The Great Filter

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim

   It's going to, at least if the Bitcoin thesis plays out, as I see it in my head, it's going to be instrumental for making the extended order more efficient. And that is by combining Bitcoin with the theory of information.

2. 00:00Reference

   I think I read the Cesar Hidalgo book, "Why Information Grows."

3. 00:46Reference

   And then that led to another book by an author named James Gleick on information.

4. 00:46Reference

   Taking this idea of information theory as put forward by Claude Shannon, who at the time, I didn't know this was actually 32 years old, which makes the feat even more impressive.

5. 01:24Claim

   For much of the extended order's lifespan, the problem has been a lack of information. The need was to source as much information, get our hands on as much information as possible so that we could be as efficient as possible in the world. That has been the case for 99.999% of the time that the extended order has been a thing.

6. 01:59Claim

   Now enter the last age, the information age, and all of a sudden information has exploded. The problem isn't that we don't have access to enough information. The problem is that there is too much information.

7. 01:59Reference

   It will overwhelm the person bite, as Cesar Hidalgo puts it, which is you can think of as the ability for one individual to be able to compute and use all of the information that is out there that they can possibly use in their lifetime.

8. 02:36Idea

   Enter Bitcoin, where if you think about what information is doing and what access to information is allowing for members of the extended order, you can start to see a future where Bitcoin is the great filter. It's the filter that is not only the most efficient but also the most accurate.

9. 03:16Claim

   If it's true that the efficiency is going to jump as much as it appears it would, then it might be worth, number one as always, just owning Bitcoin. Number two, thinking about ways that you could bring this future to light faster because the rewards will go to individuals.

10. 04:00Claim

    This filter that is Bitcoin simply wasn't possible before the technology existed. Now that it is, what does that mean?

11. 04:33Claim

    Information is, as life becomes more efficient, it increases. The very definition of efficiency, the ratio of useful work performed to the total energy expended, gives us a clue as to why information is constantly increasing.

12. 05:08Analogy

    As viewed from outer space, if aliens were to look on the planet, what you see is this black hole of information where there is so much activity on Earth. There is no other place that we can view anywhere near us that has the information generation capabilities that our planet does.

13. 06:47Quote

    That is the battle between entropy and information.

14. 07:18Reference

    A concept quite familiar to Bitcoiners that have read the Bitcoin Standard. This idea of time preference.

15. 07:51Analogy

    As you get more and more energy in reserve, as you have more hay or more wheat in the barn, you are going to have enough food to see you through the winter. So what can you do during the winter? You can come up with more plans. You're able to push out those time horizons, which allow you to then plan, which allows you to generate information.

16. 08:21Claim

    In the old days, total information was significantly lower. Because there were fewer people generating information at a much slower speed, which means less information.

17. 08:56Claim

    For information to be useful, to be at its maximum use, it needs to be able to be communicated to others in the group to be shared. That will allow for specialization, which will unlock energy reserves that were not possible before that specialization.

18. 09:36Claim

    The winners in this game were networks that allowed information to flow quicker with less possibilities for the introduction of noise to that information.

19. 10:09Claim

    The majority of information that humans generated was physically limited because it decayed over space and time. Before a written history was possible, you were limited in how you could generate information and you were limited in how that information would be shared.

20. 11:21Analogy

    When you talk to someone or when you listen to someone, that is information that is being generated, but it is decaying, physically decaying over space and over time. You can only hear someone so far away before that information is broken down by entropy.

21. 11:56Analogy

    Much how we talk about the universe needing solids so as to slow entropy and allow for a long enough leash for life to emerge from a high energy system operating in disequilibrium, which is what we are. So too does writing down information lengthen the lifecycle of that information remaining in order, remaining intact long enough to be useful to the most number of people.

22. 12:31Analogy

    Now we can write a book once and get as many copies as are demanded by the market without the constraints put in place by the laborious task of writing out each copy by hand. Information can now spread at what we could call near freeway speeds.

23. 13:08Quote

    All we have to do is locate where the information is flowing and we have to put ourselves between the information and the decay.

24. 13:52Reference

    Prior to the printing press, the largest library in Europe was the University of Paris library and it had 300 manuscripts. This is in the 1300s, 300 manuscripts.

25. 14:27Analogy

    It's built on layers. And without that foundational work being done, you expend most of your energy retracing steps that have already been walked. We want to be forging in a new path based on the shoulders of giants that have come before.

26. 14:58Reference

    Gutenberg didn't live long enough to see his invention take off. He died penniless. Gutenberg had produced, by the end of his life, 200 Bibles.

27. 15:30Claim

    If it was invented in 1436, it really wasn't until the 1490s that the technology made its way to the Venetian network of sailors, where there was an opportunity to spread information much quicker.

28. 16:33Claim

    Before the printing press books were so expensive, they had to be manually written out by scribes. This was a skill, this was a job that existed beforehand, and it was incredibly expensive to do that, which is why there was this bottleneck in spreading information to the masses.

29. 17:04Analogy

    It picked up traction when it hit the Venetian sailors because now this network would have something to sell, five books to a single captain, and that captain would go around to all of their stops and drop these books off or exchange them for locals in the area that also had presses. That is how you had your original news networks pop up.

30. 17:34Analogy

    Literacy was incredibly low. The number of people that can actually read. And this gave readers power, much like the understanding of Bitcoin now is so low. This gives people that understand Bitcoin an extreme advantage over those that do not.

