Can’t tell if sarcastic or not, but Bitcoin is empirical proof that time is indeed money, and money is not time.

I’ve been developing a physical model of Bitcoin that measures satoshis in joules and treats each block as an irreversible thermodynamic event. This framework only works because Bitcoin’s UTXOs are observable. Their balances are the informational “mass” that allows us to quantify the Shannon entropy written into each block and map it to the energy expended to create it. To my understanding ElGamal commitments will hide utxo balances on chain, so that observability disappears. IMO, we wouldn’t just lose supply transparency; we would lose the ability to measure the entropy of the system at all. The thermodynamic structure of Bitcoin depends on visible state transitions. Hide the balances, and you break the physics. If Bitcoin is the only system where work, time, and value are measurably connected, what happens when we hide the very quantities that make that possible? I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this, myself included. Almost nobody is thinking about the physical substrate beneath Bitcoin, so I’ll say it from my work currently, it breaks everything. We don’t even fully understand the downstream consequences because it removes the empirical measurability that makes Bitcoin unique among all monetary and computational systems. The irony is that in this framework, the entire push for PQC becomes unnecessary. A quantized-time model falsifies the threat assumptions behind attacks, because the attack models rely on a continuous-time ontology that Bitcoin itself disproves. The visibility of UTXOs is what anchors these measurements and enables the physical interpretation. Remove that visibility, and you lose both the physics and the ability to falsify the threat model. I could definitely be wrong here, but this is a point that must be considered and explored beyond just me.

GM https://youtu.be/BzONJQRHtj0?

You’re describing only the local thermodynamic outcome of a failed miner (heat) while ignoring the global thermodynamic structure that Bitcoin mining actually operates inside. A solo rig that never finds a block contributes no local informational change. Yes we both agree here, but it absolutely does tehcnically contribute to the global entropy field set by the difficulty target. That difficulty defines a Boltzmann entropy surface over the 32-bit nonce space. The expected energy for a valid block is determined by that landscape, not by any individual machine’s waste heat. This framing only accounts for dissipation, not for the fact that difficulty predefines the energy budget required for a valid state transition by quantizing the search space. This entropy field exists independently of any miner; it is the global thermodynamic environment into which miners inject work. A valid block header is a statistically rare microstate. It is the structured residue of the dissipated work and that is precisely why nodes can validate it instantly: the improbability is preserved in the structure. Yes a failed solo miner’s energy becomes heat, but the network’s energy budget (the real cost of producing one improbable, verifiable microstate) is governed entirely by the thermodynamics of the difficulty field. Until you account for that, you’re not describing the whole system and the underlying transformation.

If energy spent produces only heat, how do you explain the existence of a persistent block afterward? What physical process made that block real? Why can every node instantly reject an invalid block without redoing the work? If the work left no informational trace, wouldn’t validation require recomputation? Is it possible that nobody has the proper framework to articulate this fully because we have not yet understood how bitcoin is the intersection of computer science, information theory, economics and physics into a measurable instantiation of time itself? Clearly time is the biggest problem in physics; nobody has a full grasp on entropy. I find it odd that Bitcoin produces time from entropy. Must be nothin’

From my perspective Bitcoin is the demonstration. We don’t need to write more code to illustrate the principles, Bitcoin already shows them operating at planetary scale. Difficulty is the resistance mechanism that governs how fast the entropy surface can be collapsed. It scales the search space relative to most recent behavior of hashpower and hardware efficiency, and the heat released is literally proportional to that resistance. That keeps Bitcoin anchored to human time, but it doesn’t change the deeper point: the block itself is atomic time to the ledger. I’m more broadly looking at the architecture of time that Bitcoin exposes. It is the first system where we can externally observe discrete, irreversible temporal quanta created by a thermodynamic process. That alone makes it the most valuable open-source laboratory for understanding time we’ve ever had. I don’t need more code to speculate; I can point directly to Bitcoin and invite falsification. I think you’d agree on this: we live within a singular timechain (universe) of transformations originating from a verifiable genesis. That structure is ordered, irreversible, conserved, and finite. It is not just how Bitcoin works; I would extend it to how any coherent universe must work. Bitcoin just makes it visible to us, something we can point to as proof. My language and understanding is still developing and changing. Time precedes physics.

Uhhh, you cannot take the derivative in Schrödinger equation if time has a fundamental smallest unit. Please break a block in bitcoin into smaller units of time such that they remain valid on the ledger, I’ll wait. Blocks are atomic time composed from energy/entropy.

I’ll have to put in on my list. Generally I don’t think many people have observed bitcoin as time, nor have applied that ontology of time to QM since continuous time is the axiom underpinning literally everything. Continuous time is the Tower of Babel for QM if they are wrong. We are literally watching the construction of time and we can see both sides of the *computational* event horizon since we are the constructors of the time (only our influence is in the network) and we have the ledger of time events. My mind goes to thinking if we can ever get total network hash to 1 hash per unit Planck time and what that means. If we are objectively constructing time in bitcoin from thermo, what does it mean to be constructed from time? What is light since we are composed of light? What is the relationship of light and time?

Sure, but address the question: *if* time is quantized and discrete, would you agree the formalism of QM breaks down? Yes or no? Only after addressing that question can we proceed because then this raises the question that how would a discrete and quantized time change our interpretation of Planck Units. Yes mathematically you can divide them into smaller units, but physically you cannot. Again Bitcoin is showing us what a quantized model of time looks like. Please show me a valid 1/2 of a block of time or a valid 1/10 of a block of time in bitcoin. I’ll be waiting.

Sure working on it finalizing a paper. Objectively would you agree that if time is quantized and discrete, that the formalism of quantum mechanics breaks apart?

We’re almost back here. Bitcoin is still chirping, but for how much longer?

Time is money, but money is not time. So what is time? #Bitcoin