1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,040
Thanks for joining us here.

2
00:00:01,740 --> 00:00:04,500
We again are doing a day-night doubleheader.

3
00:00:04,720 --> 00:00:05,680
This is the second.

4
00:00:05,880 --> 00:00:09,800
Earlier today, we talked to David Sampson about our tribal future.

5
00:00:11,600 --> 00:00:18,620
And now we're diving into what is possibly one of the more,

6
00:00:18,620 --> 00:00:23,560
I used this term before, psychedelic understandings of Bitcoin.

7
00:00:23,560 --> 00:00:34,140
we're talking about the article bitcoin is time by the inimitable der gg and in this article der

8
00:00:34,140 --> 00:00:43,080
gg is going to lay out for us and help us understand that there are actually two times

9
00:00:43,080 --> 00:00:50,180
there is the one on my wrist the seconds and minutes and hours but then there is the time

10
00:00:50,180 --> 00:00:53,140
that is kept by Bitcoin, which is blocks.

11
00:00:54,100 --> 00:01:01,760
And how can we leave the native understanding of time that we have,

12
00:01:02,080 --> 00:01:03,800
which is that what we're born with,

13
00:01:03,840 --> 00:01:06,360
and we understand it the same way we do gravity,

14
00:01:06,540 --> 00:01:08,340
which is that we don't really understand it at all.

15
00:01:08,620 --> 00:01:10,020
We just live in it.

16
00:01:10,800 --> 00:01:15,180
So how can we kind of bring our understanding to this new

17
00:01:15,780 --> 00:01:19,360
and perhaps even more real world?

18
00:01:20,180 --> 00:01:24,640
in such that real is real, understanding of what time is.

19
00:01:25,460 --> 00:01:31,860
And to do that, to lead us off, as always, our lead-off hitter, undefeated world champion.

20
00:01:32,020 --> 00:01:33,680
Coming off the bench just for this.

21
00:01:33,880 --> 00:01:34,400
That's right.

22
00:01:34,960 --> 00:01:35,460
Bring it to us, man.

23
00:01:35,460 --> 00:01:36,560
Coming off the top rope.

24
00:01:36,600 --> 00:01:37,520
Tell me about time.

25
00:01:37,580 --> 00:01:42,200
To engage in the psychedelic endeavor of unraveling time in digital space.

26
00:01:42,360 --> 00:01:43,760
We're going to see what this is all about.

27
00:01:44,100 --> 00:01:47,420
This essay could be very technical.

28
00:01:47,720 --> 00:01:49,220
We could make it super technical.

29
00:01:49,220 --> 00:01:55,140
you can get deep into the bowels of Bitcoin's operation on the mathematics and all that.

30
00:01:55,660 --> 00:02:01,380
I'm going to say that we're not going to do that because we don't want to, because we're going to make that's a nice way to say.

31
00:02:01,800 --> 00:02:05,020
Let's just say because we don't have the intellectual horsepower between the two.

32
00:02:05,100 --> 00:02:11,380
Yeah, I've been I mean, I've been cradling mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos here going over and over again.

33
00:02:11,380 --> 00:02:14,740
The chapters on cryptographic hash functions, the blockchain.

34
00:02:15,200 --> 00:02:18,740
But we're going to take this at a high level because this is also this is a very philosophical essay.

35
00:02:18,740 --> 00:02:41,500
And that's what we want to talk about. This essay is about time and its relation to money in really two broad ways. First, time is money. It's a popular saying, but there's also some truth to that. Time makes something usable as money. Time enforces scarcity in the real world. We think of the value of gold. We could say that it is valuable because it is yellow. Probably not.

36
00:02:41,500 --> 00:02:48,460
We could say it is valuable because it takes a lot of time to dredge it up from the earth and to bring it to our usage introduced into circulation.

37
00:02:48,640 --> 00:02:51,140
The time behind gold mining makes it valuable.

38
00:02:51,240 --> 00:02:58,380
We're going to see the time behind Bitcoin, the time it takes to mine, the time it takes to do computation is going to make Bitcoin valuable.

39
00:02:59,140 --> 00:03:04,480
Also, the second part in the bulk of this essay, money requires time.

40
00:03:04,900 --> 00:03:08,520
Money requires time to order its transaction.

41
00:03:08,520 --> 00:03:19,720
It requires a sort of physical law structure of time in order to ensure that if I give something to one person, I can't then turn around and give it to another person.

42
00:03:19,900 --> 00:03:27,400
That I gave it to one person first, and if I try to give it to another person second, we can determine who has priority between the two.

43
00:03:28,020 --> 00:03:29,600
This is the double spend problem.

44
00:03:29,840 --> 00:03:35,020
This essay actually helps us understand the double spend problem at a deeper level.

45
00:03:35,020 --> 00:03:39,280
If you've heard that phrase, the double spend problem, kind of wondering, why is this even a problem?

46
00:03:40,120 --> 00:03:42,540
Discussing time really gets us to the pith of that.

47
00:03:43,420 --> 00:03:53,880
And as I said, the second sense, money requiring time for its operation to order transactions to determine which transactions are valid, that's going to occupy the bulk of this essay.

48
00:03:54,140 --> 00:03:58,980
A quick summary of the argument then of this essay, the structure of it.

49
00:03:59,300 --> 00:04:01,620
Money in a digital age requires ledgers.

50
00:04:02,320 --> 00:04:10,180
Ledgers then require an unambiguous order to the transactions that occur on the ledger and order requires time.

51
00:04:10,840 --> 00:04:11,360
Yes.

52
00:04:11,820 --> 00:04:12,060
Money.

53
00:04:13,360 --> 00:04:15,540
Money as such requires ledgers, right?

54
00:04:15,760 --> 00:04:17,780
Not just in digital, but in physical.

55
00:04:18,140 --> 00:04:18,920
There can be two times.

56
00:04:19,160 --> 00:04:20,440
We're going to talk about that in a second.

57
00:04:20,440 --> 00:04:27,320
So, okay, ledgers require an unambiguous order to transactions that occur on the ledger and order requires time.

58
00:04:27,320 --> 00:04:32,620
then a trustless ledger, which is what we want, must maintain its own time.

59
00:04:33,020 --> 00:04:38,540
Because if you want to be truly trustless, you can't trust time as such from any external source.

60
00:04:38,760 --> 00:04:43,720
You can't look at the luminary clock in the sky, as DurrGG has a quote, I think, from Auden or Elliot.

61
00:04:44,240 --> 00:04:46,400
You can't trust any external source.

62
00:04:46,840 --> 00:04:49,760
No physical protocol can even gaze up at the sky, obviously.

63
00:04:50,100 --> 00:04:53,660
It is in its own locked-in space where time does not exist.

64
00:04:53,660 --> 00:04:58,180
and to be trustless, it can't trust anybody else to tell it what the time is.

65
00:04:58,180 --> 00:05:01,520
And yet to be functional for us, it must have a sense of time.

66
00:05:01,600 --> 00:05:03,460
But let's rewind to the first point.

67
00:05:03,540 --> 00:05:05,600
And we're going to get to Lucas's point here.

68
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:07,920
Money in the digital age requires ledgers.

69
00:05:08,140 --> 00:05:09,380
What else could money be?

70
00:05:09,800 --> 00:05:14,480
Well, there's two types, Derjiji points out, two ways to account for,

71
00:05:14,780 --> 00:05:17,600
we may say anything, but here, at least for the purposes of money,

72
00:05:17,900 --> 00:05:19,500
there can be a ledger or a token.

73
00:05:20,080 --> 00:05:23,260
A token is a physical, tangible thing.

74
00:05:23,260 --> 00:05:30,320
you give somebody a token in the real world and they then have that token and you don't it's a

75
00:05:30,320 --> 00:05:35,500
unique collection of atoms that's a token a ledger is different a ledger is an accounting book

76
00:05:35,500 --> 00:05:41,240
in which to transfer one thing to another person you make a debit in one account and you write it

77
00:05:41,240 --> 00:05:48,280
out in as a positive um account and the other person's balance so the difference tokens directly

78
00:05:48,280 --> 00:05:53,080
represent the state of who has what you literally have the physical coin so they're trustless you

79
00:05:53,080 --> 00:05:57,760
don't have to trust that you have the physical coin the laws of space and time thermodynamics

80
00:05:57,760 --> 00:06:03,540
ensure that coin is what you have ledgers indirectly represent the state of things their

81
00:06:03,540 --> 00:06:09,940
lists their account books they need a designated ledger keeper and you have to then trust that

82
00:06:09,940 --> 00:06:17,040
ledger keeper to keep the ledger in a trustworthy fashion and here's one final point on this you

83
00:06:17,040 --> 00:06:22,000
have this is what kind of lucas was getting at in the digital realm there is only the ledger you

84
00:06:22,000 --> 00:06:27,120
can't have tokens in the digital realm. And this is such a brilliant observation in this essay.

85
00:06:27,380 --> 00:06:33,880
And one of the recurring themes in talking about Bitcoin now is Bitcoin, not crypto. And one of the

86
00:06:33,880 --> 00:06:39,820
things that crypto people talk about is having digital tokens. We know after reading this essay

87
00:06:39,820 --> 00:06:45,980
that digital tokens are a contradiction. Tokens are physical, real world, tangible things.

88
00:06:46,720 --> 00:06:47,540
Why does this matter?

89
00:06:48,120 --> 00:06:54,040
If you say a digital token, you're presuming that you can move the token around a digital space.

90
00:06:54,180 --> 00:06:56,460
But there is no movement in digital space.

91
00:06:56,560 --> 00:06:58,220
There is no space, properly speaking.

92
00:06:58,380 --> 00:07:00,080
We call it that, kind of as an abstraction.

93
00:07:01,220 --> 00:07:07,200
When you move, quote unquote, in digital space, you copy something in one location and paste it in another.

94
00:07:07,560 --> 00:07:08,260
Did it move?

95
00:07:08,480 --> 00:07:11,080
No, because it's still, it's now in two places, right?

96
00:07:11,080 --> 00:07:13,520
It's where you copied it from and where you pasted it to.

97
00:07:13,520 --> 00:07:20,820
You now have two of the thing unless you trust a centralized ledger keeper to delete the thing that was copied and pasted.

