Bitcoin Isn't Money, It's a Clock | Scott Dedels | BIS #216

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Scott, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show Dublin edition.

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Yes, thank you. I'm thrilled to be here spontaneously.

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Yes, you're a man who doesn't like to schedule things, I hear.

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So we thought we'd do a spontaneous podcast here.

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We decided to do this like five minutes ago.

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Here we are.

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Yeah. It's about catching the moment, isn't it?

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Yes.

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Yes, we first met in Canada, I believe.

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Or did we meet before that?

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Yeah, actually, we met in Prague.

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Sydney.

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Sydney.

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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Sydney.

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And you've written two books so far.

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The one you had last year was The Dow of Bitcoin.

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Yeah.

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This one.

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And now your magnum opus, The Age of Time.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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So tell us a little about yourself and then about the book, please.

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Yes.

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I am a longtime fan.

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I actually started my Bitcoin journey reading some of your books.

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And part of the reason why I started writing books was because of, you know, how much I personally benefited from reading what other people take the time to write.

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And so I really believe in, for people who enjoy reading or listening to books, I think it's an important contribution.

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And so I was Bitcoin class of 2020.

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And like a lot of people, I spent the first sort of two weeks of lockdown in Canada.

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drinking. And then I wanted to get serious about using the time effectively. And I started studying

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economics. And I was actually referred to a Bitcoin book accidentally by Amazon after I'd

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read a bunch of Mises and Rothbard. And that was how this all sort of started for me.

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What books was that?

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The book that actually flipped it for me was Jeff Booth's Prices Tomorrow. Yeah, which is

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interesting because as you know, it's not really explicitly a Bitcoin book at all.

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And it's not marketed as a Bitcoin book.

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So I had this book about technology and deflation.

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Yeah, I believe he wrote it without knowing about Bitcoin.

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Like the first, he discovered Bitcoin as he was writing the book, if I remember correctly.

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Interesting.

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And then it all fell into place when he wrote the last few chapters.

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I might be getting this completely wrong.

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And sorry, Jeff, if that's the case, but I believe that was the thing that he wasn't totally orange pilled until he wrote the book and it finally clicked everything for him.

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Wow.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So I finished it and then immediately read it again.

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And then I started reading every Bitcoin book I get my fingers on.

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So I spent the next few months.

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And yeah, so since then, I've written a few books.

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I co-founded a Bitcoin company in Canada called Block Rewards.

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We built Bitcoin software for paying people on Bitcoin.

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And, uh, so that's sort of what I do when I'm not doing this and writing.

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And, you know, I think the, the Bitcoin is just, uh, I love film.

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And I was talking about this at breakfast this morning.

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There's a scene in the movie, the Shawshank redemption, where the warden pushes his finger

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through a poster and realizes that behind the hole in the poster is the giant hole that

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Andy had crawled through to his freedom.

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And I feel like, you know, this is kind of a way to think about Bitcoin, right?

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it's like it's just so much bigger and it's nobody understands bitcoin it's so fascinating

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to think about and so funny that you should mention the shortshank redemption because i

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added three chapters to the praxeology book i rewrote that whole thing so it reads more like a

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textbook now uh and one of the chapters i added is called oh what's the chapter called i can't

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even remember what it's called but it's about the shortshank redemption i use that as a metaphor

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The chapter is called What About the Roads?

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So it's about debunking the notion that the state is absolutely necessary.

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It isn't necessary to have a monopoly on violence.

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Because the framing is that what about the roads is not really a question.

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It's an admittance that you think that roads couldn't happen without coercion.

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Which is, to me, obviously false.

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Of course, humans built roads before taxation happened.

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Well, the analogy in the book is about that.

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And it's sort of what the Shawshank Redemption is about.

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So there's this 90-year-old inmate that gets released and then hangs himself after two weeks because he's been totally institutionalized at Shawshank.

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so he's used to getting his three free meals per day and used to the times of the prison and

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everything and it doesn't know what to do when he the the life outside the prison is a life of

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complete anxiety at all all points because and that's why reg the morgan freeman's character

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warns andy the frame the protagonist about having hope because he says hope is a dangerous thing

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because it will kill you when they if they eventually release you so you might as well

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just get used to this and die in here and andy refuses to do this he clings on to hope because

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you cannot hope is the last thing that should you should never lose hope is sort of the message of

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the whole film and it's also about time preference and him digging that hole with a teaspoon every

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day for 10 years and then finally escaping so so no matter what's shawshanky walls the government

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puts up around you you can always if you if you think they're real and if you uh if you do as they

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say and if you would take all of this for as laws of nature instead of man-made bullshit then uh

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you lose all hope and that's how they win so so the the message is hope is a rational choice

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you're gonna die anyway so you might as well live with hope it's also a really like interesting

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discussion of the visible and in the invisible prison exactly yeah yeah and yeah but this book

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is specifically about time i know that the gg's uh wonderful article bitcoin is time inspired this

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a bit it's inspired a lot of my writing too so so what's the what's the main premise of the book and

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like what's uh what is it about and what's the message you want to give to people uh yeah you

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And Gigi's Bitcoin is Time piece, to go back to my earlier story as I was reading things about Bitcoin, Bitcoin is Time was the first thing that I really read that expanded my awareness of the Bitcoin conversation beyond monetary use case.

