Bitcoin as foundation layer of an emerging economic biosphere (long-ish post... hopefully not a strained analogy)
A distinguishing characteristic of a living system that I have found useful is the ability to counteract entropy. Indeed an informal definition of "life" could be formulated as: any closed system within which entropy is reversed or suspended and order is maintained or established. This holds true for the single-celled microbe as it does for the blue whale. Building on this assertion, it becomes evident that all life is in a continuous struggle against entropy. Most life forms (organisms) must continually fend off entropy by regularly sacrificing other organisms to this unyielding force. This is the case when a cow consumes grass. It is the case when a tiger consumes a deer. One life form converts the structure or Mass of another into biochemical Energy. Stated differently, the predator species breaks down - digests - its prey, disintegrating it from order into entropy (calories, micro/macronutrients, minerals, etc.), and absorbing it for the purpose of staving off the predator's own entropic decay. Entropic decay in this context represents death and disease. This relationship applies irrespective of whether the predator/prey diad is represented by: brown bear and cow; cow and grass; or krill and plankton. Not even herbivores escape this axiomatic reality of Life.
Ultimately, all biological complexity rests upon one miraculous reaction: photosynthesis. Only organisms capable of this metabolic process are capable of ingesting entropy in its purest form, electromagnetic energy, thereby side-stepping the need to essentially rob another organism of its ordered/integrated state to fortify its own. As such, these organisms are the basis of all life. Every other, albeit transient, triumph of order over entropy (e.g. every other living system) owes its very existence to these foundational life forms. This is the biosphere. This is the primordial resistance to the universal process that extends back to the stars: the inexorable conquest of entropy over order. Life is that which claws back, deriving order from entropy.
Satoshi's innovation, which cannot be overstated, mathematically encodes a novel means of accomplishing what only photosynthesis has. Energy/entropy is directly converted into order via Bitcoin's proof of work protocol. In no other manmade process is Energy truly captured and converted into order. All comparable applications are actually variations on two related but dissimlar processes: capture/storage of energy (as in a battery); use/harnessing of energy (as in a water mill). In a manner similar to photosynthesis, Bitcoin accomplishes a true phase change of its supplied energy. A battery CAPTURES energy in kinetic form - whether solar, thermal or electrical - and converts it to potential energy for use at another time/place. The watermill CHANNELS the kinetic energy of flowing water for use in a productive enterprise, such as milling grain. These are definitionally distinct from what plants - and I am proposing Bitcoin - accomplish. By means of photosynthesis, plants do not merely store energy. Instead they convert the energy into a complex substructure of carbohydrate (e.g. cellulose/starch), peptide (e.g. protein) and nucleic acid (e.g. DNA) polymers - curiously analogous to blockchains. This allows for the encoding of complex information and synthesis of complex proteins, enzymes and tissues. The energy of the sun is not merely being stored or harnessed. It is being converted into Order. By performing a similar function for the first time in human history, does Bitcoin represent the base layer of an entirely new economic biosphere? Are we witnessing the birth of a novel economic building block? If so, what superstructures can we expect to see built atop this foundation? My thesis here is that, in Bitcoin's proof of work protocol, we have a massively underestimated innovation that will take humanity in unimaginable directions. Unimaginable within a restrictive paradigm that seems only interested in the obvious monetary implications of this peer-to-peer electronic cash system. But Bitcoin is more than money.
#bitcoin #thinkstr
https://video.nostr.build/c939d8e4a788de288c6bcad03426411aff08e7d304f547e0faf93ff15abcdcf2.mp4