98
00:07:21,660 --> 00:07:39,300
So digital ledgers then require trust if you're going to, quote unquote, move value digitally or move anything digitally because you have to trust that the person maintaining the ledger not only added the thing in one person's balance, but also deleted it in the other.

99
00:07:39,760 --> 00:07:44,300
So that's the first, I guess, really premise and observation of this essay.

100
00:07:45,100 --> 00:07:54,540
And if you stop watching right now, you've got more than enough value from this conversation because this is such a brilliant observation that there are tokens and ledgers and there can only be ledgers in digital space.

101
00:07:54,540 --> 00:08:04,740
Yeah. So ledgers are accounting. Ledgers are not ledgers are an abstraction of what occurs in the real world.

102
00:08:04,740 --> 00:08:13,380
when I take $50 out of my account and I give it to you and you put it in your account.

103
00:08:14,020 --> 00:08:20,560
I did that physically, but what happened on the back end was that there's this abstraction,

104
00:08:20,800 --> 00:08:27,280
there's this digital accounting, there's this digital record that also reflects that.

105
00:08:28,280 --> 00:08:34,160
And it's so important for us to understand that the token is a physical thing,

106
00:08:34,160 --> 00:08:39,280
that it is, it cannot, there is not a token in the digital world.

107
00:08:39,700 --> 00:08:45,280
There is an abstraction of a token that this thing does not actually move

108
00:08:45,280 --> 00:08:46,380
because how could it move?

109
00:08:46,460 --> 00:08:50,200
Because digital is not, it has no space.

110
00:08:50,320 --> 00:08:51,960
It has no physics.

111
00:08:52,360 --> 00:08:53,680
Turns out Tron was not a documentary.

112
00:08:54,180 --> 00:08:54,600
Yeah.

113
00:08:55,220 --> 00:08:55,520
Yeah.

114
00:08:56,220 --> 00:09:00,360
And so how do we think about that?

115
00:09:00,360 --> 00:09:07,020
And the way that I put that into my mind was I, we had an instance with the band.

116
00:09:07,120 --> 00:09:08,960
We went up and we played in South Dakota.

117
00:09:09,080 --> 00:09:11,080
We came back, we stopped at a gas station.

118
00:09:11,680 --> 00:09:16,100
And late at night, some people are sleeping, some people are not.

119
00:09:16,960 --> 00:09:19,700
Fill up with fuel, we get in and we get out.

120
00:09:19,900 --> 00:09:28,720
And in my mind, I had a ledger of who had gotten off the bus and who, you know, who was sleeping when I left the bus.

121
00:09:28,720 --> 00:09:52,260
And so I got back in and in my mind, my ledger said that everybody was on the bus. I took off a mile down the road. I got a call from my guitar player standing outside the gas station saying that we left it. And I realized then, you know, like later on, I'd heard a story from a traveling band that talked about the way that they accounted for that was they had their hats.

122
00:09:52,260 --> 00:10:20,740
And if you're on the bus, your hat is on the dash. That's your physical token that lets you know that you're there. Much like in the essay, Durjiji talks about the shepherd bringing in the sheep. And you could either count the sheep and make a mark or you could take the collar off the sheep and hang it on the wall. That's the token. You could always miscount. But you can't, you know, there's a hook for every, there's a hook for every collar and there's a, there's a hook for, there's a collar for every sheep.

123
00:10:20,740 --> 00:10:49,500
Yeah. So that's actually that's more more reflect that that is the real world. And the ledger is just a reflection of the real world. And this is why I struggle a lot with the trustless idea, because we think about trust. Trust is good. I want to trust. You know, I trust you. You know, that's like, you know, people do business with those that they know they like and most importantly, that they trust.

124
00:10:49,500 --> 00:11:06,060
Yeah. And this understanding that in order for a monetary system to be pure, to work well, it cannot have trust. And Jason Lowry explained this so well in Softwar.

125
00:11:06,060 --> 00:11:15,820
the vagaries and the failings of a trusted system is that there is no example of a centralized

126
00:11:15,820 --> 00:11:22,420
system. The Catholic Church, the United States government, your Little League baseball coach,

127
00:11:22,540 --> 00:11:28,220
there's no example ever in history of trust that was put into a centralized system where that trust

128
00:11:28,220 --> 00:11:35,560
was not abused at the benefit of the trusted and at the detriment of the trusting.

129
00:11:35,560 --> 00:11:51,560
Yes. And from our conversation with David Samson this morning, he looks at Bitcoin as the resolution of the evolutionary problem of who we can trust, not because we can trust Bitcoin, but because we don't have to trust it. It eliminates this requirement of trust.

130
00:11:51,560 --> 00:11:59,900
Yes. So we can then scale trust infinitely in that we can trust in the system that we don't have to trust because it is verified.

131
00:11:59,900 --> 00:12:21,360
Yeah. So that's the first part. Money in a digital age requires ledgers. The second part, ledgers then require an unambiguous order to the transactions that occur on the ledger and orders require time. Ledgers have to make sure that transactions are sequential in time.

132
00:12:22,160 --> 00:12:23,980
This is the double spend problem.

133
00:12:24,420 --> 00:12:28,500
So a person in the real world, if they have a physical token, they can't double spend that.

134
00:12:28,560 --> 00:12:31,840
If they give the gold coin to one person, they can't turn around and give it to somebody else.

135
00:12:32,180 --> 00:12:35,940
I can't have my hat on my head and also on the dash of the bus.

136
00:12:36,060 --> 00:12:36,860
Yes, very true.

137
00:12:37,760 --> 00:12:41,140
Ledgers, though, you could do something like that in a sort of metaphorical sense.

138
00:12:41,140 --> 00:12:46,740
You can give the token to somebody and keep in your hand if you just like do some creative accounting, right?

139
00:12:46,740 --> 00:12:55,300
but if time is enforced on the ledger such that um there's an order to the transactions where if

140
00:12:55,300 --> 00:13:00,660
you do transaction one at point one in time and you try to do it again at point two in time you're

141
00:13:00,660 --> 00:13:05,120
barred from doing that if you have time to order your transaction that you can time stamp your

142
00:13:05,120 --> 00:13:11,640
transactions then you can even on a ledger enforce and prevent the double spend problem

143
00:13:11,640 --> 00:13:16,040
this is creating a before and an after

144
00:13:16,040 --> 00:13:16,960
essential to time

145
00:13:16,960 --> 00:13:20,100
usually this is done in a centralized way

146
00:13:20,100 --> 00:13:20,720
with a ledger

147
00:13:20,720 --> 00:13:22,360
we have a trusted party

148
00:13:22,360 --> 00:13:26,300
one person determine what the true time is

149
00:13:26,300 --> 00:13:27,480
operate the ledger

150
00:13:27,480 --> 00:13:30,080
and also timestamp all the transactions on the ledger

151
00:13:30,080 --> 00:13:33,560
again though this requires trusting a third party

152
00:13:33,560 --> 00:13:35,760
trusting the source of time

153
00:13:35,760 --> 00:13:39,080
not just the person who's doing the math

154
00:13:39,080 --> 00:13:47,020
But also, if somebody's telling that person the time that a transaction occurs, you need to be able to trust that person telling you the time.

155
00:13:47,440 --> 00:13:50,380
This is the very, very wild thing with this.

156
00:13:50,920 --> 00:13:57,300
Any external source of time that's an input into the digital realm could potentially be manipulated.

157
00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:01,680
This is a global distributed adversarial system.

158
00:14:01,960 --> 00:14:02,680
Bitcoin is.

159
00:14:02,920 --> 00:14:05,480
We have to assume everybody's an adversarial party.

160
00:14:05,480 --> 00:14:08,540
If anybody tells you anything, you want to be able to verify that.

161
00:14:08,540 --> 00:14:15,380
We can't then trust anybody to feed the time into Bitcoin to timestamp all the transactions.

162
00:14:16,280 --> 00:14:18,640
This is the real central problem of Bitcoin.

163
00:14:19,160 --> 00:14:27,200
Can a ledger that is not operated by a central entity take its time from somewhere that is not manipulable?

164
00:14:27,700 --> 00:14:31,020
And again, this is like it's in digital space.

165
00:14:31,080 --> 00:14:31,940
It's informational.

166
00:14:32,260 --> 00:14:34,080
It's not in the real world.

167
00:14:34,080 --> 00:14:40,040
There is no time inside the computer except for the time that we impose on it through external timekeeping mechanisms.

168
00:14:40,560 --> 00:14:46,600
A distributed ledger needs to synchronize the state of the system without having recourse to an external trusted input of time.

169
00:14:48,200 --> 00:15:03,560
Bitcoin's solution then is going to be to create time internal to it, to create its own sense of time in terms of its own internal functioning using only its own parts, anything that we put into it, any way that we interact with it.

170
00:15:03,560 --> 00:15:17,680
Satoshi had to sit down at a desk and a table and say, how can I use existing hashing algorithms, existing cryptography, the way that we're going to interact with them to create time and digital space?

171
00:15:17,920 --> 00:15:19,740
And he was able to do that.

172
00:15:20,000 --> 00:15:21,780
This is quite the solution.

173
00:15:22,260 --> 00:15:24,460
Bitcoin's own internal time as well.

174
00:15:24,460 --> 00:15:28,820
we're going to see not to get ahead of ourselves we're going to see that that internal time that

175
00:15:28,820 --> 00:15:33,760
it creates through its the functioning of its parts is going to bridge over into real world

176
00:15:33,760 --> 00:15:53,028
time so that we can then measure it in minutes in a sense too um bitcoin solution that is overall is going to be to create an internal timekeeping mechanism which is itself yeah yeah and we had so we used to have bearer money we used to have

177
00:15:53,028 --> 00:16:02,088
the gold coins and the silver coins and cash and then we moved to a system uh we could write drafts

178
00:16:02,088 --> 00:16:09,028
we could have checks. And when we wrote a check, we instantiated our own timekeeping mechanism on

179
00:16:09,028 --> 00:16:17,868
this by the date that we put on the check that we wrote it. And that, because we could control it

180
00:16:17,868 --> 00:16:24,148
individually, that could be manipulated. When I grew up, I very distinctly remember my mother

181
00:16:24,148 --> 00:16:32,368
writing checks that were future dated. You know, we owe you a hundred bucks or whatever. So

182
00:16:32,368 --> 00:16:38,608
here's a check, but today's August 5th. I wrote August 10th on there because the money's not

183
00:16:38,608 --> 00:16:42,728
there right now. And if you go try to cash that check, you won't get the money and I'll get an

184
00:16:42,728 --> 00:16:47,448
overdraft or maybe you'll get the money and I will get an overdraft if the bank is going to back you.

