldn't be scared of this at all. So how sure are you?

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As long as there's never a double spend in Bitcoin, 100%.

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As long as there's never a double spend, I'm completely confident. I gain confidence every single day that what we're talking about will make sense.

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Where can people find you in our last 10 seconds?

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BitcoinLens.net. Don't trust us. Verify yourselves. Come help us, please.

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Thanks very much.

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Thank you.