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and it was just so cool like i uh because i think why that was sort of uh an important moment for me

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was it really um changed my perception of around what bitcoin is and uh starting to see

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how people are thinking about it and talking about it you know it moved it from for me it

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move my own personal overton window from uh you know this digital magic money thing to

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a much larger idea and uh so the time thing has always fascinated me since and dow bitcoin is

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actually also a lot about time so when i was really starting to understand bitcoin

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i was observing in myself a what i would what i call in the book sort of a changing relationship

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of the present moment which i think that bitcoiners you know identify with the language of

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time preference and so as you're as you are starting to change your discretionary spending

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you know your dialism is about an internal inward experience that manifests outward as you change

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the way you think about things your experience of reality changes and uh and bitcoin kind of does

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too. So, you know, very early on, as I was really thinking about Bitcoin a lot, I think this happens

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to people when they get orange pill. And now all of a sudden, you're talking to your wife about it,

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you're talking to your dog about it. You know, it's like, you know, I was just experiencing

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a change in my experience of time. And so the books are, you know, in some ways the same,

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or along similar lines, because the time thing has, for me, is more interesting than the

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conversation about money.

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I think that, so what is age of time about?

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The acknowledgement in the first book is kind of this idea that as Bitcoin is transforming your reality it changing how you interact with time Age of Time is more of an attempt to think about what exactly that phenomenon is and how it works

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And so I feel firstly that the problem of money is much more obvious than the problem of time.

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And for this reason, the monetary use case of Bitcoin is sexier, but it's also just a lot easier to understand.

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You know, we use money, money, there are many forms of money, and Bitcoin offers us a very easy way to do an A-B test on the properties of money.

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And so, you know, it's something that people can really like, you know, we can find common ground on very easily.

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whereas with time uh there really isn't uh no one's really thinking about bitcoin yet i think

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as a as a mirror to examine whether or not how we think about time is the smartest way to do it

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or whether there's actually even a problem with with time itself we have been thinking about time

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for for ages and you know all the way back early cultures plato was writing about time

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And so in the book, I sort of trace the history of time in the same way that, you know, safety and traces the history of money in the Bitcoin standard.

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And going back sort of 400 years, we had the invention of the pendulum, which created the mechanical clock standardization of time, 1657.

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And so I sort of think that 1657 is the 1971 of time.

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And what makes this a sort of wild rabbit hole to start there is 400 years is actually long enough that now no one has been, you know, we've all been adopted into this time system.

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And it's been running long enough that it has really drifted into the realm of the unquestioned.

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questioned like we're not really examining the notion of time because we have over the last 400

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years built our entire civilization on top of it time is really uh upstream of money we and what

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we've done since the invention of the pendulum is reduce the idea to its most base form so that we

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can really agree about it without even having to consider it because there are all kinds of you

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know going back thousands of years there are all kinds of ideas about time is time a fundamental

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force flowing through the universe is it something that we observe as part of consciousness is it

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both but what clocks really do is turn that complex idea into 12 numbers and two hands

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so that we can all easily look at something and not have to really think about it.

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So in the white paper, Satoshi was trying to solve a problem of ordering an agreement.

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And in age of time, I think that firstly, he's talking about a coordination problem.

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How do we scale this solution of decentralized money online?

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And mechanical clocks, to me, timekeeping is a coordination problem.

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And that's a very literal coordination problem if you just move a bit out into space.

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When they send astronauts up, they come back and they're a little older than everyone else or a little younger.

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I can't remember which one it is, but space and time are really two sides of the same coin.

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And gravity is just curvature in space-time.

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So our perception of time is very specific to what's going on on the Earth and not to what it actually is, I guess.

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Yeah. Yeah. And so like, so what we've done by scaling mechanical time is really invented a system that operates without respect to any of those things. And one minute is one minute anywhere on earth. And so it almost loses some of the richness or the texture of the description and the system that we've built.

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And I think that, uh, so we, there's an argument to be made that civilization, um, adopts the logic of the dominant form of timekeeping.

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And we can see the results of that change, uh, in things like architectural trends and the way we imagine how we use time.

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because uh prior to so there was a time before mechanical clocks there was a long period of time

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most of human history existed before mechanical clocks and we we collectively inhabited time

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as a civilization in much different way during that period but the calendar is is super old

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so maybe not the mechanical clock but calendars have been around for like 6 000 years or something

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Yeah. So what is changing there, the innovation, is the discretization of time into smaller and smaller measurable units. So what happened in 1657 really was the ability to distribute minutes.