185
00:16:47,448 --> 00:16:52,788
But you're altering that timestamp on your own.

186
00:16:53,048 --> 00:16:58,428
And people figured out a way, like, I'm sure it didn't take very long for people to figure that out, right?

187
00:16:58,488 --> 00:16:59,928
They could future day checks.

188
00:17:01,308 --> 00:17:09,688
And so we had to figure out a way to solve for that type of manipulation as well.

189
00:17:10,708 --> 00:17:14,568
And so that's one part of it, which is the time.

190
00:17:14,568 --> 00:17:30,408
But then the other part of it is this decentralized part. So we know that we can't trust any one source. We can't trust the pope. We can't trust the president. We can't trust the guy down the street only because they have their own priorities.

191
00:17:30,408 --> 00:17:37,168
And those priorities, while maybe similar in the same direction to ours, don't perfectly match ours.

192
00:17:37,388 --> 00:17:41,608
And by the way, maybe our priorities are not great either.

193
00:17:42,348 --> 00:17:44,608
And so we have to have this decentralized thing.

194
00:17:44,608 --> 00:18:10,608
And this is the thought that I had before about introducing this as like a psychedelic conversation is that thinking of the Bitcoin ledger as a mycorrhizal structure, as the root system of of mushrooms, which, you know, you you go out and you look and there's all these mushrooms, but they they're all one organism and they all share the same structure.

195
00:18:10,608 --> 00:18:16,368
structure, much like there's a forest up in, I think it's a Utah that is, it looks as though

196
00:18:16,368 --> 00:18:22,948
there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of trees, but in actuality, they are all of the

197
00:18:22,948 --> 00:18:31,028
same root system. And so you can't pull one tree out by its roots because it has no root. It has

198
00:18:31,028 --> 00:18:38,688
roots that are embedded with all of the other ones. And so this is where I went back to this idea of,

199
00:18:38,688 --> 00:18:43,508
you know, okay, so time is money. Money is the root of all evil, but I believe that money

200
00:18:43,508 --> 00:18:50,408
has only been the root of all evil and described as such because it had a root. It had a centralized

201
00:18:50,408 --> 00:18:57,788
ledger. And when we remove that centralized ledger and we replace it with a decentralized one,

202
00:18:57,788 --> 00:19:04,548
I think what we do is we remove the evil from the system in that we give this sustainability

203
00:19:04,548 --> 00:19:09,368
so that it cannot be violated by any one individual.

204
00:19:10,888 --> 00:19:15,248
We remove the evil from the system by removing the humans from the system.

205
00:19:15,588 --> 00:19:17,988
To a certain extent, we're going to see there's going to be a human input,

206
00:19:18,128 --> 00:19:21,308
but the input is not going to be something that determines it.

207
00:19:21,308 --> 00:19:22,748
Yeah, randomness of humans.

208
00:19:22,748 --> 00:19:24,588
Yes, and it's going to be an essential part of it.

209
00:19:24,848 --> 00:19:30,588
So I mentioned where we're going with this, where Dergigi is going.

210
00:19:30,588 --> 00:19:38,948
Bitcoin is going to have to create itself into turn itself into an internal timekeeping mechanism because it can't trust external time.

211
00:19:39,088 --> 00:19:50,148
But before we create an internal before Bitcoin can be described as a timekeeping mechanism, if you're in the digital realm, you need to understand what it is you are measuring.

212
00:19:50,148 --> 00:20:02,648
That is, what is time? This is a very philosophical essay because Dear Gigi needs to inquire into what time is in order to understand what is it that Bitcoin is keeping a measure of through its operation.

213
00:20:02,648 --> 00:20:32,048
How do you keep time digitally if time doesn't exist digitally? There is no kind of indigenous digital time. There is a timeless informational realm. It's eternal. It's instant. It's instantaneous. It's all these things except for sequential arrow of time type reality that we live in where there is a now, which is on one side the past that has happened and the other side the future that is to come and we're moving along the arrow of time into the future.

214
00:20:32,048 --> 00:20:47,828
The digital realm is not like that. Time, Darjiji says, has two key aspects in the physical realm that Bitcoin is going to have to take account of if it wants to recreate some sense of time in the digital realm.

215
00:20:48,648 --> 00:20:49,828
The first is causality.

216
00:20:50,068 --> 00:20:51,788
There is a before and an after.

217
00:20:52,128 --> 00:20:53,948
The before causes the after.

218
00:20:54,068 --> 00:20:57,808
This arrow of time moves forward in a causal sort of way.

219
00:20:58,328 --> 00:20:59,868
But that's not the only thing it is.

220
00:20:59,928 --> 00:21:01,908
It also has to be unpredictable.

221
00:21:02,188 --> 00:21:04,188
It has to be causal but unpredictable.

222
00:21:04,968 --> 00:21:09,108
There needs to be, it can't just be a mathematical function of adding one.

223
00:21:09,108 --> 00:21:12,488
One plus one is two, plus one is three, plus one is four.

224
00:21:12,588 --> 00:21:13,348
That's predictable.

225
00:21:13,528 --> 00:21:15,888
The future is not perfectly predictable.

226
00:21:16,648 --> 00:21:19,928
If it was, it would collapse into the now, everything would be at once.

227
00:21:20,108 --> 00:21:25,788
There needs to be entropy to have time, some sense of change, really, but we call it entropy.

228
00:21:26,068 --> 00:21:29,128
We need something that is causal, but not predictable.

229
00:21:29,628 --> 00:21:32,128
A good metaphor might be the scrambling of an egg.

230
00:21:32,128 --> 00:21:36,428
You can't predict the exact resulting form of the scramble.

231
00:21:36,628 --> 00:21:40,788
Even as you know, causally applying heat to the egg is going to result in the scramble.

232
00:21:41,088 --> 00:21:44,028
You can't predict how that mush is going to look.

233
00:21:44,928 --> 00:21:47,188
So how can we do this for the digital realm then?

234
00:21:47,228 --> 00:21:50,488
We need causality and unpredictability.

235
00:21:51,248 --> 00:21:54,228
I guess before we even go there to the solution,

236
00:21:54,388 --> 00:22:00,528
is there anything you wanted to add to that as a notion of time requires causality and unpredictability?

237
00:22:00,688 --> 00:22:04,828
Does that seem correct to you that if you want to talk about what time is in the physical world,

238
00:22:04,868 --> 00:22:08,928
before we even get to the digital world, does it make sense to talk about it in those two key ways?

239
00:22:08,928 --> 00:22:09,888
I think so.

240
00:22:09,888 --> 00:22:18,248
The way that I'm thinking about it is just thinking about the life of a human is that the past is the causal.

241
00:22:18,848 --> 00:22:22,648
The past is the chain of events that led me to be the person that I am.

242
00:22:23,128 --> 00:22:35,368
But the future is the unpredictability that, although dependent upon who I am and therefore dependent upon the chain of events that led to this moment, in the future, I do have freedom.

243
00:22:35,368 --> 00:22:36,448
I have unpredictability.

244
00:22:36,508 --> 00:22:37,368
Freedom is unpredictability.

245
00:22:37,368 --> 00:22:42,468
unpredictability. And so I have the freedom and the unpredictability to alter my course of actions,

246
00:22:42,608 --> 00:22:47,328
do what I want. I can jump off the roof. I can take a bath. I can go for a run. I can do any of

247
00:22:47,328 --> 00:22:56,168
these things into the future. So I sit here in the now at the intersection of the solidness of the

248
00:22:56,168 --> 00:23:02,988
causality and the structurelessness of the unpredictable. And that to me makes sense. Yeah.

249
00:23:02,988 --> 00:23:05,928
Yeah. That not just the

250
00:23:07,368 --> 00:23:32,208
Yeah, that the future is unpredictable, even though it is causal. There's some seeming contradiction there, but we call it free will. Maybe we can call it entropy, too, in physical processes. And we're going to see how Satoshi did, in some sense, use for human free will, harness that to make Bitcoin unpredictable and therefore give it a notion of time.

251
00:23:32,208 --> 00:23:50,288
So let's talk about that. How can this be done in the digital realm? How can we get causation and unpredictability? This is something that could take us deep into kind of the mathematical operation of Bitcoin, which is a realm we don't want to go into. So we're going to talk about it, not superficially, but we're going to maybe gloss over some things.

252
00:23:50,288 --> 00:23:54,468
So first, how can we get causality in the digital realm?

253
00:23:54,568 --> 00:23:58,628
We can create causality through one-way functions, trapdoor functions.

254
00:23:59,468 --> 00:24:03,888
A cryptographic hash function is one of these, digital signatures as well, but let's focus on the former.

255
00:24:04,328 --> 00:24:09,908
You have in a cryptographic hash function a before state, which is the data you want to hash.

256
00:24:10,108 --> 00:24:16,308
You then hash that data and you create a unique fingerprint of that data, which is the hash.

257
00:24:16,488 --> 00:24:18,868
You get an after state, which is that fingerprint.

258
00:24:18,868 --> 00:24:27,628
I say after state because you cannot have that fingerprint reliably without having that pre-image prior state.

259
00:24:28,068 --> 00:24:39,388
If you have that hash, that fingerprint, and then somebody produces the pre-image to show that if you place it into the algorithm, you get this hash state, you know they had that pre-image before the hash.

260
00:24:39,388 --> 00:24:43,028
because otherwise it would have been just, you know,

261
00:24:43,388 --> 00:24:47,188
practically impossible to come up with 256-bit hash

262
00:24:47,188 --> 00:24:49,768
without having the pre-image that led to the hash.

263
00:24:50,188 --> 00:24:53,928
So a cryptographic hash function gives us a one-way function,

264
00:24:54,308 --> 00:24:55,468
gives us causality.

