Bitcoin Larry

I really enjoyed this conversation between Jack and Nick. I listened to it twice because I wanted to go back to certain parts that I understood from a different perspective the second time around. More than anything, it made me think about how Bitcoin allows us to observe time and what else this conversation opens. I’ve been saying for a couple of years, and I have a talk where I say it directly, that Bitcoin is a state of consciousness and it meets you where you’re at. I don’t really mean that hierarchically. Depending on your level of awareness, what you’re paying attention to, and where you connect, you begin to perceive different things inside the same system. For that, I also call it Layer One. Because consciousness, as Federico Faggin says, is irreducible. In Austrian economics, human action is a priori. It is the first principle. Bitcoin works beautifully with human action because it encounters choice through opportunity cost, intention, and, through action, becomes purposeful behavior. And even though Bitcoin is made out of numbers, I don’t experience it as static. I see harmonics in it. The halvings, the intervals, the mathematical architecture, the repetition and interruption of cycles. Harmonics are part of the nature of reality. They are also part of the quadrivium, one of the oldest ways of organizing knowledge. Arithmetic is number. Geometry is number in space. Music, or harmonics, is number in time. Astronomy is number moving through space and time. So when I speak about harmonics, I am thinking about proportion, interval, rhythm, tension, recurrence, and movement. They are interesting precisely because something can appear to move predictably, and then an interval or a point of tension changes the movement. Gurdjieff spoke about these intervals. Things don’t simply develop in a straight, uninterrupted line. There are points where the movement changes, where something can evolve or involve. This is also how I can read financial markets or astrological charts. There are rhythms, intervals, tensions, repetitions, and changes in direction. And then astronomy brings another question. How and where are we located within all of this? One insight from Jack and Nick’s conversation was thinking about blocks as time itself. Jack calls the block a “quantized tick of time,” and at one point says: “We exist on the other side of the boundary. We’re observing time from the outside.” This opened another question for me because I don’t experience time as linear. For me, time is dimensional. Dimensions cannot necessarily be measured in the same way we measure chronological time. I feel that you have to be both inside and outside of them to observe and perceive them. So the idea that Bitcoin creates a sequence of discrete, measurable blocks while we can observe the time produced by that system from outside of it gives me another architecture for thinking about time. What does it mean to be inside time while simultaneously observing it? What exactly are we measuring when we measure time? Are we measuring time itself, or are we measuring intervals that allow us to orient ourselves within it? I’ve been questioning these subjects for as long as I can remember, exploring the nature of reality, thus the name of my first book, through Taoist teachers, Carl Jung, astrology, Human Design, Austrian economics, Bitcoin, and other practices. Some people call these things woo woo. I don’t. For me, they’re different ways of looking at the nature of reality. Even the root of physics, physis, takes us back to nature. We’re all trying, through different languages and systems, to understand what this reality is made of and what our relationship to it actually is. Bitcoin gives me another architecture through which to observe and be part of it. The value, again, is in perception, observation, intention, and purpose. Efrat, thank you so much for this and allowing me who have been studying this for years, to learn something new