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and we started to see uh clock towers becoming the central point of coordination in city states

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in europe where now all of a sudden everything revolves around a single clock markets open

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uh you know like we just start to adapt our behavior so that process started hundreds of

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years ago and then we get into uh like the internet subsequent innovations like time zones

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train train schedules the jet economy daylight saving both right everything starts to be layered

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on time this is so this is how 400 years later no one's really examining time because so many

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things are built on top of it but there isn't really a great opportunity to go backwards now

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and say are we doing this right uh but the problem is that it doesn't stop at minutes

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You know, we've gotten to seconds and atomic clocks, like we're, we're measuring this thing into oblivion. And alongside that is the human experience of time and which has appreciably declined as technology as, you know, I think there's a, there's a really important narrative around accelerationism here, because what I think is a more pressing problem than the erosion of currency.

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time is way more precious and finite than money and our we are now seeing uh also an exponential

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metting out of the time that we have and we notice that through our how we how we distribute

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our free time right so we used to watch whole films netflix instagram reels tiktok is like

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seconds and and so our our we're training our attention spans in parallel to this like time

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phenomenon and i think it has to do with the the face of a clock actually doesn't reference anything

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it just endlessly wheels in a circle and it's so it creates a sort of like uh

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a mindset a collective uh agreement around sort of like endless forward progress i think that it

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is that was not present in the previous cultures and we can see that based on how they thought

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about building structures like so europe is covered in buildings that took centuries to build

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and if i was to start a company today that said uh you know we're gonna start a building i'm gonna

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hope to have it done by 2400 uh does everyone think this is cool i like everyone to think i'm

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insane so oh there's so much to unpack here first i think uh that one of the reasons that the the

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gregorian calendar and and time as we measure it now is so popular it's because it's so super

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accurate i think that um if i remember correctly like when the year 2000 was supposed to be a leap year but then again it was supposed to be uh not a leap year because every 400 years the leap year is left out it called a leap year

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is that correct turn yeah so and except every 2000 years so this was the first exception to

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the exception so it was actually leap year in the 2000s and that makes the that makes the calendar

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accurate to like the minute on a time scale of a hundred thousand years or something like that

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and then there's something called a leap second like every 13 years or something there's a leap

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second uh and it's extremely accurate and has been for a very very long time and there's also another

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another fascinating thing that if if we had 13 months per year instead of 12 uh every every month

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would be 28 days and every and every day would start i think on a monday yeah so there's actually

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i think a fair amount of debate around the gregorian calendar as an example of when

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the the the problem with the centralization of uh authority timekeeping is one of those things and

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and history and record keeping is another uh because the 13-month calendar in a lot of ways

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makes much more sense and yeah the the there are a number of sort of fringe schools of history that

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think a lot of recorded history has been edited or falsified and uh the the uh the calendar the

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years are part of that because there's a there's a sound argument that at least 300 years of uh

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European history from like 300, sorry, 600 to 900 was completely made up so that certain people

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could be said to have been ruling at the, at the 1000, at the turn of 1000. And, and yeah, so

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calendars themselves are a funny thing. You know, the, the week, the modern concept of the week

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does go back a really long way. There's nothing in nature that identifies one day from the next

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day so we completely made up the notion of a seven day week it could be weeks could be three

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days weeks could be 10 days and uh and this is before the bible right so so um seven days per

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week has been along also since like forever yeah seven comes from there are there were at the time

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seven astral bodies that didn't conform so all of the stars rotate around polaris the north star

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except for the five visible planets in the sun and the moon so the so the seven they were called

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wandering stars the seven wandering stars became a day for each of them so monday is moon day

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sunday is sat saturday is for saturn and saturn is the outermost visible planet the boundary of

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the cosmos and so it became the boundary of the week it's the last day of the week cycle yeah so

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So would you agree that time is money?

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What's the connection?

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I mean, I have my definition of the connection.

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Maybe I should lay it out.

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Because my understanding of it is that in lowering your time preference, that's really equivalent to accumulating capital.

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The most basic example being Robinson Crusoe trying to catch fish with his hands.

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And if he, instead of doing that, he sets aside some fish to feed himself while constructing a fishing net,

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He lowers his time preference and delays his gratification.

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And when the fishing net is done, he can catch more fish per time unit, thereby increasing his productivity.

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So civilization is very much tied to people lowering their time preference and saving up capital for the future.

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So capital is really stored up time.

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and and capitalism the word in itself in in its very basic meaning of it is just uh better

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better uh resource allocation over time or like saving up time that's what it's all about and i

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think that this this is is only partially true until we discover bitcoin because now we have

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something that is a perfect representation of the finiteness of every human being's lifetime so

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So sats are as scarce or even more scarce than your minutes on this planet.

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So there's a very, what are your thoughts around that?

