The Path to Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a machine for remembering, and it works because of one deliberate hole in its memory. The Coldcard entropy failure filled that hole with facts the world had already written down somewhere, which turned a private key into an explainable object and cost people hundreds of millions of dollars without a single server being breached. Entropy is th...

Being early and being wrong are the same position, and the original Bitcoin thesis, the one that expected people to figure it out quickly, was 90 percent wrong. Out of that error comes a working definition of value, and underneath it a definition of knowledge: arrangements that keep their shape as they travel between physical substrates and across time....

The intelligent party in a conversation with a frontier model is not the model. Both the people building these systems and the people warning against them assume otherwise, and that shared assumption is the same error the nineteenth century made about gold once the telegraph arrived: mistaking the part of the work a new technology does for the whole of ...

A persistent knowledge structure can only take one shape. Information is physical, verification is asymmetric, and those two facts force a Gabriel’s horn topology on anything that wants to keep growing. The interesting move is to run the same test against artificial intelligence, since most of what the frontier labs are shipping is shaped like a cylinde...

P versus NP is the question of whether finding a solution is genuinely harder than checking one. Almost every working mathematician believes finding is harder, and the entirety of modern digital security assumes they’re right. The same asymmetry runs through Einstein deriving E equals MC squared and through a Bitcoin miner burning gigawatts to find one ...