“That temporary local advantage you just cited, right? If you find cheaper energy, then you get a temporary local advantage in Bitcoin mining.

But that local advantage is then disseminated into the world in the form of energy.

Yep.

That's another interesting kind of like global local alignment.

Yeah, this is very, you nailed it. So global local alignment, so let's do so you have energetic binding all the way down and then you have the maximum abstraction. It's defined by pure math and pure computation.

The computation is maximally abstract. Again, the fact that it's not solving any particular, call it utilitarian problem that culture can identify, but is solving a pure abstraction problem is critical. So you have these two points at the maximum abstraction on the basis of transcendence, things that are invariant across human agency.

And energy, which is also transcendent and fundamental to anything. Remember, energy is fundamental to chemistry, laws of thermodynamics, is fundamental to biology, fitness, is fundamental to behavior. This is called behavioral investment theory.

It's fundamental to culture. And then ultimately, okay, now we can say it's fundamental to this new thing, this technological civilization. But we can maintain the continuity “all the way up.

And it holds both, and it has, you can't go higher, you can't go more abstract, and you can't go lower. And so there's no, you don't have the problem of golden fiat moving here. You got the whole continuum, top to bottom, and connected properly.

And then the global local binding. It creates a context where everybody's time preference produces a movement, a propagation out into a more global and a longer time preference. So we can all sort of look at it and say, oh, cool, do what you are doing with a maximum focus on your local self-interest in the time frames that you value.

And the system will propagate that out horizontally so that it produces a global net benefit. And by the way, these two points are connected. It only works if the local benefit is at the level of energy or at the level of computation.

Only those two points. Any advance at the level of computation propagates horizontally. Any advance at the level of energy propagates horizontally.

And then that, and those are the two substrates atop which all things are built. The ability to use intelligence to “modulate energy. Everything else in the economy is a subset of those two things coming together.

And so it triangulates an abstract structure that fills the entire space. But it's abstract and it's minimalist. It doesn't try to populate anything else.

It says, okay, what am I going to do? What am I going to give you as your instrumentalities, as your institutions? Well, I'm going to give you a ledger.

So the ability to maintain state that has the ability to do things like disambiguate and verify provenance of movement of information through time, consensus. And by the way, initially, I'm going to give you consensus about a very, very compact, minimal state, which is which wallets have what numbers associated with them. But the point is, that's the minimum substrate that allows a lot of other things to be built.”

From The "What is Money?" Show: Our Civilization is Dying...Can Bitcoin Save It? w/ Jordan Hall (WiM584), May 16, 2025

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400?i=1000708769366&r=5221

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