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There's a link there for sure.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And so this is where, you know, I also think the idea of the problem of time being is being

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upstream of money because there were interest-bearing loans before mechanical clocks, but the modern

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interest-bearing loan came after.

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And Edward Chancellor wrote a book.

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He's a financial historian, wrote a book in the last year called The Price of Time, which is a really great history of interest in how we evolved that concept.

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I think that, you know, why this matters for civilization is the time problem as it's currently constructed forces a never-ending compression on the time horizon of decision-making, which is a bad thing when you're trying to like, yeah, civilization.

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That's not a lowering on time preference, but the opposite.

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Like it's a higher and higher time preference.

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Yeah.

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And so what do I come back to your question about?

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I think that when I was talking earlier about the idea that the clock is this really base reduction of an idea so that everybody can understand it.

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Bitcoin as a clock is the reverse.

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And as a system for describing reality, it actually offers a completely new way of describing a set of information.

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And what it's doing is it's unifying value and time into a single expression.

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And it does that because blocks have an associated and fixed number of the block reward attached to that unit of time.

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So in the current system, clocks can describe seconds and minutes and hours.

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and then independent of that we have 180 different currencies that are we're all trying to use

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and compare to each other and then we we smush those together to price time yeah so it's almost

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like thinking about describing the size of this table by either having the length and the width

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of it or by having the area so to me bitcoin transforms that information into into a single

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expression by sort of bonding the relationship between energy and time, value and time, sorry,

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with energy in a permanent and predictable way. So this is how it becomes really a civilization

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level technology for changing the way we think about value and time, no longer as being separate

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things and being sort of one unified expression. So could you say that all fiat currencies are

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really broken clocks yeah totally yeah yeah and so this is where i think like it's such an

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interesting thing because we spend so much time talking about broken money and it's i don't even

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know that you can properly capture the problem without incorporating a clock into it and talking

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about how important time because you know we think about when we think about an expenditure or planning

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we always think about how long it's going to take and this is partly the reason why we don't build

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buildings that take 300 years anymore um the price of lumber went up like 700 in the last 20 years

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so you can't even think in 20 years to build a to build a building and you know i have a chapter in

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my book that's titled beauty is a symptom of a thriving civilization you know and we really i

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feel and part of what is inspiring about bitcoin is thinking about all these cool changes that

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could result as a if we had mass adopted as a monetary technology and i think we could experience

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even cooler changes if we were to adopt it as a time technology because another really amazing

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thing that bitcoin offers is so you know i think that the human mind it takes a certain amount of

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time for us to ingest an idea. The human mind needs time to think. And this is actually what is

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sort of under constant attack in the notification society that we have found ourselves in.

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And if you want to scale that out into a group the bigger you scale the group the more time is required consensus takes time and so the bitcoin clock has built into it this really incredible mechanism where the fastest we can ever

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agree on something is around 10 minutes yeah which is actually i think it's a it's critical

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It's really important because it's almost creating a safeguard for us around the never-ending acceleration of the expectation for us to be able to think at a certain speed.

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And this is becoming more important as AI can produce content at rates that we can't even begin to digest.

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and so you know you scale this out to yeah to to all of civilization and bitcoin offers um you know

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like a respite it gives us some room to to breathe yeah and then we can think again and start thinking

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about planning things on appropriate time horizons and this is the beauty of the difficulty adjustment

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algorithm i think gg goes into this like how the 10 minutes decides the two weeks or the 2016 blocks

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because the it adjusts according to if it actually took 10 minutes or not and then the two weeks

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decide the 10 minutes what that means so it's like circular and it's just a thing of beauty if

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you properly understand i am yet to to encounter a person who is like against bitcoin that

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understands the difficulty adjustment uh algorithm that it simply such a person does not exist yeah

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i mean you could blow that idea all the way out to in the book i talk about it's a it's a causal

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loop between 2009 and 2140 the exact same mechanism you just described is actually operating on a

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over a century-long scale it's breathing and i mean that's incredible like if you think about

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So the last block, you were talking earlier about the time cons as it's being pushed to the present moment.

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This future moment in 2140, the last block, it exists right now because it has to.

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Because the first block and the mechanism that connects those two moments.

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And we're somewhere in the middle.

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Yeah, and that's just mind-blowing to think about this stuff.

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So one interesting question.

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I had a very good guest, my good friend Falker, talking about free will and how it either cannot exist or presupposes a soul or something supernatural going on.

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Or what I suspect could be like quantum entanglement back in time or something like that.

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It's just very hard to grasp.

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But the idea is the synapse in your brain will have to precede the decision made by your brain.

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So that would allude to free will.

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That free will couldn't exist because the electrons would have to fire off before the decision is made.

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And you can actually measure the consciousness comes with a delay.

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So what we think are our own rational decisions is really our consciousness playing up whatever our brain did for us.