265
00:24:55,828 --> 00:24:57,568
Like the scrambling of an egg,

266
00:24:57,628 --> 00:25:01,568
it's easy to scramble an egg or do a hash function,

267
00:25:01,968 --> 00:25:06,328
but effectively impossible to reverse the function or unscramble the egg.

268
00:25:06,328 --> 00:25:11,608
The data that is hashed or scrambled had to exist before the resulting hash.

269
00:25:12,228 --> 00:25:18,788
So now we have causality, the beginning of time through computational irreversibility.

270
00:25:19,208 --> 00:25:21,668
Now we have to get to unpredictability.

271
00:25:21,928 --> 00:25:26,308
We have causality in digital space with cryptographic hash functions, which are one-way functions.

272
00:25:26,768 --> 00:25:29,808
How do we get to unpredictability?

273
00:25:30,528 --> 00:25:32,628
Lucas mentioned it, like human free will.

274
00:25:32,828 --> 00:25:35,308
How can we bring human free will into the digital realm?

275
00:25:35,308 --> 00:25:40,688
Well, we can't predict the peer-to-peer transactions that are going to occur on the Bitcoin network.

276
00:25:41,188 --> 00:25:53,928
So that's one way that the real world reaches in unpredictably into the digital world, into the digital protocol to add randomness is the peer-to-peer transactions that occur in a block in the next block.

277
00:25:54,068 --> 00:25:57,228
We can't predict how all these human agents are going to transact, right?

278
00:25:57,588 --> 00:26:02,228
So now we have a source of unpredictability we can feed into the protocol, the transactions.

279
00:26:02,608 --> 00:26:04,228
What is the second source of unpredictability?

280
00:26:05,308 --> 00:26:10,108
The resolution of the proof of work puzzle that mines a block,

281
00:26:10,188 --> 00:26:16,728
the act of finding a solution for the target hash of the next block to be mined

282
00:26:16,728 --> 00:26:19,028
can only be done by making guesses.

283
00:26:19,508 --> 00:26:20,828
This is how mining works.

284
00:26:20,948 --> 00:26:24,248
It's probabilistic because there is no approach to finding the right answer

285
00:26:24,248 --> 00:26:29,128
that is quicker other than to have a miner that makes as many guesses as possible,

286
00:26:29,568 --> 00:26:31,428
just trillions or whatever of guesses,

287
00:26:31,868 --> 00:26:35,248
until you, by luck, solve the proof of work

288
00:26:35,308 --> 00:26:43,068
puzzle. It's unpredictable. So now we have two ways to bring, to resolve causality and

289
00:26:43,068 --> 00:26:47,468
unpredictability in digital space. We have rather mathematical ways to do that and ways that we can

290
00:26:47,468 --> 00:26:53,388
bring the real world into digital space as a source of unpredictability specifically. So with

291
00:26:53,388 --> 00:26:58,948
these pieces, we can have time in the digital realm. Causality through one-way hash functions,

292
00:26:59,508 --> 00:27:03,828
unpredictability because transactions on the ledger will be unknowable in advance and because

293
00:27:03,828 --> 00:27:09,188
proof of work as a way to add a block of transaction can proceed only by making guesses.

294
00:27:09,928 --> 00:27:14,568
With that possible, we can then see how Bitcoin keeps track of time, how it is a time-keeping

295
00:27:14,568 --> 00:27:15,088
mechanism.

296
00:27:15,588 --> 00:27:19,388
But before we get to that, I mean, that's kind of the hairiest part of this essay, I

297
00:27:19,388 --> 00:27:25,548
think, is talking about like the mathematical and practical ways that causality and unpredictability

298
00:27:25,548 --> 00:27:26,668
can be established.

299
00:27:26,848 --> 00:27:27,988
Does that all make sense, kind of?

300
00:27:27,988 --> 00:27:40,948
I mean, the way I'm trying to think about this is, so you mentioned when we talked about this before that the naming structure is that there's the parent block and then there's the child block.

301
00:27:40,948 --> 00:27:48,988
And much like you can take a mathematical proof and you look at the proof and you can't have the answer immediately.

302
00:27:49,188 --> 00:27:58,748
But once you go through the proof of work to get down to the bottom and find the answer, you can put the answer in and you can see very quickly whether it's right or wrong.

303
00:27:58,748 --> 00:28:27,928
And so I think of this kind of like having children where you have, you're bringing together the causality, the knowns, the parents, and then the child is coming out and you have something that you can look at a couple and you can go, oh, I might be able to kind of imagine maybe what their children will look like, but you can't really nail it down.

304
00:28:27,928 --> 00:28:34,188
But once they have children, you're standing there and you're like, okay, these two people had two children.

305
00:28:34,428 --> 00:28:35,268
Here's eight children.

306
00:28:35,528 --> 00:28:36,508
Which two are theirs?

307
00:28:36,588 --> 00:28:37,828
And you can go, oh, it's those two.

308
00:28:38,288 --> 00:28:38,628
Children are.

309
00:28:38,808 --> 00:28:40,188
You can identify them.

310
00:28:40,188 --> 00:28:41,868
Children are a cryptographic hash function.

311
00:28:41,948 --> 00:28:42,148
Yeah.

312
00:28:42,268 --> 00:28:42,588
Nice.

313
00:28:42,808 --> 00:28:42,968
Yeah.

314
00:28:43,968 --> 00:28:49,988
And so, yeah, so that's the way that I'm like trying to visualize this and put it into my head.

315
00:28:50,008 --> 00:28:50,628
Metaphors are good.

316
00:28:50,628 --> 00:28:51,688
So that I can make it work.

317
00:28:51,688 --> 00:29:03,908
But one thing I want to, and I hate that I'm putting you on the spot, but I have to because I want to make sure that not just me, but people that listen to this understand we're saying hashing a lot.

318
00:29:04,108 --> 00:29:04,408
Yes.

319
00:29:04,908 --> 00:29:06,308
Can we define hashing?

320
00:29:06,768 --> 00:29:07,828
No, I can't.

321
00:29:07,888 --> 00:29:08,768
I'll do my best, though.

322
00:29:08,948 --> 00:29:16,028
So, again, as an emotional support animal or blanket, I've been cradling Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos.

323
00:29:16,968 --> 00:29:17,968
Define hashing.

324
00:29:18,268 --> 00:29:19,928
Let's maybe talk around the definition.

325
00:29:19,928 --> 00:29:24,108
So a hash, like hash browns, what is a hash?

326
00:29:24,168 --> 00:29:26,048
It's literally like a chopped up mess, right?

327
00:29:26,648 --> 00:29:27,088
Yeah, yeah.

328
00:29:27,368 --> 00:29:40,148
And so a hash function is a way that you take a fixed set of data and then produce a scrambled up result that seemingly has no, it's just totally different looking than the data set that went in.

329
00:29:40,288 --> 00:29:45,808
And yet that data set will always produce that same hash of that data set.

330
00:29:45,808 --> 00:29:50,808
If you change one period in that data set, you will get a completely different hash.

331
00:29:50,968 --> 00:29:52,728
Every part of it will be rearranged.

332
00:29:53,188 --> 00:30:02,668
So the SHA-256, which is the hashing algorithm, SHA-SHA, simple hashing algorithm, is a 256-bit algorithm.

333
00:30:02,848 --> 00:30:06,048
So there's 256 bits of information that are in this hash.

334
00:30:06,828 --> 00:30:15,228
And so it's a one-way function, this hashing algorithm, because it's trivially easy to do to plug in what is called a pre-image.

335
00:30:15,228 --> 00:30:18,488
and then get the resulting hash through this hash function.

336
00:30:19,368 --> 00:30:23,088
But it's like, unless you have like a quantum computer, which does not exist,

337
00:30:23,188 --> 00:30:26,648
you can't reverse it to get to the pre-image from the hash.

338
00:30:27,408 --> 00:30:30,828
So we can take the potato or we can chop it up and we can make a hash brown

339
00:30:30,828 --> 00:30:35,288
and we can take another potato and we can chop it up in the exact same matter,

340
00:30:35,408 --> 00:30:39,148
but we won't get the exact same hash brown because we didn't have the same potato.

341
00:30:39,268 --> 00:30:40,488
Yes, that's correct.

342
00:30:40,488 --> 00:30:46,968
that's called second pre-image resistance when you have a hash you can't then come up with another

343
00:30:46,968 --> 00:30:52,368
find another pre-image that will lead to the same hash yeah so there's hashes have certain

344
00:30:52,368 --> 00:30:56,988
cryptographic properties there's also collision resistance where if you have a hatching function

345
00:30:56,988 --> 00:31:04,968
it's not going to produce the same hash with different data sets yeah so there's all of these

346
00:31:04,968 --> 00:31:09,488
things that make a hash function this very interesting thing and for the purposes of this

347
00:31:09,488 --> 00:31:14,108
essay make it what we call a one-way or a trapdoor function you know we don't know we know what a

348
00:31:14,108 --> 00:31:30,295
trapdoor is you fall to the bottom but you can you know get back through the trap that what a hash function is for the purposes of this essay um again just know we need causality to have time One way to have causality is a one function

349
00:31:30,696 --> 00:31:36,896
So the closest way to approximate that aspect of time in digital space is through a hash function.

350
00:31:37,596 --> 00:31:40,995
I don't know if that was like Satoshi's insight, but it's brilliant.

351
00:31:41,295 --> 00:31:43,576
Whoever incited it, I don't know if that's a word.

352
00:31:43,576 --> 00:31:46,576
So we really do hash children because we...

353
00:31:46,576 --> 00:31:47,396
Cut them up?

354
00:31:47,396 --> 00:31:53,775
Well, because we bring the same genetic material together and we have the first child.

355
00:31:53,936 --> 00:31:54,196
Yeah.

356
00:31:54,295 --> 00:31:58,876
And then we bring the same genetic material together again and we have a different child.

357
00:31:58,995 --> 00:32:04,416
And we have a different child because no man walks through the same river twice because he's not the same man and it's not the same river.

358
00:32:04,555 --> 00:32:05,495
You're down the road.

359
00:32:05,616 --> 00:32:05,755
Yeah.

360
00:32:05,755 --> 00:32:06,676
You're not the same potato.

361
00:32:06,836 --> 00:32:07,076
Right.

