The Most Powerful Weapon
The Most Powerful Weapon
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
What is the one weapon you cannot, under any circumstances, allow your adversary to possess? No, not nuclear weapons — as dangerous as they are (and we might be close to finding out), you can deter them with nuclear weapons of your own and possibly even shoot them out of the sky. There is an even worse weapon, one for which you have no defense: The Time Machine.
If your enemy has a time machine, you are in big trouble. Whatever technology you have, he can go back and invent, so that it is now he who possesses it instead of you. Of course, there’s not much need for that as he can simply interfere with your parents meeting, and you would not even exist at all! The Time Machine cannot be defeated because it always has the jump on you, even before you are born. Your enemy must never be able to possess a time machine.
Fortunately for you, he never will. That’s because time travel is not possible per the physical laws of the universe. Cause must always precede effect, and never the other way around. To travel backwards in time, you would need to travel through space faster than the speed of light. This is impossible because as any object even approaches the speed of light, it takes on infinite mass and thus requires infinite energy to propel. Because energy is finite, nothing with any mass can ever be accelerated to the speed of light, let alone beyond it, and hence no one can travel backwards in time.
This “difficulty adjustment” of sorts — the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need to increase your speed — means that the timeline of events is secure and cannot be tampered with no matter how much power one has at his disposal — your enemy can never acquire the ultimate weapon.
. . .
Time is money, or so the saying goes. It follows that money is also time: a representation of the collective economic energy stored by humanity.
One way to look at money is stored time. To the extent I lack money, I will probably want to trade some of my time to acquire some, and to the extent I have it, I now can trade it for someone else’s time. Whether through my own labor (time) or someone else’s (inheriting stored time from a parent, e.g.), I might have some stored time to trade. People making (voluntary) time trades is essentially how a healthy economy functions.
Imagine then if while you and I are trading time amongst ourselves and others, someone especially efficient with his time comes along and has a lot of surplus to trade. That wealthy person will at first get a lot of others’ time in return, but people will observe his methods, become more efficient themselves, and that will eventually become the new standard, i.e., the process of innovation and competition. These injections of efficiency make goods and services cheaper for everyone, i.e., less costly in stored time to acquire.
Imagine, alternatively, someone else comes along with a magic machine such that he can, by pressing a button, create stored time in unlimited supply, and he brooks no competition. You can see his method (counterfeiting), but you can’t copy it because for you it is illegal. What happens to your healthy economy of time trading and innovation? For starters, savvy people will do what they can to transact with the man who has the machine. After all, he has infinite stored time to offer, and you have only the meager surplus you were able to save. Instead of innovating and competing for your stored time (building goods and services), the best and brightest will seek out the infinitely remunerative financial sector that sits closest to the machine.
Moreover, because the machine injects so much stored time into the system, one’s share of stored time relative to that of the entire economy gets diluted — there is stored time inflation, and your stored time does not have the purchasing power it once did. It’s as though the work you did, the actual time you expended in exchange for the stored version, was negated. When you look at wages as time, and saving as stored time, inflation that cuts your savings in half isn’t merely wage theft, it’s time theft. The man with the machine is rolling back the ledger of events and essentially saying, “Actually that work you did for that stored time? You only did half of it.”
Even worse, many people don’t know they’re being robbed. They know the time they’re putting in doesn’t go as far as they used to, that it’s harder to pay for scarce goods and services like healthcare, education and a home, but the man with the magic machine never breaks into their apartments directly — he doesn’t have to. He just re-arranges the ledger, so that it appears certain people earned more in the past (holders of scarce assets, financiers closest to his magic machine) and others less (wage earners, people who have their savings in cash.) The man has a machine that can re-arrange stored time, so to speak. He has, in essence, a time machine.
. . .
Over the last 25 years, the world has begun (as Michael Saylor puts it) to dematerialize huge swaths of everyday life. Social media for socializing, payment processors and online banking for money, e-commerce for online shopping, communication via email. This has added great convenience and utility. All but most die-hard luddite would rather pay a bill in two seconds with a click than have to find a postage stamp, a check and walk to the nearest mailbox.
But the dematerialization of everything has come at a cost. That cost is middleman control of the digital rails. Twitter or Facebook can ban you from participation in the public square, Paypal or JP Morgan can prevent you from using the payment rails, something that was impossible when people transacted with physical cash or gold. In digital realms, controlled entirely by third parties, there is no speed-of-light-infinite-mass adjustment ensuring the sequence of events or the integrity of the ledger. There is nothing to prevent creating money out of thin air, there is nothing to prevent dilution, inflation and time theft.
. . .
Or I should say there *was* nothing.
The invention of Bitcoin in 2009 was a breakthrough. Not only does it have a fixed and entirely auditable supply, but it relies on real-world, unforgeable energy for its verification. It takes energy from the physical world to mine a block, and over time it becomes increasingly difficult (by now virtually impossible) to meddle with the ledger, to change the records of who owes what to whom, or whose time is stored where.
Moreover, Bitcoin mining is subject to a difficulty adjustment. Miners expend energy to guess a random number, the successful achievement of which enables you to mine the next block and get rewarded in bitcoin. If the number to be guessed were between one and a quintillion, for example, it would take a certain amount of processing power (or otherworldly luck) to make a sufficient number of guesses to find it. But the difficulty of guessing it adjusts, depending on how much energy went into the prior 2,016 blocks (roughly two weeks worth.)
So say, the US government decided to put substantial power behind mining with an aim to capture the rest of the bitcoin to be awarded, the difficulty would spike accordingly. Maybe instead of one in a quintillion, it would be one in three quintillion. In sum, you cannot simply brute force mine all the bitcoin for yourself — like the speed of light, which keeps time for the universe, the difficulty adjustment keeps the blocks coming in, one after another, roughly 10 minutes apart, no matter how much or little energy is going into it.
. . .
The universe has protected us against the ultimate weapon in the physical realm, but in the increasingly important digital sphere, someone has gotten hold of it. He can devalue our stored time, he can re-write our work history, re-arrange who owes what to whom at a whim. As luck would have it, Satoshi Nakamoto brought us a shield, an incorruptible ledger to which we can turn, an accurate clock that will tell us what time it is.
I’ll let Julian Assange have the last word:
