Information Legos

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:35Analogy

   That's because it's not physical to me. I don't immediately recognize the physical signature of Bitcoin like you would something like the Great Pyramids. If you can imagine the Great Pyramids, all of the energy that was transformed in constructing them, you go to a location like that, you see it, you are in awe, you recognize the volume of energy, the volume of work necessary to generate such a structure.

2. 01:15Claim

   With Bitcoin I find it significantly harder to recognize not only the sheer size of the entity itself, the footprint that it creates, but also the number of solutions or possible future scenarios it helps solve, the degree to which it will make the extended order more efficient, as in the opportunities where it can find utility in transactions amongst members of the extended order.

3. 01:51Claim

   That number is so large, there are so many opportunities, because money is one half of every transaction, of every exchange as it stands now. That it's a very difficult concept to understand and to recognize and then to not forget about, because if you forget about it, then it doesn't seem near as useful.

4. 02:22Claim

   The price is representative, at least in fiat dollars, of what it can do now to make the world more efficient. I think it scales much bigger than that, I think that it will be more valuable than that, because just in my own little circle it appears as though that would be a better thing, but to think beyond that is just that much more difficult.

5. 03:33Idea

   We can think about that information like Legos, individual units that can be divided or removed from one another and added with others, subtracted from things. We can build different objects, we can take the individual components of the Legos, put them together to reveal a seemingly infinite number of possibilities. These past technologies, these past types of Lego pieces are then put together by individuals inside the extended order to solve a problem, to make us more efficient.

6. 04:12Claim

   Technology is a means of minimizing effort to work. It's energy efficiency embodied. It is information, technology is novel information, it's the physical embodiment of order, where we are trying to assemble a tool that will make us more efficient at overcoming a certain task or a problem.

7. 04:42Claim

   Technology doesn't always have to be physical, it can assist in every sort of endeavor, scientific endeavors like telescopes and microscopes, you're using this new form of order to be more efficient at researching whatever aspect of the stars or cells or bacteria you're looking at.

8. 05:12Claim

   The more that we can generate novel information that allows us to take advantage of the energy discrepancies between being inefficient and efficient, the better that's going to be. Ideas are also technology, there's mathematics, there's calculus, all of those things allow us to minimize effort, minimize work, all aimed at the life goal of generating order where there is disorder, in a world of ever increasing entropy.

9. 05:52Claim

   You can see this in the way that the extended order itself comes to be. We mobilize society to solve problems that would otherwise be very difficult or impossible to solve on our own, through the division of labor, and we needed tools for the division of labor to achieve escape velocity from what we can do all by ourselves, and to facilitate that exchange we need to keep track of who is putting energy into the system, and this is where things like money come along.

10. 06:26Reference

    This is studied in things like complexity theory, and you find this in biological life, which is the 25 percent rule that's found everywhere in the entire biosphere.

11. 07:01Claim

    If you have an organism that is five kilograms and you double it to 10 kilograms, that 10 kilogram organism only needs 75 percent of the energy to continue to live, to maintain the equilibrium necessary to live, and that scales all the way up or down from a cockroach to a blue whale.

12. 07:38Idea · condensed

    There's actually a 15 percent improvement on the rate of ingenuity as the size of the network doubles with human beings. This is why you feel that you need information to generate more information and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Why is that? It's because this is the treadmill that we are on. This is the treadmill that never slows down. Everything needs to speed up because of this fact.

13. 08:21Claim

    The extended order is running on a treadmill, life is running on a treadmill, and the speed is increasing. We need to generate more information to access more energy so that we can keep this growing population fed with energy, they need to have access to reserves. We need to find new ways to put the Lego pieces together so that we can transform more energy from inaccessible to accessible.

14. 08:56Claim

    As we innovate, as we increase the amount of information and the tools we have at our disposal, we will hit a limit to that technology's ability of that time and that era to actually cycle faster, we're going to hit the maximum RPM of whatever treadmill we're on, and we don't want to do that, because then we're going backwards and we're going to have access to less energy, and that collapses the entire system.

15. 09:29Analogy

    Not only do we have to continually get faster on the treadmill that we're on, but we need to continually jump to the very next treadmill that is already going faster than what we were. It's almost like gears in a car, you use first gear to get to second gear, you get to third gear, you don't jump from first gear to sixth gear, it doesn't do you any good.

16. 09:59Claim

    We're getting to the era of information where it is so accessible, and it allows for generation at such a speed, such a rate that we haven't seen before, where the speed that we're running on the treadmill will actually be eclipsed by the speed that we are jumping from treadmill to treadmill.

17. 11:11Analogy

    You had 50 years to get really good at understanding and to become an expert at extracting maximum utility from the telephone. You had a thousand years to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of information, the maximum amount of energy from using pen and paper. That's a long time.

18. 11:41Claim · condensed

    Now it's getting so quick, the jump from treadmill to treadmill is getting so rapid that it actually doesn't pay to get up to speed on each treadmill, there's significantly less return trying to do that, it's in fact better to look for the next treadmill, because you know it is coming, because it can't be any other way.