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so some part of our brain made the decision uh and it doesn't really matter to praxeology i mean we

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we do see but we do decide on what means to use to reach certain ends that that that process happens

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anyway regardless of whether free will exists or not it's the framework is still correct

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but it's fascinating to think about because it's so such an outlandish thought that we

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couldn't have free will and i i like the christopher hitchens quote of course we have

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free will we have no choice but to have it but it's such a fascinating paradox so does the book

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go into that at all a little bit i was recommended there there are a few books that really inspired

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the idea together and the one of the last ones that i read that kind of finished the concept of

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the book for me is a book called the user illusion by a danish author uh tor nor tanders and uh it's

295
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a really really great read um user illusion is uh is a rossus album oh yeah um i wonder which

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came first i think they're about the same age so in user illusion uh you know one of the one of the

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core uh arguments around the idea is that actually the sensory information from the different senses

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in your body arrives to the brain with a different latency so sight is the first signal that your

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brain takes in touch smell you know they don't they don't stream in simultaneously now your toes

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if you get hit on the toe that takes longer than for you to get hit on the head yeah so it's so it's

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you know in addition to what you were describing your brain actually delivers to you you know we

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we think we're, we're experiencing life in real time, but our brain is delivering, uh, a composite

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of all of that information on a slight tape delay. Yeah. So we're like half a second after. Yeah.

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Otherwise it would be like watching a badly dubbed movie, uh, you know, and everything would

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be completely insane. I hope the YouTube video won't be out of sync here. It would be a good

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illustration of what's actually going on. So, so that's, that's a really powerful idea because

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that on its own eliminates the idea that we are we're all operating in real time where we are not

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experiencing reality that in the way that we think we are and i think that uh you know and so part b

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of that is that it's also true that the brain is performing all kinds of procedures for us

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to help us make sense of this experience unconscious things that just happen

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so i think of it a little bit like the brain is like a blockchain because this this is what this

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is how bitcoin works right and i think it's it's probably not uncoincidental that that's how bitcoin

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works it's a mirror of consciousness and so what's happening there is that there is a certain amount

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of uncertainty as as information is organized and your brain is taking in all these different things

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sort of pruning them deciding what version of it you're going to get and then once you get that

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it's permanent and it happened and you filter the spam off yes yeah you have the longest chain

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and uh so i wonder about how much of that process is on is invisible to us you know beyond beyond the

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half a second delay and to your question about time i think it's very possible that

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the experience that we experience of linear time is simply a result of the ordering mechanism that

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exists inside the brain would this explain why you know you experience time differently at

321
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different ages yeah totally and things like uh deja vu or intuition this could be more thought

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of is like an unconfirmed block in the mempool it's possible that we it's like pre-membering

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you know like we just we we haven't sorted that data out yet but you know because coming back to

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you know physics and time there's actually a lot of debate and unsettlement around you know being

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able to prove what time is as a fundamental force.

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Whether or not these things are interdependent of each other is also difficult to prove or

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know.

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I mean, this is so fascinating because it reminds me of a theory I once read about,

329
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which is kind of out there, called the memetic theory of reality or something like that.

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The premise is that objective reality is where our subjective interpretations of it collide.

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So that's why both you and I perceive this to be a table, for instance, instead of just fluctuations in the wave function of the whatever Higgs boson field.

332
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I don't know the correct terms.

333
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And also that it sort of aligns with that idea of the mempool.

334
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In Bitcoin, there's no such thing as the mempool.

335
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We all have different mempools.

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we finally decide on the the what actually ends up in the block that's that's what manifests in

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reality and consciousness creating reality around it like the saying is we don't experience the

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reality the way it is we objective reality the way it is we experience it the way we are so uh

339
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So, and this could, yeah, this sort of maps onto that.

340
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Yeah.

341
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Yeah.

342
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So, you know, I think that coming back to this idea of Bitcoin as a civilizational clock,

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there's a really big idea here around what we've done as the result of centralizing time.

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And I don't think we really think about time as being centralized in the same way we think

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about it as money, as being centralized.

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but like most people actually get told what time it is today by either apple or samsung

347
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you know time is incredibly standardized or centralized and it's it's become so unquestioned

348
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it's like just something that runs in the background and i think that in some ways

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because civilization really is the the most immense coordination project that we have

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and and it rests on uh sort of a lattice of unquestioned beliefs right like we just don't

351
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have the bandwidth to be continually evaluating everything so we come to an agreement on something

352
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something makes sense okay now that's good let's go on to solving some of the problem

353
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but again like there was a civilization that existed in a different period of time and and

354
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people so we were building great things before mechanoplocks pyramids megaliths and the this

355
00:36:34,962 --> 00:36:42,682
the this was before uh centralized time enabled shared time to be scaled beyond a physical

356
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geography and i'd say this is why the great things that happened before mechanical clocks

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really happened in one shared space you know this is why you have like eza uh we could accomplish

358
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incredible things but it was where everyone was sort of in one locality and uh and that's progressed

359
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through to the to the current age but the the transition proves that a transition is possible

360
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so it's like if you believe as a bitcoiner that it's possible for us to adopt an entirely new

361
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agreement about what we think money is and how money should work it should also be possible that

362
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time is on the table and that we could adopt again a new way of thinking about how we agree

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at scale around the order that things happen and uh and if we do that in this new way

364
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that not only incorporates how much time it took, but what it was worth.