362
00:32:07,376 --> 00:32:07,636
You know?

363
00:32:07,816 --> 00:32:15,555
I mean, so the way that a hashing algorithm works, how it does the math, I don't know if that's the same combinatorial math that's done with our genetics.

364
00:32:15,555 --> 00:32:16,555
You know, I think it's...

365
00:32:16,555 --> 00:32:16,736
Doubt.

366
00:32:17,396 --> 00:32:18,136
Okay, there we go.

367
00:32:18,255 --> 00:32:20,936
I do know that much.

368
00:32:21,275 --> 00:32:22,015
But it's a good example.

369
00:32:22,136 --> 00:32:31,515
And a lot of this, throughout this conversation, you probably, you have heard already and you will continue to hear that we're giving metaphorical examples to gloss over these very technical processes.

370
00:32:31,795 --> 00:32:32,176
We're not that smart.

371
00:32:32,255 --> 00:32:33,035
Because we're not that smart.

372
00:32:33,216 --> 00:32:35,055
So, also, Dergigi does it too.

373
00:32:35,176 --> 00:32:35,876
He is smart.

374
00:32:36,076 --> 00:32:37,295
We have license to use metaphor.

375
00:32:37,755 --> 00:32:41,876
Our metaphors are a lot more dumber than his, but we're doing our best.

376
00:32:42,535 --> 00:32:46,476
Now that we have time as possible in the digital realm.

377
00:32:46,476 --> 00:32:49,136
We have causality through one-way hash functions.

378
00:32:49,316 --> 00:32:58,255
We have unpredictability through uncertain transactions and through the uncertain unpredictable resolution of the proof-of-work puzzle.

379
00:32:58,616 --> 00:33:01,555
With that, time is possible in the digital realm.

380
00:33:02,836 --> 00:33:05,196
We can see how Bitcoin keeps track of time.

381
00:33:06,316 --> 00:33:12,295
Now that we have time, we can see how Bitcoin keeps track of time, how it is a time-keeping mechanism, right?

382
00:33:12,316 --> 00:33:14,555
We had to establish time to get to the time-keeper.

383
00:33:15,316 --> 00:33:16,456
I mean, what is a timekeeper?

384
00:33:16,795 --> 00:33:28,436
A timekeeper is something that marks units of time, the ticking of a clock, the seconds, the pendulum swinging back and forth, a metronome, something that at regular intervals, I don't know what it does.

385
00:33:28,436 --> 00:33:31,555
It measures entropic change or something.

386
00:33:31,696 --> 00:33:36,456
You know, it's even difficult to say what's happening, but it's seconds, minutes, et cetera, something tick-tock.

387
00:33:36,876 --> 00:33:42,995
Well, yeah, I mean, if you think of what a pendulum is, it is traveling a distance at a speed in order to have time.

388
00:33:42,995 --> 00:33:49,116
A determinant speed that we think is kind of maintaining the same speed, sort of mark off the same.

389
00:33:49,116 --> 00:33:54,855
Well, we know that it's not because of entropy and friction and wind resistance, barometric pressure.

390
00:33:54,896 --> 00:33:55,116
Yeah.

391
00:33:55,295 --> 00:34:11,996
Right. So that's why we have to go into things that have less, they're less affected by those things, which like you mentioned before, not this, but like cesium, like measuring vibrational frequency of a particle.

392
00:34:11,996 --> 00:34:28,635
Yes. You'll notice that Lucas is saying, you mentioned this before, we had this conversation once and in true Christopher Nolan style, we wanted to do something interesting with time. So we trashed that conversation. So when Lucas says what you said before, he's actually referring to something that I will say in the future now.

393
00:34:28,776 --> 00:34:29,236
This is correct.

394
00:34:29,335 --> 00:34:31,335
Yeah. So we're kind of playing with a sense of time.

395
00:34:31,456 --> 00:34:33,956
I love the movie Tenet. I actually understood it.

396
00:34:33,956 --> 00:34:35,016
You were the only one.

397
00:34:35,575 --> 00:34:39,315
So what Bitcoin does with time, how is it a clock?

398
00:34:39,416 --> 00:34:40,976
How is it a timekeeping mechanism?

399
00:34:41,936 --> 00:34:47,396
This is absolutely brilliant and stunning just to understand.

400
00:34:47,795 --> 00:34:49,555
It's an insight into time itself.

401
00:34:50,036 --> 00:34:53,916
The ticking of the Bitcoin blockchain is the processing of a block.

402
00:34:54,036 --> 00:34:55,775
TikTok next block, we hear this phrase.

403
00:34:55,775 --> 00:35:03,335
The internal sense of time that Bitcoin creates is just the processing of a block.

404
00:35:03,335 --> 00:35:04,856
That is the tick of the clock.

405
00:35:05,356 --> 00:35:08,476
So it's doing something at a regular interval at an interval.

406
00:35:08,635 --> 00:35:11,976
We haven't established this regularity yet, but that is processing blocks.

407
00:35:12,055 --> 00:35:17,196
It's doing something regularly, like a metronome swings back and forth regularly, so there is a ticking.

408
00:35:17,776 --> 00:35:24,115
Now we have a type of clock, this type of ticking that is internal to the Bitcoin network,

409
00:35:24,276 --> 00:35:28,756
that does not depend on appeal to an external clock outside of the network.

410
00:35:28,756 --> 00:35:36,075
rather the solving of the hash function embedded in the next block to be mined

411
00:35:36,075 --> 00:35:40,476
leads to the processing of that block and the ticking of the clock that is bitcoin

412
00:35:40,476 --> 00:35:46,976
a ticking that is done probabilistically through the solving of this hash function

413
00:35:46,976 --> 00:35:49,896
we're going to talk about why probabilistically in a minute

414
00:35:49,896 --> 00:35:54,335
a way that relies on computation to generate guesses

415
00:35:55,016 --> 00:35:56,575
Computation relies on energy.

416
00:35:57,595 --> 00:35:59,275
And there's a lot of moving parts here.

417
00:35:59,416 --> 00:36:10,155
I think we'll stop here, though, just to marvel or reflect on Bitcoin as a mechanism that acts as its own time and also creates time as such.

418
00:36:10,775 --> 00:36:10,856
Yeah.

419
00:36:11,016 --> 00:36:11,856
Does that make sense?

420
00:36:11,856 --> 00:36:12,315
Yeah.

421
00:36:12,615 --> 00:36:18,795
So to go back to something that we mentioned before is that digital space has no space.

422
00:36:18,976 --> 00:36:19,095
Yes.

423
00:36:19,095 --> 00:36:19,876
There's no physics.

424
00:36:20,095 --> 00:36:23,256
There's no length, width, height, thickness.

425
00:36:23,256 --> 00:36:32,555
It just is truly a realm ungoverned by the laws that we live by, the laws of physics.

426
00:36:32,555 --> 00:36:52,396
And Bitcoin has done something that has never been done, which is bridge the digital realm with the physical realm and impose the laws of physics into the digital realm without introducing entropy.

427
00:36:53,256 --> 00:37:01,456
which is, I can get on board with people that say that this is the singularity because there

428
00:37:01,456 --> 00:37:06,396
is now a bridge between the physical world and the digital world where the laws of physics from

429
00:37:06,396 --> 00:37:13,315
the physical world are imposed on that digital world. And so to take that a step further,

430
00:37:13,315 --> 00:37:20,996
we talked a little bit just now about time. So when we're calculating time using, say,

431
00:37:20,996 --> 00:37:28,655
a pendulum, or even when we're using measuring the back and forth motion of this cesium particle,

432
00:37:29,456 --> 00:37:39,356
time is distance over, or sorry, speed is distance over time. And so since there is no distance

433
00:37:39,356 --> 00:37:43,356
in the physical realm, we can just call that a constant. We can call that a one.

434
00:37:43,956 --> 00:37:50,775
And so then we end up with speed equals one over time, and then we can invert that and we can say

435
00:37:50,775 --> 00:37:58,295
time equals one over speed. And so the more speed, so the more guesses, the faster the guesses

436
00:37:58,295 --> 00:38:05,555
are being guessed in order to solve the block, the less time it takes to solve the block.

437
00:38:06,275 --> 00:38:14,575
And the less speed, the fewer guesses, the more time it takes to solve that block. So

438
00:38:14,575 --> 00:38:28,095
So I think we've been able to have kind of an understanding of how our definition of time is applying here sans the distance without having that physical realm.

439
00:38:28,095 --> 00:38:52,175
And this leads into the next intricate part of this whole mechanism. We're going to need a way to bridge the two times such that if we input more guesses into this intricate mechanism, we don't solve the blocks quicker and quicker such that we solve one block 10 minutes. The next solution comes in five minutes. The next solution comes in one minute because we're getting better and better at putting guesses into it.

440
00:38:52,175 --> 00:38:57,856
So this part of the whole Bitcoin mechanism protocol is called the difficulty adjustment.

441
00:38:58,575 --> 00:39:02,896
Digital time through the difficulty adjustment bridges over to our human world.

442
00:39:02,896 --> 00:39:23,755
We need a way to make the Bitcoin protocol process blocks at an interval that stays roughly the same and is sufficiently long such that it can propagate transactions or block processing over all the network, all the nodes.

443
00:39:24,275 --> 00:39:27,675
So we need to keep time at a steady human interval.

444
00:39:28,036 --> 00:39:30,755
Can we riff on why do we have to have that?

445
00:39:30,756 --> 00:39:35,795
do why is that why do we have to have um why do why does it have to be 10 minutes or it doesn't

446
00:39:35,795 --> 00:39:41,135
have to be 10 minutes but i mean why does it have to be a roughly consistent time why is what is the

447
00:39:41,135 --> 00:39:45,675
value of that and it's the value in that is that if we didn't have that then we wouldn't have

448
00:39:45,675 --> 00:39:53,976
causality um that's maybe one way to look at it i would say we know that it has to be over a certain

449
00:39:53,976 --> 00:39:57,556
amount of time it can't happen in half a second because that's not going to give because everything

450
00:39:57,556 --> 00:39:58,756
would collapse into the now.

