Does Time Back Bitcoin or Does Bitcoin Back Time?

Ahead of yet another 12-14% difficulty increase coming in the next 15 hours,i the Bitcoin network has reached nearly 100 petahashes of processing power,ii less than 8 piddling months after hitting 1 petahash.

Let that sink in.

It’s insane. It’s beautiful. It’s utterly mesmerizing.

And it’s precisely why, even as I sit here in a sprawling private apartment in the heart of Old Montreal, ready to tap into a city alive with Grand Prix fever, nothing else in the world matters.

So why is this so special? I’ll let #bitcoin-assets take it from here:

Naphex:iii So.. if the difficulty adjusts itself to do sha256 for 10 minutes, isn’t bitcoin backed by TIME? *woah*
Apocalyptic: *Mind blown*
Naphex: Someone should give that to the presses to annoy all silver/gold/money bugs. So yeah maybe proof of work is the future future. How else can you pack 10 minutes of yard work ?
mircea_popescu: Yes. And time conquers all.
Naphex: Nothing else more valuable.

Naphex is right on the money, and yet, the Bitcoin-Time relationship could be deeper still. In addition to time backing Bitcoin, it could also be Bitcoin that backs time, where Bitcoin acts as the world’s metronome, relentlessly ticking no matter how bad the storm is. Amid the complete chaos of our digitally globalized society, where multiplier effects comingle with cascading effects to create ever larger black swans,iv Bitcoin is nearly as predictable as the moon itself.v Time being the construct that it is, it’s getting increasingly hard to tell the two apart.

To paraphrase Lincoln, “the best thing about the future is that it comes one bitcoin at a time.”

Hash… Hash… Hash…

___ ___ ___

  1. Nearing us ever closer to 14B difficulty on Bastille Day. Who said you can’t make money in Bitcoin?
  2. It’s currently at 95,024,859 GH/s according to Bitcoin Wisdom. By the time you check it yourself, it’ll almost certainly be higher.
  3. Naphex operates the Romanian Bitcoin Exchange btcxchange.ro and is a #b-a regular.
  4. Both positive and negative black swans, of course.
  5. As such, Bitcoin will, according to MP, soon start controlling the price of electricity. This isn’t that hard to imagine. What’s harder to imagine is what Bitcoin won’t soon control. Weird thought: can you imagine if women adapted their menstrual periods to, instead of occuring once every lunar cycle, occured once every two network difficulty resets? The difference is only about a day so it couldn’t take that many generations…

24 thoughts on “Does Time Back Bitcoin or Does Bitcoin Back Time?

  1. pankkake says:

    Bitcoin is actually a great way to prove time.

    http://www.proofofexistence.com/

    I am not aware of any other technique that would provide the same proof without a trusted third-party.

  2. Bitcoin definitely gives meaning to time. Human activity has so far been only approximately anchored into time, but with the heart of all markets now ticking – as you say, as a metronome – things are suddenly very different.

  3. […] It’s insane. It’s beautiful. It’s utterly mesmerizing. – Peter D. […]

  4. […] wealth being entirely a function of our time, that is, our Bitcoin. […]

  5. […] It’s insane. It’s beautiful. It’s utterly mesmerizing. – Peter D. […]

  6. […] It’s insane. It’s beautiful. It’s utterly mesmerizing. – Peter D. […]

  7. […] with “being an aspiring writer” and everything to do with making yourself understood in a world without time or geography. Either a blog or a journal can serve as a starting point. How often and how much […]

  8. […] sequentially may be taken as a unit of measure for the passage of time. It was once conjectured Bitcoin is backed by time, but for this purpose as transactions are anchored in time by their block their existence is […]

  9. […] on the dollar,ii you can have a piece of Bitcoin history – a momento to that short window of time when merchant adoption, ATMs, and the Redditard community appeared to have any impact on Bitcoin […]

  10. Mezmorizing and brillant. The intrinsic value of bitcoin is that it is as metronomic and calculated as the universal construct of time itself.

    Bitcoin is backed by time, and boasts intrinsic value which will continue to grow as more users join the fold and the network becomes exponentially more valuable for every participant.

    • Pete D. says:

      You must think I’m really fucking stupid to let you walk around misspelling “mesmerising” and “brilliant” while ripping off my articles, improperly attributing them, failing to link back to the original source, and then having the motherfucking GALL to leave a comment on my original post with a link back to your piece of shit knock-off.

      Holy fuck Travis. You must be really fucking new to this Internet thing, much less this Bitcoin thing. You’ve a very long ways to go, my friend, a very long ways to go indeed.

  11. […] this fucking kid reads Does Time Back Bitcoin or Does Bitcoin Back Time ? and thinks to himself “Gee golly wouldn’t it be great if some of the third-rate idiots […]

  12. Z.A. Corbett says:

    Hmm, it almost appears that other articles on that site were pulled from other publication…

    • Pete D. says:

      Scammers gonna scam until he scams the wrong dude – this being the one waiting by the door with a double-barrel shotgun marked “USE IN CASE OF SCAMMER” and not afraid to do just that.

  13. […] up with inflation. Don’t believe the stock market or Hollywood ? Believe the metronome : Bitcoin. […]

  14. Mitchell says:

    Looks like his only ‘success’ is from biting your shit: http://www.coindesk.com/forget-gold-bitcoin-is-backed-by-time/

    He’d be much wiser to get into the WoT and obtain his own ideas.

    • Pete D. says:

      So Travis has been demoted from his own platform to the scam-pumpers at CoinDesk which is in every way like going from your own girlfriend to a bar slut that made out with another guy 15 seconds before she made out with you ?

      Colour me very slightly amused and not so very surprised.

  15. […] perhaps ? And you thought Bitcoin was a metronome ! […]

  16. […] other even less salient and less notable examples, all of which have been lost to the relentless march of blocks. Every one of these attacks failed in the face of the threat of economic ruin at the merciless and […]

  17. […] these days, not that I have 10+ hours to sink into a costume anyways given that, y’know, my time is actually worth something. […]

  18. […] have I simply delayed gratification long enough to enjoy the golden fruits of my labour ? Another three hundred thousand blocks will surely see the a bitcoin or two buy a fine Italian boulevardier of the rosso corsa variety, […]

  19. […] Time, Specs and designs for the first ever Blockheight Timepieces, and of course the seminal Does Time Back Bitcoin or Does Bitcoin Back Time?  […]

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