1/ Everyone knows that time is money. In the digital realm, however, money is also intricately related to time. It has to

2/ Among other things, money solves a coordination problem. Trading a single good against others solves the combinatorial explosion of a barter economy. It is a scalability solution that allows coordination across large groups of people.
3/ The two basic forms of money are ledgers (made of information) and physical tokens (made of atoms). Physical tokens keep track of themselves. Ledgers need someone who is in charge.
4/ In the informational realm, only ledgers exist. And to make sure that transactions on a ledger are in order, a concept of time is required. In other words: Tokens are timeless, ledgers are not.
5/ A decentralized system can't rely on our human concept of time. A trustless, non-local time is required. Trustless, because we must not introduce a third party. Non-local because we don't have the luxury of a central frame of reference.
6/ Bitcoin creates its own sense of time using two essential building blocks: causality and unpredictability. Causal links are settling the past. Unpredictable events are opening the doors to the future. The chain tip is the eternal now.
7/ Bitcoin uses SHA-256 and digital signatures as its causal building blocks and the ever-changing interactions of its peers, as well as the randomness of PoW as its source of entropy.
8/ This intricate dance of coordination creates a moment in time that every node can verify for itself. It can trust, with a very high probability, that this is what actually happened in the past.
9/ The difficulty adjustment makes sure that Bitcoin's time and our time stay in sync. It is the probabilistic metronome that orchestrates the intricate dance of the network.
10/ By creating a novel definition of time, Satoshi managed to solve an otherwise intractable coordination problem in our relativistic universe: agreeing on the order of things on a global scale.
11/ I hope you have enjoyed this time-centered view on Bitcoin. The next time someone asks what Bitcoin is, simply answer: "It is time."
12/ Thanks to everyone who helped with this piece: @Croesus_BTC, @FriarHass, @CitizenBitcoin, @skwp, @joernroeder, @SwanBitcoin - and thanks to all my supporters. I wouldn't be able to do this without you.
13/ "Bitcoin Is Time" is one chapter of my upcoming book, 21 Ways. You can support me and follow along here:

https://t.co/NjCREIXoWx

More from Bitcoin

The #Bitcoin fundamentals of four generations of inflation, entitlements, and regulations are separate and apart from #Bitcoin the technological innovation. If we had sound money there would be little demand for Bitcoin. (1/13)


The notion that gold futures hold down the physical gold price or subjects the gold price to long-term manipulation is a canard. CME gold futures deliveries are settled with warrants meeting exact specifications met by approved refineries, carriers, and warehouses which (2/13)

ensures the integrity of delivery apart from the exchange. https://t.co/CpV1OBSsAT One need look no further than the 1980 Hunt Silver fiasco which illustrates how deliverable futures contracts provide for the discovery of an untapped silver supply resting in people's homes.(3/13)

Not so for Bitcoin. The CME Bakkt Bitcoin contract is for Bakkt Bitcoin. It is not Bitcoin. Bakkt Bitcoin is a cash-settled monthly futures contract. While the Bakkt Bitcoin has geographically storage of private keys, they are not your private keys. (4/13)


Not your keys, not your bitcoin. The Bitcoin Warehouse is an internal ledger The internal ledger operates separate and apart from the Bitcoin blockchain. The only interaction with the public blockchain is during the deposit of bitcoin into the Bakkt Warehouse and the (5/13)

You May Also Like

The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.