451
00:39:59,175 --> 00:40:00,815
Yeah, and the Bitcoin protocol

452
00:40:00,815 --> 00:40:02,376
needs to be able to propagate

453
00:40:02,376 --> 00:40:04,076
new blocks throughout the network

454
00:40:04,076 --> 00:40:05,996
and process the transaction,

455
00:40:06,115 --> 00:40:07,095
get all the nodes up to date.

456
00:40:07,335 --> 00:40:08,775
And so it's a global

457
00:40:08,775 --> 00:40:10,256
distributed network, right?

458
00:40:10,716 --> 00:40:12,196
So it needs to be sufficiently long.

459
00:40:12,456 --> 00:40:13,595
Maybe 10 minutes is that.

460
00:40:14,076 --> 00:40:14,556
Does it need,

461
00:40:14,635 --> 00:40:15,595
I mean, this is an interesting question

462
00:40:15,595 --> 00:40:16,256
I hadn't considered,

463
00:40:16,396 --> 00:40:18,036
and I don't know that this essay does it.

464
00:40:18,396 --> 00:40:19,675
Does it have to be 10 minutes?

465
00:40:19,916 --> 00:40:21,335
Well, we do know that it's not

466
00:40:21,335 --> 00:40:22,335
exactly 10 minutes.

467
00:40:22,335 --> 00:40:23,675
It's probabilistic.

468
00:40:24,295 --> 00:40:25,696
Durjiji points out that

469
00:40:25,696 --> 00:40:27,335
this means really

470
00:40:27,335 --> 00:40:36,275
every one second interval, there's a 0.16% chance that the miners on the network are going to

471
00:40:36,275 --> 00:40:45,755
mine that block, solve the target hash. So 0.16% averages out to 10 minutes. That 10 minutes then,

472
00:40:46,335 --> 00:40:52,795
over after a two-week period, there's a difficulty adjustment done to make sure that it's staying at

473
00:40:52,795 --> 00:40:57,516
roughly 10 minutes. So if there's been more guesses happening over time in that network,

474
00:40:57,576 --> 00:41:01,795
and so it's been solved faster and blocks being processed in less than 10 minutes,

475
00:41:02,095 --> 00:41:09,216
then after a two-week period, the network readjusts itself to make it more difficult

476
00:41:09,216 --> 00:41:13,155
to make it closer to 10 minutes again for a block to be processed.

477
00:41:14,135 --> 00:41:19,876
I think keeping it irregular, it really doesn't have to be. I mean, it didn't have to be conceptually.

478
00:41:19,876 --> 00:41:22,996
It makes it easier for us to plan around and use the network.

479
00:41:23,115 --> 00:41:25,115
And so it's brilliant that he does that.

480
00:41:25,535 --> 00:41:30,055
But again, like Bitcoin's internal time is tick-tock next block.

481
00:41:30,196 --> 00:41:35,456
For its non-human purposes, it just measures block coming, block coming.

482
00:41:35,555 --> 00:41:36,295
That's its tick.

483
00:41:36,775 --> 00:41:40,216
The bridge to the real world makes it 10 minutes, right?

484
00:41:40,295 --> 00:41:43,216
That difficulty adjustment, that makes it usable by humans.

485
00:41:43,216 --> 00:41:53,496
And we do need to know that there is a now in Bitcoin time, which is the tip of the heaviest chain.

486
00:41:53,835 --> 00:41:54,615
Current state of the ledger.

487
00:41:54,655 --> 00:41:55,755
The current state of the ledger.

488
00:41:56,075 --> 00:42:08,716
We do need to know that and then know how long it's going to take to confirm successive blocks in order to have confidence that any one transaction truly has been confirmed by the network.

489
00:42:08,716 --> 00:42:23,196
And so if we know they're roughly 10 minutes apart, then we know maybe we can wait an hour, wait two hours and get a sufficient number of confirmations to have confidence that a transaction added in a block is not going to be a chain split.

490
00:42:23,396 --> 00:42:28,295
And so then later on discarded by another heavier canonical chain.

491
00:42:28,896 --> 00:42:30,175
There's a lot in that.

492
00:42:30,315 --> 00:42:32,556
I don't know if it's worth to disentangle that.

493
00:42:32,556 --> 00:42:35,196
Well, I think, no, I think it really is.

494
00:42:35,196 --> 00:42:54,856
And I think the reason why it is hairy and why it is nasty and hard to understand is because we've come to a very important inflection where we are now being faced with the realization that we're talking about two times.

495
00:42:54,856 --> 00:43:00,275
We're not talking about time in terms of seconds and hours.

496
00:43:00,555 --> 00:43:05,095
We're talking about time in terms of work, time in terms of power.

497
00:43:05,196 --> 00:43:34,016
Um, and so those are the reason why it is roughly 10 minutes and not definitively 10 minutes or three or 20 or two hours is because this is the mind blowing, you know, you need to be whatever, eight bong hits or 12 grams deep in order to understand this or even be able to like try and break yourself free from.

498
00:43:35,196 --> 00:43:45,675
from this legacy idea that we're natively born into, which is that there is time, minutes,

499
00:43:45,835 --> 00:43:52,335
seconds, hours, but then there is Bitcoin time and Bitcoin time is blocks and blocks are not

500
00:43:52,335 --> 00:44:03,416
blocks are not, um, distance and speed dependent, um, which is where we get our time over here.

501
00:44:03,416 --> 00:44:12,635
blocks are work dependent with a chance of with chance yeah with probabilistic um uh luck involved

502
00:44:12,635 --> 00:44:19,335
in them and so no i think this is like it this is this is probably the hardest part for me to

503
00:44:19,335 --> 00:44:26,815
understand which is that we probably need another word for it instead of time because like block

504
00:44:26,815 --> 00:44:31,675
height is you know that's how jack mallers introduces it on his show he talks about block

505
00:44:31,675 --> 00:44:39,536
height yeah um because it is a completely separate thing from the clock yep yeah and we are only

506
00:44:39,536 --> 00:44:46,476
using the clock to understand it because that's we because we understand the clock yeah no there

507
00:44:46,476 --> 00:44:51,196
was some consideration about the kansas city bitcoin summit so people were um time stamping

508
00:44:51,196 --> 00:44:56,815
their real world reaction or interactions with the block height at which they occurred so instead of

509
00:44:56,815 --> 00:45:01,396
referring to we process that would you know things happening at the bitcoin network talking about it

510
00:45:01,396 --> 00:45:05,516
in real world time, talking about real world events in terms of Bitcoin time.

511
00:45:05,635 --> 00:45:07,755
This event occurred at block height, such and such.

512
00:45:07,755 --> 00:45:16,275
So it is a new notion of time that we can also, yeah, begin to describe our own reality

513
00:45:16,275 --> 00:45:20,476
in terms of a clock that's not manipulable, but is different.

514
00:45:20,635 --> 00:45:24,896
The Bitcoin protocol is a decentralized, probabilistic timekeeping mechanism.

515
00:45:25,016 --> 00:45:25,996
It's just different, right?

516
00:45:25,996 --> 00:45:32,115
And Satoshi, he knew how important this was to the Bitcoin network.

517
00:45:32,255 --> 00:45:35,196
He called it a time chain in the code, not a blockchain.

518
00:45:35,416 --> 00:45:36,196
We get that later.

519
00:45:36,675 --> 00:45:40,516
Blockchain because, you know, that structure of causally linking blocks.

520
00:45:40,555 --> 00:45:42,416
It's very helpful to picture it that way.

521
00:45:42,476 --> 00:45:43,956
It's good terminology in that sense.

522
00:45:44,335 --> 00:45:53,095
But really the main innovation of Bitcoin is how it enables us to independently agree upon a history of events without a central coordinator.

523
00:45:53,095 --> 00:45:55,976
We have a distributed timestamp server, right?

524
00:45:55,996 --> 00:46:03,055
We have a distributed notion of time where we can assign time to events in a distributed manner without a central coordinator.

525
00:46:03,175 --> 00:46:07,416
And that's, it's just, it's mind-blowing that that is able to occur.

526
00:46:09,295 --> 00:46:25,516
Again, something we talked about before in the last conversation was, you know, it's even brilliant to think, to begin to have the thought that we need to bring time into the digital realm because without time we get instant abundance, right?

527
00:46:25,976 --> 00:46:29,376
It's a nice thing about digital and informational space.

528
00:46:29,716 --> 00:46:31,516
Copy and pasting is good for many purposes.

529
00:46:31,996 --> 00:46:36,775
We can copy value and you can get the value and I can still have it.

530
00:46:36,936 --> 00:46:41,016
I can send you an MP3 and I can still have the MP3 and we can both have the song, right?

531
00:46:41,016 --> 00:46:54,315
And so it's almost this like utopic nature to what happened in the early internet where it was unleashed free without central coordinators, database operators tying down their data.

532
00:46:54,315 --> 00:46:56,535
where you could just give but also keep.

533
00:46:57,595 --> 00:46:59,575
And that's not something that occurs in the real world.

534
00:46:59,775 --> 00:47:18,843
In fact as we read Jeff Booth book The Price of Tomorrow that kind of the vision He thinks that we going to get in meat space is abundance through AI We going to kind of bring the digital into the physical almost in a sense even as in the digital we trying to bring the physical to constrain and tie down the digital

535
00:47:19,203 --> 00:47:27,483
We want to bring the digital into the real world to enable abundance outside of time and space through machines that are going to do our work for us and AI is going to power them or something.

536
00:47:27,483 --> 00:47:44,663
Yeah. What just to continue to hammer home the difference between time and block height or Bitcoin time is that we may have a hard time grasping the Bitcoin time because our definition of time is that it's something definite.

537
00:47:44,663 --> 00:47:51,423
it's seconds it's minutes it's hours it's days but where did we get that from we got that from

538
00:47:51,423 --> 00:47:59,083
how long it takes for the earth to circle the sun and also how long it takes for the earth to spin

539
00:47:59,083 --> 00:48:06,063
on its axis yeah and those we know are not constant you know the earth's right the earth's

540
00:48:06,063 --> 00:48:11,763
orbit does change over time due to the gravitational pull of the sun which is you know

541
00:48:11,763 --> 00:48:20,523
degrading over time, things like that. Yeah. Or yeah. And also the Earth's axis, right?

542
00:48:20,963 --> 00:48:26,883
The poles, we know that the poles eventually shift and that we get a different type of spin.

