Bitcoin Standard Time

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Reference

   I wanted to go over the concept of Bitcoin Standard Time, and this stems originally from an article by Gigi, one of my favorites, Bitcoin Is Time. It's not the easiest article if you're just getting into Bitcoin, but it really is perfect for people who are just emerging from their initial mental battles with Bitcoin.

2. 00:00Idea · condensed

   Once you realize that the real breakthrough of Bitcoin is the internal time element, another world opens up, and the hope is that by looking at efficiency gains from advancements in our ability to track time, the extended order's benefit can track almost one-for-one with the money becoming more effective.

3. 00:00Claim · condensed

   The melding of time, energy, and information is what allows for the emergence of a perfect money.

4. 01:31Claim

   Bitcoin not only has an internal time, it has its own arrow of time that it creates, which is mandatory for the system to actually work.

5. 02:10Quote

   It must be stressed that the impossibility of associating events with points in time in distributed systems was the unsolved problem that precluded a decentralized ledger from ever being possible until Satoshi Nakamoto invented a solution.

6. 02:57Reference · condensed

   That refers to the internal time, the arrow of time that Bitcoin the system itself creates for itself, and Satoshi Nakamoto invented the solution to it.

7. 02:57Idea

   We can use the internal clock, which is essentially the block height.

8. 02:57Claim

   If the ultimate goal of life is to transform energy from inaccessible to accessible, in the form of easily reached, denser, better energy reserves, then tracking time must do that too.

9. 04:21Claim · condensed

   Tracking time boils down to increasing efficiency in coordination: the larger an economy, the more reserves it can transform, the more specialization and exchange happens, and time is a coordinate for energy transformation, so the more accurate and numerous the coordinates, the more opportunity we can make use of.

10. 04:21Analogy

    It is like the first person shooter video game analogy used before: are you going to be more effective in the game if your screen is updating at a higher frequency, a higher refresh rate, allowing for smoother, clearer gameplay?

11. 05:35Claim · condensed

    If we can be more accurate about time, we can divide it into smaller, easily identifiable units for transforming energy from inaccessible to accessible, and if we can all agree on time inside the extended order, our opportunity for creative destruction increases by eliminating guessing and time wasting.

12. 06:14Analogy · condensed

    Locating the store that has the item you want, foreign exchange fees, and the haggling back and forth versus just listing the price are all things that decrease exchange because they increase friction and require additional energy that would not be needed otherwise.

13. 06:14Claim

    Overcoming the transactional cost of accurately tracking time and communicating the current and past time throughout the extended order has been essential in the leaps of global innovation throughout history.

14. 06:14Analogy · condensed

    If you have to have a meeting to create a new good or get supplies, saying 9 o'clock is going to be more accurate and waste less time and energy than saying first thing in the morning, which leaves more room for discrepancy, confusion, and sitting around.

15. 07:14Quote

    It's not so much the numbers that matter, but it's much more the agreement on those numbers, or much more just the agreement in general.

16. 07:14Claim · condensed

    Decreasing transactional costs leads to increased specialization, which leads to increased efficiency, which results in more energy reserves than would have been available otherwise.

17. 07:51Claim · condensed

    If we can better coordinate, we can increase our ability to specialize, which means we get better at whatever we're doing, which finds efficiencies, and efficiencies lead to transformation of energy, and energy is good, we all win.

18. 08:28Claim · condensed

    Clocks are technology, a tool that has improved like any other tool: sun dials, water clocks, sand glass, candle clocks, mechanical clocks, atomic clocks, each improvement leading to an increase in accuracy with a huge impact on the extended order's ability to coordinate and transform energy.

19. 08:28Claim · condensed

    Clocks solve a coordination problem; the less reliable the time, the larger the chunk necessary for measurement, and the more accurate and divisible the timekeeping, the more record-keeping improves, which creates a more fair system, which increases trust and investment.

20. 09:54Claim · condensed

    Leaps forward in time tracking played an enormous role in the Renaissance, when the standard was canonical hours: unequal hours, sundial based, that the church divided the day into, and the church and the clock tower were pivotal to economic activity.

21. 11:24Quote

    You need to sell your entire day, because that's all that can be reliably measured.

22. 11:24Claim · condensed

    Canonical hours limited what was possible for splitting up the day and coordinating activity, so agreeing on a start and finish time for work, or on breaks, was very difficult, and in the economic sense you essentially had to sell your entire day because that's all that could be reliably measured.

23. 12:00Claim · condensed

    A centralization problem emerges quickly around the clock tower and bell tower: the better and more reliable the accuracy, the more economic activity is possible and the more a region flourishes, and if it doesn't flourish it makes itself vulnerable to outside invaders.

24. 12:00Analogy · condensed

    In highly built-up Renaissance economies the bell tower system evolved into a dual control system, with two people living in the bell tower full time, almost like the nuclear keys needed to release nuclear weapons, so that one person alone could not fall to the system or lie to it and disrupt the local economy.

25. 13:30Claim · condensed

    There is a lot riding on those bells, and the church had a monopoly on this, so if you were outside the church and wanted a meeting, rally, or protest to reach as many people as possible at a specific time, you needed access to bell time, and it could get flooded very quickly.

