![]() Or, to use more common parlance: tokens and ledgers. Broadly speaking, everything we have used as money up to now falls into two categories: physical artifacts and informational lists. Money is essentially a tool to keep track of who owes what to whom. However, you will have to make sure to create a new list every time you start counting, and you will also have to make sure not to count a single sheep twice (or not at all). Of course, you can also count them and keep a list. If you have one hanger for every collar, you will know that every sheep returned safely as soon as all hangers are filled. You can put a collar on each sheep, and as soon as a sheep returns home, you simply remove the collar and hang it up in your shed. ![]() Imagine you are a shepherd and want to make sure that your whole flock returned home. You can either use real-world artifacts directly, e.g., give someone a sea shell, a coin, or some other tangible thing, or you can replicate the state of the world by writing down what happened on a piece of paper. Very broadly speaking, there are two ways to keep track of things: physical tokens and ledgers. These things are, for the purpose of counting, considered alike, and they may be single objects or groups.ĭavid Eugene Smith, The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics (1900) Let the child learn to count things, thus getting the notion of number. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in 1934: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.” Today, it is again a timekeeping device that is transforming our civilization: a clock, not computers, is the true key-machine of the modern informational age. Timekeeping devices have transformed civilizations more than once. We will explore why the problem of timekeeping is intimately related to keeping records, why there is no absolute time in a decentralized system, and how Bitcoin uses causality and unpredictability to build its own sense of now. To answer these questions, we will have to take a closer look at the concept of time itself and how Bitcoin makes up its own time: block time - more commonly known as block height. How do you tell the time if clocks can’t be trusted? How do you create the concept of a singular time if your system spans the galaxy? How do you measure time in a timeless realm? And what is time anyway? But when it comes to synchronizing the state of a global, adversarial, distributed network, telling the time becomes an almost intractable problem. You might think telling the time is as easy as glancing at whatever clock is nearby, and you would be right when it comes to everyday tasks. More profoundly, as we shall see, keeping track of things in the informational realm always implies keeping track of time.Īs soon as money goes digital, we have to agree on a definition of time, and herein lies the whole problem. If money requires no time to create, it doesn’t work as money very well, or not for long. However, the link between time and money is more intricate than it might seem at first. It follows that money is also time: a representation of the collective economic energy stored by humanity. It is no more than a concept we don’t know if it even exists…Ĭlifford D. Robert Frost, Acquainted with the Night (1928) Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio.
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