If you asked the same person how to describe “information,” they might say essentially the opposite; it’s intangible, it can be given to someone while the giver retains it, and it can survive in perpetuity without changing.
We now have an example of how an infinite resource can be bound in a semi-physical form to leverage the benefits of both worlds.
Yet there are multiple metaphysical layers of defense that prevent this from occurring: robust network effects, a firewall of mining hashpower, a hornet’s nest of social consensus, and so on .
I no longer believe that Bitcoin is simply a network, digital gold or the future of our financial system.
But like the saying goes, “Bitcoin’s value doesn’t go up a straight line.” Similarly, the universe has systems of order along the path towards disorder.
In the context of this monologue, I define life as a system working as one to leverage the potential energy of its environment to stabilize its own entropy.
For example, what would win out, the sheer volume of my shrill singing voice or the strength of a wine glass? Intuitively, the primary characteristics of each have nothing to do with each other, this is demonstrable with the units by which they are measured.
With research, practice and lots of vocal lessons, I can learn the resonance with which the chemical bonds in my wine glass vibrate and sing at that exact pitch.
It wasn’t what I took for granted as the primary characteristics of my voice that mattered, these concepts are unrelated to each other.
I might take for granted the fact that the next beer could serve the same purpose, or it could be a gift for a new neighbor that might foster a strong community or a long and memorable friendship.
I didn’t reinvent the idea of vocal resonance, I had to discover it.
My path was a movement we could both understand, but it could be best described as orthogonal to his line of sight.
On a classic two-dimensional graph, the x-axis and y-axis are orthogonal, as they can be described in independent ways but, rather importantly, they are not completely independent.
Most of us assume that this point is meaningless, but Breedlove adds onto the work of Brahmagupta to say that not only is zero a sort of final frontier of numbers, but it is a gateway to negative and imaginary numbers.
If it were to come upon a slow, stopped or reverse-moving electron in the same wire, they would have no choice but to pass through each other or collide.
In our world, that is to say an electrical force applied on one end of the wire will travel to the other end, affecting the wire wholly; there is no section of wire not affected by the electron.
To summarize, the dimensional difference between two systems has an exponential effect on the inability for them to have influence upon each other.
In a sufficiently cold environment , decreasing the pressure causes solid ice to phase change into gas, omitting the liquid state completely.
Yet two entities having common existence on multiple dimensions have a much higher probability of meeting.
It is ironic then, that Bitcoin is the only purely scarce thing in the universe, and it’s not even purely physical.
In Bitcoin’s eternal struggle, Gigi demonstrates the incentive-bounds of Bitcoin and summarizes it by saying, “Bitcoin grows on the edge of order and chaos.” He is describing how Bitcoin takes the “chaos” of randomness and leverages it into the “order” of blocks.
Being able to harness something intangible and bound it in a physical form breaks us free of our physical limits.
This may lead to a completely digital existence, or the ability to regenerate ourselves in meatspace elsewhere in the universe.
I mentioned above that I believe life is a “system working as one to leverage the potential energy of its environment to stabilize its own entropy.” Generally speaking, individual life forms are in competition with each other for resources.
If knowledge is a force of infinite magnitude, then it will win out versus anything bound by the limits of the physical world, but it requires the right application.
What do we currently accept as truth which may be fallible if we grow to a higher level of intelligence: The eventual end of our species? The heat death of the universe? The expected death of an individual life form? I hope I live long enough to see another shattered assumption.
If entropy is a stream and life is a fish swimming against the current, life’s ultimate goal is to build a watermill and leverage the force of the stream or dam it up entirely.