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

Another #FreeLoveFriday. So far, I’ve covered Bitcoin, Mastercoin/Omni, and last week ChainLink and the importance of decentralized oracles. Today, let’s talk about one of the most fascinating projects in crypto - @MakerDAO


In my thread about Mastercoin, I briefly touched on the vital role fiat-backed stablecoins play in crypto markets, but there’s a catch with them:

The counterparty risk of a third-party holding fiat in reserves.

Enter MakerDAO, which set out to create a decentralized, collateral-backed cryptocurrency, DAI, that would be “soft-pegged” to the U.S. Dollar using the power of algorithms. In crypto tradition, its supporters said trust game theory, not operators.

In 2017, MakerDAO published a whitepaper describing a system where anyone could create DAI by leveraging ETH as collateral to create Collateralized Debt Positions. Essentially, you take out a digital USD loan against your crypto.

The game theory of the system is structured such that DAI issuance is controlled to keep the price pegged to $1.00. In essence, it buffers the fluctuations of the underlying collateral to create a synthetic dollar bill.

You May Also Like

Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.