19. 12:15Claim

    The dangerous part of this is that eventually every node in the network, every person in the extended order, becomes a user rather than an expert, or doesn't even have the optionality to become an expert, which requires understanding. Then it's only about using.

20. 12:48Analogy

    It's almost like being in grade school when you had to do a math problem and write it on the board. It wasn't so much that the teacher was interested in the answer by itself, there would be a follow up of, well, how did you get there, show us through the work. The ultimate answer that's spit out isn't the important thing, it's the path that you took to get there.

21. 13:18Claim · condensed

    The heart of the problem, the harder the problem, the more reward there is, and that has been the case throughout the history of the extended order. Everything worthwhile is an effort, and that is what we reward, that is what we tell stories about.

22. 13:51Analogy

    If you play tic-tac-toe, you can be interested in that until you're about five years old, or you can play chess or go, you can play those games forever. Why? Because they're more complex, there's a higher chance of failure, and there's something to be learned with every single game.

23. 14:31Claim

    As the world and the extended order become more complex and we have to jump from treadmill to treadmill, we don't have the opportunity to figure out why, or to have the understanding of what's happening with the technologies that are allowing us to become more efficient, and then we're just along for the ride.

24. 14:31Open question

    This is where I think there is a question to be had: are we, as an entity, an energy transformation entity, more or less efficient if people use Bitcoin and don't understand it? Because we know that simply by using Bitcoin rather than the alternative, the extended order is in a far better place energy wise.

25. 15:07Claim · condensed

    The benefits are already built in there just from exiting the fiat system without understanding the advantages that the Bitcoin system offers, because removing the ability for a select few to manipulate the energy storage of others already closes a huge gap between where we could be and where we are.

26. 15:45Claim

    You only know you're becoming more efficient if you understand how the system works. If you just adopt Bitcoin, yes, overall the extended order is much better off, but in a world becoming more productive at the singular level, the vast majority of the benefits will go to the individuals who understand how this is happening behind the scenes, because then they can leverage it in other novel areas.

27. 16:22Claim · condensed

    If one element changed throughout the process, you would be able to adapt to it because you could zero in on what was different, and come up with a hypothesis and check it. If you only knew the answer, you would just memorize it, and you'd be at a significant disadvantage if anything changed inside that problem.

28. 16:53Idea

    To circle back to my original point, to think of Bitcoin as an evolution of what is possible with Legos, all of the technology and information we have inside the extended order are these different Lego pieces that we're able to pull apart, put back together, and in combination make pretty much anything we can think of. The way that you solve a problem in the extended order now is you take all of the available pieces, you arrange them in a unique and novel fashion, and if it serves some purpose and makes us more efficient, you're going to receive rewards from the market.

29. 17:29Analogy

    It might be the case that Bitcoin is just a new block, right? Instead of having three holes on top and a dot on the bottom, it's got a different pattern on it, and that different pattern will be able to slot in with all of the other blocks so that we'll be able to build new and unique things.

30. 18:00Claim

    But it has to fit on these little blocks, so it's limited in its ability, it changes how you interact with the piece itself, we might think of that piece as money. Except money is half of every single transaction and every single exchange, so instead of just being a unique block, it's almost like we've jumped treadmills.

31. 18:34Idea

    We're at maximum RPM on whatever treadmill we're at before Bitcoin, in the fiat world, and we've jumped treadmills now, and this treadmill is still accelerating faster than the last, but it's a new treadmill. And what happens in this universe is that the Lego pieces that we have access to no longer require the energy that used to compress them together, that used to snap the Lego pieces together based on the design of the dots and dimples and the little holes that are on the actual pieces.

32. 19:05Claim

    Imagine a world where you didn't have to connect the Legos in that way, that's the level of innovation, that's the change that has taken place because of Bitcoin. You no longer have to place the pieces in the order that you had to place them before, so you can completely ignore all of the limitations that were there before.

33. 19:38Claim

    Without the need to conform to where the pieces fit together, what kind of structures can you come up with? That's the main difference, it's not an individual piece inside of the system, it's the actual system of connection altogether.

34. 20:08Claim

    Why does it allow us to be more efficient at putting the other pieces together? Because it is the glue, it is the bond that holds them, that is where the exchange happens. This is not a small step forward, because it's the snap of the pieces that have been altered, which means every single piece, everything that we have done in the past, now has the option to become more efficient by adopting this way of joining the pieces together.

35. 20:41Claim

    Not only does what we have been doing get more efficient, because these pieces fit together better, but with the same pieces we can create things that simply weren't possible before, because there was no way to securely attach the individual pieces to one another unless they conformed to the system overall.

36. 20:08Quote

    It is the glue. It is the bond that holds them. That is what the exchange is. That is where the exchange happens.

37. 21:16Reference

    There are certainly forces of homogeneity that are present, things like artificial intelligence or OpenAI, where they're telling you what to think or how to think or communicate more clearly as defined by the data set itself, a model constructed using a set of data comes up with, well, this is the way that I would go forward here, and the more individuals that use that, the less individuality there is.

38. 21:53Claim

    We need the outliers, we need the individuals, we need the people thinking about how to put the blocks together in a different way to report back to the hive mind. That's how we get to the next treadmill, we need individuals that are doing things differently.

