TIL Bitcoin is NOT time 🥲
Discussion
Time doesn't exist. 👀
Time is a thing on itself. Not how we measure it.
Bitcoin can measure time, but is not the best at it.
It made me sad too, but for the network to “know” it needs to adjust difficulty, it needs to calculate the current block production rate from an external source of time. The concept of time is not fully self contained in the network
What if the blocks come exactly every 10 minutes, but it's us that speed up and slow down. Bitcoin adjusts for us. Bitcoin time is relative.
Did you even read Bitcoin is Time? 😂
Code:
Yes, I read it in 2021 and it made me happy. Then I had a long drunken discussion at Pacific Bitcoin last night with someone who pointed out the need for reconciliation with an external source of time (points 1 and 2 in your first screenshot). To me that means time as a concept is not as self contained in the network as I first thought. The approximation used is probably good enough, but it still made me sad 😂
You need wall time to be tethered to the real world, but it's also not terribly important. Hash is way more important, which is why a newer (higher) block can have an OLDER timestamp than the previous (lower) one, in terms of wall time.
Miners are paid by the network, in part, to provide a more-or-less "accurate" timestamp, which is used to, via averaging across 2016 blocks, to keep a constant 10 minute block time. Always.
The timechain is a purely digital arrow of time, and it is built by the Bitcoin network itself, which is (in some weird sense) a clock.
After chatting with nostr:npub1j8y6tcdfw3q3f3h794s6un0gyc5742s0k5h5s2yqj0r70cpklqeqjavrvg just now, I realize why I’m sad. When I read Bitcoin is Time a couple of years ago, I understood it as the timechain’s conception of time was immaculate. However, due to this mild externality of reconciling wall time with the block production rate, there is a small asterisk next to immaculate
Would time exist without the presence of memory?