26. 13:30Quote

    To use Bitcoin speak, the block space of sound waves can get very crowded.

27. 13:30Claim · condensed

    A union or guild that arranged for its own exclusive bell time, rather than starting work at sunup, could gain a coordination advantage over its competitors.

28. 14:51Claim · condensed

    The pressure to be heard as far as possible, because the more people on the same time the more chance for energy transformation, stressed innovation in other domains: an important technology that emerged was how far the bell could be heard.

29. 15:22Quote

    It's the same wrong time for everybody.

30. 15:22Claim · condensed

    The most valuable property of bell tower time was not the accuracy of the exact time of day; canonical hours didn't really rely on that. It was that the broadcast happened at the same time for everyone, even if it was the wrong time, it was the same wrong time for everybody, which made it fair.

31. 16:03Analogy · condensed

    The bell tower system was like the public system for time, while every individual had their own private system, using candles, small objects to check shadow length, or sand glass, to double-check for themselves, which very much builds on the don't trust verify ethos inside of Bitcoin.

32. 16:35Claim · condensed

    Even before mechanical clocks, everyone was double-checking time for themselves, using candles or small objects to check their shadow length, or later sand glass, which hints at just how important accurate time was for communities, important enough to take that extra step beyond what was pushed over the public airwaves.

33. 16:35Quote

    This makes the monetary shift to an absolutely scarce commodity like Bitcoin look small, in terms of just how capable are humans are at adapting.

34. 16:35Claim · condensed

    The 14th and 15th century arrival of the mechanical clock, made possible by the escapement, forced the extended order to rewire how it thinks about time so thoroughly that it makes the monetary shift to an absolutely scarce commodity like Bitcoin look small by comparison.

35. 17:46Claim · condensed

    The mechanical clock ushered in the exact hour system for good, meaning bells could eventually be automated and the time fraud that individual bell keepers could commit could be gone.

36. 19:08Claim · condensed

    Sand glass has major advantages over early mechanical clocks: it is very easy to trust and verify, since anyone can see if it's been flipped, whereas checking whether an early mechanical clock is genuinely accurate is very difficult, and the more accurate time that emerged from mechanical clocks became more expensive, cost prohibitive to the masses.

37. 19:08Reference

    Nick Szabo has a great piece on clocks in time and how it allowed for a fungible unit of sacrifice to emerge.

38. 20:34Claim · condensed

    The shift to exact hours and mechanical clocks led to the time value of labor, meaning prices could carry more signal and less noise, and Europe progressed in a virtuous circle where bells and clocks improved the productivity of relationships and the resulting wealthy institutions in turn funded more advances in timekeeping.

39. 20:34Claim

    In Nick's piece he argues that of all measurement instruments the clock is the most valuable, because so many of the things we've sacrificed to create are not fungible, and now, because of this technology, we have a base unit to price things in, and abstract time let different kinds of workers set verifiable working hours different from the naturally verifiable times of sun up and sundown.

40. 22:05Quote

    The more divisible, the more useful.

41. 22:05Claim · condensed

    Rather than selling the whole day, workers could now sell hours, and that process hasn't stopped: our ability to make time divisible and trackable keeps increasing efficiency, and the more divisible, the more useful, which is exactly the same idea heard before about Bitcoin.

42. 22:05Analogy · condensed

    Uber lets you sell much smaller increments of time than an hour, extending the same divisibility trend seen through the history of timekeeping.

43. 22:45Idea · condensed

    The bell technology of improving acoustics so it could be heard by the most people has essentially been perfected: now the entire extended order can hear the rings at the exact same time, no matter where they are, and the triple entry bookkeeping Bitcoin allows for is made available instantly for everyone, essentially for free, for the vast majority of users.

44. 22:45Prediction · condensed

    We can use time tracking history to imagine what will come with this jump in efficiency: new technology never necessary before, or never even imaginable before, will now be enabled, just as innovation went into the bell's acoustic reach in earlier eras.

45. 24:10Claim

    Every tick of block height allows for the most accurate signal ever produced: the exact state of affairs of energy in its final and settled state is known, at least a few blocks down, in much less time than legacy settlement.

46. 24:10Quote

    Compare settlement times with Bitcoin and the legacy system. Just, just the idea of knowing complete settlement in the legacy system is, is a farce. It's complete joke.

47. 24:10Claim

    Knowing complete settlement in the legacy system is a farce; it wouldn't be possible no matter how much time you had, because we don't know the total number of units inside the system anyway.

48. 25:31Quote

    The difference between public and private time is now zero because it's all public time.

49. 25:31Claim · condensed

    Personal verification, once as costly as carrying around your own hourglass or sand glass, is now so cheap, running your own node to get the accurate block height essentially for free, that the difference between public and private time is zero because it's all public time.

50. 25:31Prediction · condensed

    Block height will become the ultimate record, and the reliability of that signal, the toll of the bell, will be leaned into more and more as confidence and trust in the system grow, following the same adoption progression as anyone new to Bitcoin coming to understand it's immutable and unchangeable.

51. 27:01Quote

    So it's bullish to say the least.

52. 27:01Prediction

    This will change the way the extended order can leverage accurate time tracking, and that will lead to unimaginable levels of energy transformation, so it's bullish to say the least.