An ocean wave can travel a thousand miles before it breaks on a point, reef, or sandbar. But the water doesn’t travel a thousand miles, it’s only the wave that is moving through the water. So what is the wave? Imagine throwing a sheet over an invisible person. Now you can see that there is something there and you have a rough idea of its form. As the wave reaches the place where it breaks, it begins to feel the bottom, rises up, and another layer of visibility emerges, as the local topography and circumstances add fidelity to the wave shape.
Tracing the wave’s origins back in time, we find a fetch of sustained winds, a thousand miles away, caused by convection, an energy transference. As the wind hits the surface, little ripples are pushed forward. And then, in a self organizing way, those wind driven little ripples merge to become bigger ripples, and those bigger ripples merge, in harmonic resonance, to become bigger and bigger waves, in longer and longer frequencies.
Bitcoin is digital energy. Like light, it can be thought of as both wave and quanta. What form the wave ultimately takes will depend on the energy and duration of the fetch, and the circumstances of the shorelines it reaches. At the current bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment, if I'm not mistaken, a bitcoin averages around 143,000 kwh’s of digitized energy and a new one emerges in the fetch every 10 minutes or so. In this analogy, think of changes in wind energy as a change in the mining difficulty adjustment. If this is so, then a satoshi (think of it as a little ripple) is currently around .0143 kwh’s of digitized energy.
The form that a bitcoin wave takes, when circumstances transmute its energy into something physical, will depend on the topography of the shorelines it reaches. The cumulative effects of many individual choices (ripples to waves), acted on by local circumstances, will determine the ultimate shape of a breaking bitcoin wave.
When it comes to local circumstances, waves have really good shape in El Salvador. I can say from personal experience that Las Flores and Punta Mango both sculpt beautiful waves from a good groundswell. And it looks like the bitcoin waves reaching El Salvador’s shores are shaping up beautifully too.