365
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That's a really step function improvement

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in the sophistication of how we're thinking about the information we use to describe our reality.

367
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Would you be a proponent of changing the calendar to before and after Satoshi,

368
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calling everything before Satoshi BS?

369
00:38:01,982 --> 00:38:23,262
Yeah. And like stopping this nonsense of thinking that we're living 2026 years after the alleged birth of a carpenter's son in a desert somewhere and like just start viewing Bitcoin as the true birth of the actual distributed timekeeping.

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Yeah, actually, I think it completely makes sense because, you know, there are lots of ideas that the year is made up. And, you know, so I think that the one thing that Bitcoin offers civilization is the basis for the expectation of a rational civilization.

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You know like all of our institutions should be should revolve around this incorruptible thing that can be co by anyone Like that should be a non starting point for the basis of you know kind of what i call it again a new golden age like if we want to

372
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these things need to be wrested away from

373
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uh the ability to to corrupt them and to to certain people's advantages and that's it's not

374
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just money right so we need to come up with another term in golden age though it should be

375
00:39:17,288 --> 00:39:29,128
like a clockwork orange yeah yeah yeah and so i think um i i hope so the problem is that you know

376
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we still need we will still need for coordination purposes units that are more accurate than blocks

377
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and so i think it is it's i know where do i suggest that we're going to stop wearing watches

378
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And I always caution around, I think it's so cool to think about what Bitcoin could become.

379
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But in Age of Time specifically, I'm very careful with the kind of pronouncements I make about what Bitcoin might be.

380
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I let other people fool around with more experimental ideas and conjecture.

381
00:40:06,808 --> 00:40:08,208
It's actually very rooted.

382
00:40:08,208 --> 00:40:21,668
It's a very grounded in reality discussion around, you know, this thing about mechanical timekeeping is like central banks is an innovation that for its time was really important.

383
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Well, meaning served a very, you know, a critical stage in the progression of the complexity of civilization.

384
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and the trade-off of that centralization has produced some problems that i think could be

385
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remedied by a continued investigation about what could be better so so would you say like uh because

386
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you can't really inflate minutes but but as it's sort of like maybe it's akin more to the gold

387
00:40:51,128 --> 00:40:57,488
standards of prices or it's the illusion of stable prices is the the same as the illusion of stable

388
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minutes i guess then yeah i mean so i think this is the the core issue with having these numbers be

389
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related but not fixed to each other so in the mechanical time fiat world the units of time

390
00:41:09,228 --> 00:41:15,788
are fixed and don't change but the value is totally arbitrary and changing all the time and so

391
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when they're bonded together in a sensible and permanent way um it just eliminates

392
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basically like you know you you need one number to express how much value is some kind of

393
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combination of energy and time and uh you know so if you you should be able to think i think

394
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think about it like a triangle and you know it's like with a with an isosceles triangle if you know

395
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the information about two sides you should be able to figure out the third so if you know how much

396
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time something took and how much it cost to make you like you should know what it's worth

397
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and if you know how you know like there should be some marxist to me though like labor theory

398
00:41:55,408 --> 00:42:01,708
values sort of thing because it doesn't really align with subjective valuations does it like

399
00:42:01,708 --> 00:42:08,068
it just because you put a lot of time and effort into something doesn't mean that i value it and

400
00:42:08,068 --> 00:42:15,908
want to buy it off of you yeah that's true so how do you square that i think that so it's it's

401
00:42:15,908 --> 00:42:23,988
potentially a better solution to this that what we have now where the value that what we have to

402
00:42:23,988 --> 00:42:33,908
describe value makes so little sense that uh i just i see that as a bigger fish to fry where uh

403
00:42:33,908 --> 00:42:40,448
the economic theory around how that actually works in practice becomes developed by other people who

404
00:42:40,448 --> 00:42:45,888
are living in that world when once that system's been adopted if that makes yeah yeah yeah i'd say

405
00:42:45,888 --> 00:42:49,628
The way I view it relates to value in a different way.

406
00:42:50,628 --> 00:43:09,174
The higher valuations are implicit and sort of inevitable because of the scarcity of the asset and how perfectly it represents the scarcity of human time So all prices drop forever is the thesis Everything divided by 21 million thesis or whatever you may call it

407
00:43:09,654 --> 00:43:15,894
but in theory could drop forever, but it will fluctuate forever also.