543
00:48:27,123 --> 00:48:35,363
And so that, even though we believe time in the sense that we traditionally think about it,

544
00:48:35,423 --> 00:48:40,463
we believe it to be constant. It truly is not. And it's based on something that has variability.

545
00:48:40,463 --> 00:48:46,543
and that variability is dependent upon speed and distance yeah time is relative for sure exactly

546
00:48:46,543 --> 00:48:54,763
and time is absolutely factually proven uh to be relative yeah um you know another way that that

547
00:48:54,763 --> 00:49:03,463
block height is a good way to be able to consider time even in our real world meat space is biology

548
00:49:03,463 --> 00:49:10,703
talks about this, we can watermark or stamp reality by putting on the blockchain a cryptographic

549
00:49:10,703 --> 00:49:17,863
hash of an event, data regarding an event that has occurred to preserve a record that at block

550
00:49:17,863 --> 00:49:23,523
height such and such, a thing had actually happened, that some random Joe stood in front

551
00:49:23,523 --> 00:49:29,703
of a tank in Tiananmen Square or whatever, that this happened on X date, or at least by that date

552
00:49:29,703 --> 00:49:35,003
it had happened we can use the block height structure as a way to create an indelible record

553
00:49:35,003 --> 00:49:41,383
of something couldn't have happened later than this yeah yeah this really i mean brings us near

554
00:49:41,383 --> 00:49:50,383
the end of the essay um the linkage with time is not arbitrary because time is money money must be

555
00:49:50,383 --> 00:49:57,843
linked to time because it is only thing that we will never make more of gold is valuable because

556
00:49:57,843 --> 00:50:03,143
it takes a lot i'm just reading my notes now i don't even understand um this was this is the

557
00:50:03,143 --> 00:50:06,803
point i wanted to make bitcoin is time in two ways at least this is where we started the essay off

558
00:50:06,803 --> 00:50:17,503
um it's units bitcoin coins whatever marks on a ledger are stored time um because we have

559
00:50:17,503 --> 00:50:22,803
used proof of work and computation

560
00:50:22,803 --> 00:50:28,023
causally with hash one-way functions

561
00:50:28,023 --> 00:50:30,603
in an unpredictable way to import time into them

562
00:50:30,603 --> 00:50:31,423
and make them valuable.

563
00:50:31,763 --> 00:50:33,443
The Bitcoin network is time

564
00:50:33,443 --> 00:50:35,123
because it is a decentralized clock.

565
00:50:36,023 --> 00:50:38,683
I mean, that's an overheated brain way

566
00:50:38,683 --> 00:50:42,783
to kind of try to summarize the essay

567
00:50:42,783 --> 00:50:45,143
as I roll out of it with a melting down chassis

568
00:50:45,143 --> 00:50:48,003
at the end of this, you know, 400-mile.

569
00:50:49,843 --> 00:50:52,003
What do they call those races where you go like?

570
00:50:53,003 --> 00:50:54,823
I think they literally call them like death races.

571
00:50:55,003 --> 00:50:55,663
Something like that.

572
00:50:55,683 --> 00:50:56,903
Like the 200-mile runs and stuff.

573
00:50:56,923 --> 00:51:00,983
I just feel like how the engine to those cars must feel at the end of that,

574
00:51:01,023 --> 00:51:03,643
just like overheating and melting, and they go rolling across.

575
00:51:03,643 --> 00:51:05,043
I'm talking about like a Le Mans race.

576
00:51:05,103 --> 00:51:06,323
Yeah, that's for like 24 hours.

577
00:51:06,323 --> 00:51:06,883
Something like that.

578
00:51:06,903 --> 00:51:07,843
And they just see who can go the furthest.

579
00:51:07,983 --> 00:51:09,243
Yeah, and then just, yeah.

580
00:51:09,243 --> 00:51:13,903
Yeah, and maybe that's actually kind of a good example is who can go the furthest

581
00:51:13,903 --> 00:51:18,263
because so time is money, money is power, power is energy.

582
00:51:18,503 --> 00:51:23,743
When you're a wage slave and you go to work and you trade your time for money,

583
00:51:24,103 --> 00:51:29,023
you might incorrectly say, oh, I'm not trading my time, I'm trading my skill.

584
00:51:29,103 --> 00:51:30,063
But what is your skills?

585
00:51:30,183 --> 00:51:31,923
Your skill is just a function of your time.

586
00:51:32,543 --> 00:51:34,683
You don't acquire that skill without time.

587
00:51:34,763 --> 00:51:40,423
And you don't acquire that skill without the power that you put behind that time,

588
00:51:40,423 --> 00:51:46,763
whether it's the power of studying or the power of lifting or shooting baskets or whatever you're doing that makes you valuable.

589
00:51:48,403 --> 00:51:53,803
Yeah. So I think that's where we end up. It's like it's time is power.

590
00:51:54,703 --> 00:51:59,303
Time is power to affect change. If I don't have time, I can't change anything.

591
00:51:59,683 --> 00:52:06,143
But if I have if I have time, if I have a low time preference, then I can affect a lot of change in my life.

592
00:52:06,143 --> 00:52:06,423
Yeah.

593
00:52:06,683 --> 00:52:07,063
You know?

594
00:52:07,423 --> 00:52:07,683
Yeah.

595
00:52:07,783 --> 00:52:11,523
I can look far down the path and I can make long decisions.

596
00:52:11,723 --> 00:52:12,023
Yeah.

597
00:52:12,263 --> 00:52:12,503
Yeah.

598
00:52:12,863 --> 00:52:13,643
Bitcoin is time.

599
00:52:13,643 --> 00:52:21,583
So I wrote down some quotes as I was going through this for things that I thought were key, but that maybe I didn't understand perfectly.

600
00:52:21,723 --> 00:52:23,783
I thought it would be good to hash out in real time.

601
00:52:24,303 --> 00:52:29,703
So I'll read one of the quotes and we'll see if we can, you know, wring the insight from it.

602
00:52:31,003 --> 00:52:32,483
Here's something Durjiji writes.

603
00:52:32,483 --> 00:52:38,543
proof of work works in a peer-to-peer setting because it is trustless, and it is trustless

604
00:52:38,543 --> 00:52:44,443
because it is disconnected from all external inputs, such as the reading of clocks, or

605
00:52:44,443 --> 00:52:50,463
newspapers for that matter. It relies on one thing and one thing only. Computation requires

606
00:52:50,463 --> 00:52:59,603
work, and in our universe, work requires energy and time. So I think what that's saying, and you

607
00:52:59,603 --> 00:53:00,543
You can give me your interpretation.

608
00:53:01,503 --> 00:53:04,403
So computation is like the digital substrate.

609
00:53:04,683 --> 00:53:06,003
It's a digitally native thing.

610
00:53:07,003 --> 00:53:12,003
And energy and time are things that happen in the real physical world.

611
00:53:12,523 --> 00:53:15,883
Where these two meet then, computation requires energy and time.

612
00:53:15,883 --> 00:53:19,523
It requires this real world inputs.

613
00:53:20,383 --> 00:53:27,363
And so to power Bitcoin with computation through proof of work,

614
00:53:27,463 --> 00:53:28,443
that's what proof of work is.

615
00:53:28,443 --> 00:53:39,703
You're doing computation to try to solve a hash function, to try to reach the target hash by doing hash functions over and over again until you get the correct result, guessing essentially.

616
00:53:40,243 --> 00:53:43,583
You're doing guesses over and over again to try to hit the target.

617
00:53:44,863 --> 00:53:52,403
That can only be done through the expenditure of energy and time, which is a form of work.

618
00:53:52,823 --> 00:53:56,363
And then that's what we're feeding into the Bitcoin protocol.

619
00:53:56,543 --> 00:53:57,343
Does that make sense?

620
00:53:57,343 --> 00:54:21,383
Kind of. One thing that I want to point out to the computation is not inherently digital. Like we're like the human brain is a computer, right? So we're computing. And we could very well conceive that instead of Bitcoin miners, we just have people sitting at a keyboard punching in numbers, making guesses, right? And so all the computer is doing is just that better.

621
00:54:21,383 --> 00:54:23,063
Yeah. Yes.

622
00:54:24,103 --> 00:54:36,123
One of the I do I do want to throw this in because this this helps me think about this is that we cannot undervalue or understate this difficulty adjustment.

623
00:54:36,323 --> 00:54:37,183
I know we're past that.

624
00:54:37,523 --> 00:54:38,123
Yeah, we're not past it.

625
00:54:38,163 --> 00:54:39,503
Yeah, we're not.

626
00:54:39,703 --> 00:54:40,423
No, I have a quote.

627
00:54:40,623 --> 00:54:41,623
That's the next quote is about it.

628
00:54:41,663 --> 00:54:42,003
So go ahead.

629
00:54:42,083 --> 00:54:42,323
No, no.

630
00:54:42,323 --> 00:54:59,503
Well, OK, so the difficulty adjustment, the way I think about the difficulty adjustment, this is so brilliant of Satoshi to be able to look into the future and understand that we are starting at a point where people were mining Bitcoin with a desktop computer.

631
00:54:59,503 --> 00:55:07,803
And so it was better than you and me sitting there punching in numbers, but not by a whole lot.

632
00:55:07,923 --> 00:55:08,083
Yeah.

633
00:55:08,323 --> 00:55:21,283
By a lot, but not by the magnitude that we have today with ant miners and even your bid acts, even these more modern ones.

634
00:55:21,283 --> 00:55:31,043
He looked into the future and he realized that what I'm doing is I'm essentially, I'm challenging whoever wants to participate in this competition.

635
00:55:31,243 --> 00:55:35,763
I'm challenging them to do work.

636
00:55:35,943 --> 00:55:37,763
I'm challenging them to like a feat of strength.

637
00:55:37,903 --> 00:55:41,223
And I think of this as Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill.

638
00:55:42,003 --> 00:55:47,583
And he recognized that it wouldn't always just be Sisyphus, that soon there would be a hundred Sisyphuses.

639
00:55:49,623 --> 00:55:49,903
Yeah.

640
00:55:49,903 --> 00:55:51,223
And then there'd be a million.

641
00:55:51,463 --> 00:55:51,743
Sisyphus.