39. 22:24Analogy

    The classic example is a screwdriver or the knife, there's things that you can do with a knife or screwdriver that you simply cannot do without them. We are looking for those technological breakthroughs, the new abilities to transform energy in the world around us, where machines can solve physical limits through mechanics.

40. 22:58Claim

    Logic and mathematics can overcome cognitive limits and logical paradoxes. Technology is simply a tool to make us more efficient, to do less with more, seeing the information in the physical world around us as the blocks of the Legos that need to be rearranged to design tools that will make us more efficient and allow us skill sets that weren't possible before.

41. 23:33Claim

    As we unlock these new abilities, that unlocks a larger probability that we will be able to transform energy into denser and denser containers that will allow us to access it. If we have access to more energy reserves, that puts us in a better place, and the lower we can make our time preference, the further out into the future we can plan, the more runway we have to generate different ways of transforming energy.

42. 24:49Quote

    That's a blow the brain out the back of your head moment, thinking about just how many Lego pieces have to go together to represent all of those transactions.

43. 24:49Claim

    It's an enormous marketplace, it's an enormous unlock of energy. It is the greatest compression tool that we have ever had, and the ability to see how that's going to impact the energy reserves that we have access to, thus growing the pool of energy.

44. 24:49Idea

    You remember the TASOE, the total accessible supply of energy, the Bitcoin itself, the figure, the coins that are distributed on the network. That's what that represents.

45. 25:26Reference

    The thesis for investing in Bitcoin is that the Lindy effect of life becoming more and more efficient is going to continue as it has since the dawn of time.

46. 25:26Prediction

    If that is going to grow, which we think that it will, if you think that's true, well then it's best to invest in Bitcoin, and it's best to get a little bit of Bitcoin, because that's what you're accessing, we have fenced the total accessible supply of energy that the extended order can actually generate, transform into usable, accessible units.

47. 26:01Claim

    If it unlocks areas of things we haven't been able to do before, if it is the screwdriver for the digital world, what can we do with that screwdriver that we couldn't have done without it? It's the rearrangement of every single transaction inside the economy, and this is why it's also a very exciting time to be involved with Bitcoin.

48. 26:33Quote

    You're no longer a tour guide on things that have come before, information that has come before. Right now, you're the explorer.

49. 26:33Claim

    Through this information revolution, we're now at the point where there are limits to understanding, not the ability to parrot back information in a cohesive manner, but to actually understand what is happening. The excitement comes from this idea of joining Lego pieces in ways that have never been possible before.

50. 27:05Open question

    That's what's on the horizon or the landscape of Bitcoin's future, is that it isn't completely explored, it hasn't been completely dug. There's still questions out there that need answers, and there's still a veil of uncertainty on just how rapid all of these things are going to take place.

51. 27:05Quote

    I need to hit the end of the rabbit hole, to hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, not the actual end of it, more just the edge, which is where the digging has not yet begun or where the digging has ceased, because no one has pushed it further in a direction.

52. 27:38Open question

    What the ramifications of microtransactions are going to be, or of absolute scarcity, what that squeeze is going to look like from a world of infinite cash to a finite cash, and the transfer of value that will happen, these are all things where we have a new test bed, a new treadmill that we are running on to be able to facilitate different possibilities that were not there before.

53. 28:09Claim

    This is where I think the real value is in Bitcoin, not just the use of Bitcoin but the understanding of it, because that is what sparks the curiosity of the individual to decide which direction things need to be explored further, or where energy is best spent. It is the ultimate compression of energy allocation, there is a map for the real territory that is Bitcoin if you use the tool.

54. 28:42Claim

    Without knowing that the tool exists or functions, that puts you at a significant disadvantage. Going forward, the opportunities I see for the most return are understanding the tool, developing an expertise, increasing the curiosity to explore different areas and construct or build entities using the blocks that wouldn't have been possible before.

55. 29:17Claim

    You're just not snapping them together, and that in and of itself is a change large enough to facilitate an enormous amount of energy transformation, because you no longer have to apply the energy necessary on the Legos themselves to snap them together, we've removed that friction, so all of that energy that went into snapping the blocks together can be used somewhere else.

56. 29:47Claim

    If you can't find a use for that freed energy somewhere else, you're going to say, I need a place to park it. It's like the aid of snapping together without the required energy to push them together, that has been unlocked, and the Bitcoin market itself, or everything denominated in Bitcoin terms, will tell you exactly where that energy should flow to.

57. 30:20Claim

    In the future, maybe it won't be parking in Bitcoin, but it does appear that way until the extended order realizes the size of the unlock that has occurred because this new tool exists, this recognition of the new treadmill that requires an increase in speed, but also an increase in looking around for whatever the next treadmill is going to be that we have to jump from.

58. 30:51Prediction

    We are only going to get more efficient, we're only going to increase our information generation capabilities, and if that is the case, we need to keep winning at areas that we didn't think were possible to find efficiency gains in, and until it's recognized by the vast majority of extended order participants, we're in for asymmetric returns.