408
00:43:15,894 --> 00:43:24,254
I think about it like Bitcoin is a system that is capturing more and more information

409
00:43:24,254 --> 00:43:27,074
about all of the activity that's happening in the world.

410
00:43:27,074 --> 00:43:33,774
yeah and then they have in the everything but divided by 21 million thesis at some point all

411
00:43:33,774 --> 00:43:40,494
of the information about all of the activity would be captured by that system and so in that system

412
00:43:40,494 --> 00:43:47,334
this idea of the three things together uh it has the ability to capture all of the information

413
00:43:47,334 --> 00:43:54,554
and it also has the ability to measure the time so that and then in so in that way

414
00:43:54,554 --> 00:44:03,794
it has the ability to value everything that is being valued is related to the time so like all

415
00:44:03,794 --> 00:44:09,474
of the economic activity in the world for 10 minutes is captured in that in that in that

416
00:44:09,474 --> 00:44:15,374
discrete measurement and then as a result we'll find some way to value everything inside that and

417
00:44:15,374 --> 00:44:20,574
properly like unrelated to each other because if we back it up one step further to what we're doing

418
00:44:20,574 --> 00:44:26,034
now it is all these separate systems that have nothing to do with each other currencies that

419
00:44:26,034 --> 00:44:32,814
don't have any you know we have to then artificially figure out some kind of way to evaluate them to

420
00:44:32,814 --> 00:44:38,694
each other and in this world it's more like you know if i'm um you know creating aluminum in

421
00:44:38,694 --> 00:44:43,474
canada and sending it to argentina to make boats like you know we're operating in some unified

422
00:44:43,474 --> 00:44:49,514
system where it's it's one expression one number there's a lot to figure out in between but

423
00:44:49,514 --> 00:44:54,094
that's kind of how i see it evolving did you see a movie called i think it's called in time

424
00:44:54,094 --> 00:45:01,774
justin timberlake is it this place that uh where instead of money you have a certain amount of

425
00:45:01,774 --> 00:45:07,374
seconds left on your life i think that's a bitcoin movie without knowing it's a bitcoin movie yeah

426
00:45:07,374 --> 00:45:14,914
totally i mean i can think a lot of the time movies are it's uh because for individuals you

427
00:45:14,914 --> 00:45:21,874
know bitcoin is a negotiation with your future self every time you spend bitcoin yeah that's why

428
00:45:21,874 --> 00:45:26,874
i don't like the term store value by the way i think it's a medium of change over time and space

429
00:45:26,874 --> 00:45:32,474
so it's four-dimensional medium of a change and you're saving or hodling is just trading with

430
00:45:32,474 --> 00:45:37,554
your future self yeah yeah and so i think that that understanding whether it's conscious or

431
00:45:37,554 --> 00:45:43,034
unconscious is what drives the behavioral change and that subjective change in the experience of

432
00:45:43,034 --> 00:45:53,014
time and i think that that scales to collective consciousness and we we can all experience that

433
00:45:53,014 --> 00:45:59,594
and so age of time really at the end of it is a thought experiment around what happens when

434
00:45:59,594 --> 00:46:07,994
humanity is actually ingested at different clock because our built world our built environment

435
00:46:07,994 --> 00:46:15,754
has transformed immensely under the programming, the operating system of mechanical time.

436
00:46:16,634 --> 00:46:24,994
And so it, to me, is rational to expect that we will move forward and design a very different

437
00:46:24,994 --> 00:46:31,174
physical environment to inhabit when we have all come to a different agreement around what

438
00:46:31,174 --> 00:46:32,514
time is and what it's worth.

439
00:46:33,394 --> 00:46:37,474
Have you explored that as an actual scaling solution for Bitcoin?

440
00:46:37,474 --> 00:46:43,454
because one thing i thought i've had for a long time is that if if we all lower our time preference

441
00:46:43,454 --> 00:46:48,974
and if we all get richer over time because of number go up or purchasing power go up which is

442
00:46:48,974 --> 00:46:57,474
more accurate then we will use money less and less over time so so uh the future i foresee

443
00:46:57,474 --> 00:47:04,174
like i view microtransactions as a very keynesian fiat thing so instead of paying a euro every time

444
00:47:04,174 --> 00:47:22,120
I go to the bathroom in the Central Station somewhere in Europe today I will pay a one Bitcoin payment for a lifetime subscription to all the train rides I want in my life because the receiver of the money is incentivized to get it as soon as possible because purchasing power goes up over time

445
00:47:22,120 --> 00:47:27,040
So I see fewer and fewer transactions happening and that being a good thing.

446
00:47:27,460 --> 00:47:32,780
And that deflation and the velocity of money being the biggest lie ever told, really.

447
00:47:34,020 --> 00:47:36,460
Have you thought about that and around that?

448
00:47:36,620 --> 00:47:37,320
Yeah, absolutely.