31. 18:10Quote

    There's nothing you could have done in the 1490s that would have been more valuable than just reading books.

32. 18:55Claim

    There is a stereotype that German engineering is far superior to anything else, and there's theories as to why might that be, and what things are present in the economy or in the social environments or in the economic feedback loops that make it so that German engineering continues to dominate.

33. 18:55Claim

    Those closest to, much like the Cantillon effect, closest to the spigot of fresh money is the most advantageous position to be in, because by the time it filters out or spreads out to the rest of the economy, you've taken advantage of it by buying up scarce assets. The same goes for the printing press.

34. 18:55Reference

    Much like the Cantillon effect, closest to the spigot of fresh money is the most advantageous position to be in.

35. 19:59Analogy

    What if we paused the entire world, but we just gave the country of the United States three generations to consume and generate information on their own? Would they emerge after that 60 year pause on the rest of the world having access to information and therefore generating new information, new technologies, new innovations?

36. 21:04Claim

    With the printing press, scientists can rely on the printed findings and the numbers of a given experiment, which made the results that much more reliable and repeatable, which is exactly what was necessary for something like the birth of the scientific method.

37. 22:14Quote

    The idea that information compounds and it must be there to grow in the first place, and the more there is, the less is required to add to the pile.

38. 23:27Quote

    The equation is suddenly and almost violently flipped on its head overnight.

39. 24:03Claim

    There's just too much information to get through for any one person. So now the major need is in filtering information. We don't care about essentially all of the information that is being generated. We care about a very small sliver of that information.

40. 24:33Quote

    This is where we enter the great filter that is Bitcoin or that will be Bitcoin.

41. 24:33Prediction

    The earlier you adopt the filter, the larger advantage you're going to have over those that delay seeing this idea.

42. 24:33Quote

    The seem to lab way of saying the same thing, which is don't tell me what you like. Show me what is in your portfolio.

43. 25:06Claim

    The selfish instinct to want to survive, we know that we need access to energy. And that means that we are very careful with how money is allocated in our lives because we operate as a member of the extended order. Money is our way to interact with that order to get access to the energy that we need to survive.

44. 26:11Claim

    Even if you just have a very brutal, no no pointer, level understanding of what money is, the phrase money talks still rings true. The pricing in the exchange network has a way of highlighting what is useful and therefore what has value.

45. 26:44Claim

    With Bitcoin for the first time ever, we have a tool that offers the extended order an opportunity to filter the most useful information, regardless of location, regardless of when, regardless of how.

46. 27:23Claim

    By using Bitcoin as your unit of account, because of the emerging properties inherent in the system, you can get a crystal clear picture of what is being valued as information at any given time without outside interference, because Bitcoin cannot be manipulated.

47. 27:58Claim

    The network settles, at least via lightning and other layer two opportunities, at the speed of light, which makes it that much more effective at highlighting utility.

48. 27:58Quote

    Bitcoin is a truth machine because money talks and all you have to do is look at where people are putting their Bitcoin and that will show you where there is value.

49. 28:40Reference

    The author James Gleick uses it in his book, The Information: The New York Times editors, in the past before the internet, deciding what was above the fold on the front page.

50. 29:13Analogy

    That was done by the editors of the magazine. They didn't have to consult with anyone. They didn't have to do focus groups or look at what articles were getting the most clicks. They were going based on their own biases as to what was going to have the most value in communicating to the readers.

51. 29:45Claim

    Now the information that is being projected into the world via The New York Times is changing all the time, based on clicks. There's an algorithm to decide how can we get people to stay here as long as possible.

52. 30:16Quote

    It's one thing to have a system based on abstract power, and it's an entirely different thing to have one based on real power.

53. 30:48Prediction

    The technology to use Bitcoin as this great filter is already there. There's a number of smart people working their way through the issue. The foundation for this world built on valuable information, that's being built as we speak. And it isn't there yet, but the writing is on the wall.

54. 31:23Reference

    You can already see this on Nostr in its infancy, where as something gets read, you can boost it or you can just stream sats to it as you read it.

55. 31:58Claim

    As sats streaming happens across the board, both in products in the physical world and online, you're beginning to generate a pattern of filtration that has priorities, an ordinal fashion, according to the masses and you individually where the value is in the information that's being generated.

56. 32:34Prediction

    The unit of account for everything will be Bitcoin. And so information both online and offline will be subject to the truth machine that is Bitcoin.

57. 33:16Claim

    You aren't relying on some black box algorithm of a giant newspaper industry or media industry or the tech giants, all of whom have shown themselves incredibly vulnerable to political capture.

58. 33:53Analogy

    If I'm confident that a product will be useful, what better way to tell them that than by giving them Bitcoin, saying, hey, here's a little seed Bitcoin, you should check out what I've done here. This product or service will make you that much more efficient.

59. 35:08Claim

    Me being more efficient, taking care of whatever task that was needed three people before, now it only needs one. Those two other people can be of service to us elsewhere, where their energy returns are going to be greater than whatever was locked in the previous iteration of the product or service.

60. 35:41Quote

    Hopefully in the end, we win, even though we probably won't, as physics has shown us that it's a slippery slope, but we might as well push it as far into the future as we can.

61. 36:19Open question

    Is there something to this? Is there a concept in there? Is the idea that Bitcoin will be this great filter? Is this like how far down the rabbit hole are we now?