642
00:55:51,863 --> 00:55:52,563
And Sisyphus.

643
00:55:52,783 --> 00:55:53,003
Yeah.

644
00:55:53,163 --> 00:55:58,823
And then not only would there be more, that we would have Sisyphus on stairwells.

645
00:55:58,823 --> 00:55:59,043
Yeah.

646
00:55:59,223 --> 00:56:00,383
And BPC 157.

647
00:56:00,843 --> 00:56:07,343
And they would be jacked and they would be using video cards and graphics cards in order to do this.

648
00:56:07,383 --> 00:56:08,163
They would be stronger.

649
00:56:08,263 --> 00:56:08,463
Yeah.

650
00:56:08,463 --> 00:56:15,403
And so they would be able to, if that rock was, you push the rock up to the top and you get the reward of the Bitcoin.

651
00:56:15,403 --> 00:56:35,783
if that rock was always the same rock, and then all of a sudden you've got, instead of the wimpy 90-pound weakling, you've got, you know, Thor, whatever the guy, the mountain, you know, the 6'9", 420-pound mega man pushing this thing up the hill, it'd go too fast.

652
00:56:36,703 --> 00:56:40,123
And so we had to figure out a way to handicap that.

653
00:56:41,283 --> 00:56:44,263
And it was so brilliant that he was able to do this.

654
00:56:44,263 --> 00:57:02,063
And this is where I want to throw in the story about Bitcoin Pizza Day that I just learned this year, which is the reason we have Bitcoin Pizza Day is because one of the guys early in on the message boards who was mining Bitcoin, he thought, oh, maybe I could do this with a graphics card.

655
00:57:02,063 --> 00:57:09,163
And turns out graphics cards are really good at mining Bitcoin relative to your regular desktop processor.

656
00:57:10,043 --> 00:57:18,323
And so he starts just cleaning house and mining every block because he's able to do it so much more with so much more power.

657
00:57:18,603 --> 00:57:23,783
And he got a message from Satoshi saying, hey, I know that we are going to enter an arms race.

658
00:57:24,143 --> 00:57:30,163
And I know that it's going to be a huge competition to see if you can have the most powerful chips to mine Bitcoin.

659
00:57:30,163 --> 00:57:38,083
I'm hoping to delay that as soon as long as possible in order to allow a greater diffusion and greater adoption.

660
00:57:39,423 --> 00:57:44,083
You know, would you, you know, be a gentleman and just chill out for a bit?

661
00:57:44,183 --> 00:57:45,643
And the guy was like, yeah, cool. No problem.

662
00:57:45,643 --> 00:57:53,523
At this point in history, it's it's it's very important to understand that Bitcoin quite literally had no no value.

663
00:57:53,743 --> 00:57:56,723
It had not been there. There was no price for. Yeah.

664
00:57:56,723 --> 00:58:03,163
And so he created the first ever market for Bitcoin by saying, hey, I like pizza.

665
00:58:03,463 --> 00:58:04,283
Bring me two of them.

666
00:58:04,403 --> 00:58:05,303
It doesn't have to be.

667
00:58:05,443 --> 00:58:06,463
It could be from Domino's.

668
00:58:06,503 --> 00:58:07,683
It could be homemade, whatever.

669
00:58:08,223 --> 00:58:10,283
And I'll give you Bitcoin for it.

670
00:58:10,603 --> 00:58:24,643
And that was his way of giving back to the Bitcoin community and also staving off and somewhat delaying the inevitable arms race of chips as they accelerated to become more powerful and faster at making those guesses.

671
00:58:24,643 --> 00:58:25,123
Yeah.

672
00:58:25,703 --> 00:58:25,943
Yep.

673
00:58:25,943 --> 00:58:31,303
In our last conversation, we talked about what it means for these miners to get better.

674
00:58:31,943 --> 00:58:36,883
So the miners are not getting better at doing the math.

675
00:58:37,043 --> 00:58:39,343
They're doing it faster and faster, making more and more guesses.

676
00:58:39,503 --> 00:58:42,403
So it's not like they're learning how to solve this equation better.

677
00:58:42,983 --> 00:58:44,943
It's just this is probabilistic.

678
00:58:45,203 --> 00:58:46,163
There is no way to get better.

679
00:58:46,303 --> 00:58:46,523
Yeah.

680
00:58:46,623 --> 00:58:50,083
The only way to get better is just to make more and more guesses, do them faster and faster and faster.

681
00:58:50,523 --> 00:58:51,003
Yeah.

682
00:58:51,003 --> 00:58:59,343
Yeah. There's one other quote I wanted to read here because this, I think, summarizes a core piece of this.

683
00:58:59,703 --> 00:59:05,803
We talked about causality and unpredictability as necessary to establish time.

684
00:59:05,903 --> 00:59:13,343
There was a third thing that Derdigi mentions at the end, coordination, in order to turn time into timekeeping.

685
00:59:13,643 --> 00:59:17,023
You have to have causality and unpredictability for time and then coordination.

686
00:59:17,223 --> 00:59:18,243
So here, I'll just read the quote.

687
00:59:18,243 --> 00:59:23,703
This puts a lot of this together, I think, and will make sense, hopefully, after we've now discussed all this material.

688
00:59:24,303 --> 00:59:29,443
Quote, timekeeping requires causality, unpredictability, and coordination.

689
00:59:29,903 --> 00:59:36,703
In Bitcoin, causality is provided by one-way functions, the cryptographic hash functions and digital signatures that are at the core of the protocol.

690
00:59:37,523 --> 00:59:41,963
Unpredictability is provided by both the proof-of-work puzzle as well as the interaction with peers.

691
00:59:41,963 --> 00:59:48,343
You can't know in advance what others are doing, and you can't know in advance what the solution of the proof-of-work puzzle will be.

692
00:59:49,163 --> 00:59:55,643
Coordination is made possible by the difficulty adjustment, the magic sauce that links Bitcoin's time to ours.

693
00:59:56,083 --> 00:59:57,363
We've talked about all those parts now.

694
00:59:57,403 --> 01:00:06,043
I hope that paragraph makes sense because it takes a lot of work to get there to understand causality as a cryptographic hash function, a one-way function,

695
01:00:06,743 --> 01:00:10,923
unpredictability being added through peer-to-peer interactions in the proof-of-work puzzle,

696
01:00:10,923 --> 01:00:14,603
and then coordination being made possible by the difficulty adjustment.

697
01:00:15,263 --> 01:00:17,323
Maybe that last portion is something we didn't.

698
01:00:17,863 --> 01:00:18,763
What does that mean?

699
01:00:18,863 --> 01:00:21,603
Coordination is made possible by the difficulty adjustment,

700
01:00:21,823 --> 01:00:24,363
the magic sauce that links Bitcoin's time to ours.

701
01:00:24,783 --> 01:00:25,403
I don't know.

702
01:00:25,783 --> 01:00:25,983
Yeah.

703
01:00:26,443 --> 01:00:27,483
I'll take a stab at that.

704
01:00:28,203 --> 01:00:30,723
Coordination is made possible by the difficulty adjustment,

705
01:00:30,823 --> 01:00:33,523
the magic sauce that links Bitcoin's time to ours.

706
01:00:33,523 --> 01:00:40,263
So we talked about how the difficulty adjustment links Bitcoin's internal block height time

707
01:00:40,263 --> 01:00:43,083
to the 10-minute approximately real-world time.

708
01:00:43,183 --> 01:00:50,483
So we've seen that that's how at least Bitcoin's time is linked to ours

709
01:00:50,483 --> 01:00:55,143
by a difficulty adjustment that keeps the mining of blocks at roughly 10-minute intervals.

710
01:00:55,763 --> 01:01:01,843
This then allows coordination in that it allows all of the nodes

711
01:01:01,843 --> 01:01:07,423
to be able to coordinate on receiving and propagating the reactions.

712
01:01:07,423 --> 01:01:12,303
And it also, I guess, allows humans to coordinate in relation to it.

713
01:01:12,363 --> 01:01:15,543
I don't know that I'm catching everything in that, but that's what I got from it.

714
01:01:15,983 --> 01:01:24,923
Coordination, I think, would, yeah, I guess the way that I'm interpreting it from what you're saying is coordination allows for all the nodes to update to the current state of the ledger.

715
01:01:24,963 --> 01:01:26,343
Yeah, that might be the best way to.

716
01:01:26,623 --> 01:01:33,203
Yeah, and for the mempool to start taking in the new transactions or to take in the new transactions or create a new loop.

717
01:01:33,543 --> 01:01:33,883
Yeah.

718
01:01:34,743 --> 01:01:35,143
Yes.

719
01:01:35,443 --> 01:01:35,643
Yeah?

720
01:01:35,643 --> 01:01:36,003
Yeah.

721
01:01:36,003 --> 01:01:45,743
Yeah. This is a great essay. What you saw was us working through it in real time a second time or a third time.

722
01:01:45,743 --> 01:01:47,783
We talked about this eating Mexican food.

723
01:01:47,823 --> 01:01:51,963
We did. And so this is such it's a great essay. It's very deep.

724
01:01:52,383 --> 01:01:59,563
It's something that as all good philosophy does, it's something that you really need to break apart and work through yourself.

725
01:01:59,723 --> 01:02:02,923
You can skim through this essay and feel like you have a superficial understanding.

726
01:02:02,923 --> 01:02:06,983
but then as you go back through it and try to put the pieces together and pull them apart

727
01:02:06,983 --> 01:02:12,643
you see the gaps in your understanding and as you explain it to yourself and hopefully as

728
01:02:12,643 --> 01:02:18,903
you dear third party witness saw lucas and i doing you try to piece the argument together

729
01:02:18,903 --> 01:02:25,063
and you know you just have to work it out so watch tenant watch tenant yeah or you can understand

730
01:02:25,063 --> 01:02:28,623
that you can understand this what's the one where you have the tattoos on them like memento

731
01:02:28,623 --> 01:02:39,103
yeah oh no hit stop record and watch this now my brain hurts yeah yeah no that's all i got a great

732
01:02:39,103 --> 01:02:43,983
essay dear gg did a wonderful job of bitcoin philosophizing we need more of this um beautiful

733
01:02:43,983 --> 01:02:46,663
essay fantastic we will see you guys next