449
00:47:37,980 --> 00:47:45,120
And I think it's, again, an example of one of those things where it starts in the individual person.

450
00:47:45,120 --> 00:47:52,220
And civilization is a collection of individual persons conforming to a shared set of rules.

451
00:47:53,440 --> 00:48:00,120
And so as we all do this, it starts to make sense again to think about building something that takes 300 years.

452
00:48:00,680 --> 00:48:07,340
And this is what they're doing in China with trying to reforest the Gobi Desert.

453
00:48:07,340 --> 00:48:14,560
so there is a massive multi-decade projects and you know i think china is a great one thing that

454
00:48:14,560 --> 00:48:20,240
they're really doing better than the rest of the world is behaving like a proper country and thinking

455
00:48:20,240 --> 00:48:26,400
and things thinking in terms of time preference yes at least yeah not in all ways not in all ways

456
00:48:26,400 --> 00:48:32,440
but in in that exact way they uh you know and it's i think partly because i i lived in china

457
00:48:32,440 --> 00:48:40,980
20 years ago and they are one of the oldest continuous civilizations and they they have a

458
00:48:40,980 --> 00:48:46,900
different way of thinking about long duration because of how old their their culture is and

459
00:48:46,900 --> 00:48:52,680
so this time consciousness thing is fascinating to me because you know how it works in bitcoin i

460
00:48:52,680 --> 00:48:57,920
think is you know how it works in the individual human mind and i think it's it's how it works

461
00:48:57,920 --> 00:49:03,1000
in civilization yeah ironically enough i have to check the time here because i know that you're

462
00:49:03,1000 --> 00:49:10,940
about one block away from having to be on stage upstairs uh it would be better maybe if if they

463
00:49:10,940 --> 00:49:17,560
measured if they put the program in block heights instead of maybe we're not there yet but you have

464
00:49:17,560 --> 00:49:23,120
to be there in about nine minutes so we need to close this out pretty soon uh but before we do

465
00:49:23,120 --> 00:49:28,760
Is there anything here we haven't covered that you'd like to talk about a bit more?

466
00:49:29,160 --> 00:49:32,260
I don't know if there's anything that really jumps out.

467
00:49:32,960 --> 00:49:36,620
If you're interested, the book is available on Amazon.

468
00:49:37,040 --> 00:49:41,120
And I also have a personal website for it, theageoftime.com.

469
00:49:41,940 --> 00:49:47,200
And if you want to buy the book for SATs, that's where you can do that.

470
00:49:49,080 --> 00:49:49,600
Yeah.

471
00:49:49,600 --> 00:49:54,440
And if people want to contact you, will you even respond?

472
00:49:54,440 --> 00:49:57,400
Yeah, actually, honestly, very much.

473
00:49:57,900 --> 00:50:01,320
And I'm super interested in people's feedback on the book.

474
00:50:01,440 --> 00:50:03,620
If you read it, I'd love to hear from you.

475
00:50:04,560 --> 00:50:06,280
I'm on Twitter and Noster.

476
00:50:07,160 --> 00:50:08,140
The handles are the same.

477
00:50:08,300 --> 00:50:09,460
It's a lantern Bitcoin.

478
00:50:10,720 --> 00:50:13,720
And the lantern is, I just made a short story about that.

479
00:50:13,800 --> 00:50:14,660
I talk about it in the book.

480
00:50:14,660 --> 00:50:20,480
i'm fascinated by lantern lanterns are one of the oldest human technologies

481
00:50:20,480 --> 00:50:31,060
and uh it's a technology for transmitting light enlightenment yeah yeah i guess yeah and uh you

482
00:50:31,060 --> 00:50:39,700
know this the point of having a lantern is so that you could transport light and uh and so that's

483
00:50:39,700 --> 00:50:44,580
sort of where the idea came from and it's uh it's an important part of the book because

484
00:50:44,580 --> 00:50:49,040
you know i think these throughout throughout the history of civilization

485
00:50:49,040 --> 00:50:56,300
are a number of different inventions rooted in hope and and the lantern is one of them

486
00:50:56,300 --> 00:51:03,180
yeah fantastic yeah we're here at the bitcoin island conference in dublin we're having a great

487
00:51:03,180 --> 00:51:08,300
time here you should come and visit next year we go to more bitcoin conferences in general

488
00:51:08,300 --> 00:51:09,300
Yeah.

489
00:51:09,300 --> 00:51:12,300
And yeah, I think that's about it.

490
00:51:12,300 --> 00:51:13,300
Thank you very much.

491
00:51:13,300 --> 00:51:14,300
It's a real pleasure.

492
00:51:14,300 --> 00:51:15,300
Yeah.

493
00:51:15,300 --> 00:51:16,300
Likewise.

494
00:51:16,300 --> 00:51:19,300
This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show Dublin edition.

495
00:51:19,300 --> 00:51:21,300
Brush your teeth and see you next time.