[00:02:34] Preston Pysh: Guys, where do you want to kick this off? What’s your three-sentence compression of this topic for the listener tuning in and wondering, “What in the world are they about to talk about?”

[00:02:46] Jack: If I were to start, I’d simply say this: Bitcoin is physics. This paper brings us into the domains of exploring energy and time itself—

[00:02:59] Nick: —as well as memory.

[00:03:00] Nick: I think we can at least say that Bitcoin provides a new lens through which to look at what we’ve thought we understood in physics for a long time, and it gives us a new language to reference—to kind of fact-check ourselves and everything we’ve discovered since this project of knowledge began.

[00:03:20] Preston Pysh: Jeff, people might be wondering why Jeff Booth is on this call. What’s your role here?

[00:03:25] Jeff Booth: People know how much reading and thinking I do, and when I’m stuck on something, I just keep going down the rabbit hole. The same reason that took me down Bitcoin also took me into physics. Physics has had two major models that haven’t worked together for about 90 years, along with countless theories trying—and failing—to reconcile them.

[00:03:52] Jeff Booth: So when Jack and Nick first brought this paper to me—Preston, you know this—we see a lot of information that doesn’t immediately jive with what we believe, and it forces us to ask, “Could this be true?” and to look deeper. When they first showed me this paper—how long ago was that?

[00:04:13] Jeff Booth: Almost a year.

[00:04:14] Jack: Probably about a year ago, yeah.

[00:04:16] Jeff Booth: There was something in it that grabbed my attention in a profound way. It was still just a nugget at that point, and they had been working on it for a long time, but it compelled me to dig in.

[00:04:27] Preston Pysh: You guys talked to me about this, what—six months ago?

[00:04:30] Preston Pysh: We had a conversation, and the paper was probably around 150 pages at that point. Where are you at now?

[00:04:38] Jack: We’re still in the process of finalizing the edits. When this podcast releases, we’re landing at about 224 pages.

[00:04:47] Preston Pysh: I mean, this is a book. There’s no fluff here. When you go through it, you’re going to be thinking, “Oh my God.” But I think that’s part of the challenge—

[00:04:58] Jeff Booth: The precedent, which sets up a challenge.

[00:05:00] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:05:00] Jeff Booth: Because if the ideas in Jack and Nick’s paper are correct—and it feels like they are—it rewrites everything.

[00:05:09] Jeff Booth: That’s a huge claim, and it demands evidence. It’s not just about the length of the paper—though that alone is impressive—it’s the implications that force you to pay attention.

[00:05:24] Preston Pysh: I want the audience to understand this isn’t something you just banged out over a weekend. This is something you’ve been thinking about and piecing together for over a year.

[00:05:36] Jack: I want to make a note on that, Preston.

[00:05:37] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:05:38] Jack: We’re going to get into some deep physics. When people talk about the quantum world, they love to talk about entanglement—how we’re entangled in ways we can’t perceive. Your podcast has been instrumental in shaping our thinking and leading us to this point.

[00:05:53] Jack: These ideas predate 2020. When you first brought Michael Saylor onto the podcast, that was a moment where I thought, “Someone is finally speaking the language I see in my head.” I had this intuition that Bitcoin is energy and time.

[00:06:10] Jack: There was no proper way to express that back then. Listening to you helped bring us here. We’re seeing how the past interacts with and builds the future, and we couldn’t be here without you or the Bitcoin community.

[00:06:27] Jack: Everyone has played a role in this paper. Even if you never meet the people who hear your words, your actions influence the future. That’s how this paper became what it is.

[00:06:40] Nick: I’d add that while we’ve actively worked on this over the past year, the journey doesn’t have a clean start date.

[00:06:50] Nick: It’s been the culmination of listening, understanding different viewpoints inside and outside the Bitcoin community, returning to formal academic frameworks, and trying to make sense of everything together.

[00:07:05] Nick: We’re trying to lay out an answer, but fundamentally this is an exploration—an exploratory paper meant to make sense of the logical pieces as they come together.

[00:07:26] Preston Pysh: Your paper opens with what feels like a Gödelian problem: physics treats time as a continuous parameter, but we can’t step outside time to test whether that’s true because we’re made of it. Can you explain this self-referential problem and why it’s been invisible for so long?

[00:07:51] Jack: So I guess I would start—the problem that Gödel introduced is incompleteness. And when you begin to dig and use Bitcoin as your reference to understand incompleteness, you realize that incompleteness is formally defined by the lack of a boundary. Mathematically, that’s expressed in Bitcoin’s 21 million cap.

[00:08:10] Jack: So we really want to hit the point here that the novelty of Bitcoin is the 21 million cap. That thinking needs to extend outside of just money—it needs to extend to physics and logic itself. In mathematics, any number divided by infinity is zero.

[00:08:27] Jack: That is your definition of meaninglessness—it’s the mathematical form of meaninglessness. So when you begin to put together what’s incomplete here, it’s the lack of boundary in our mathematics. The idea is that we take Bitcoin to be the truest form of knowledge we can hold onto—it persists indefinitely.

[00:08:50] Jack: Every block is persistent forever, as far as we know. We’ve always approached this ledger as a formal structure that needs to be applied to further thinking. And when you think of it, it’s like we are a product of time—or, if we are, everyone calls it the Planck tick of time: the smallest known unit where our theory of time breaks down.

[00:09:17] Jack: If we think of that object as equivalent to a Bitcoin block, we exist within that block. So we can’t exist outside its formation. When you’re trying to measure time itself—when you’re trying to measure the block—if you are a fraction of time, you can’t reference its creation because the process precedes your cognition.

[00:09:39] Jack: It’s like a computer bit trying to understand the computer it resides in.

[00:09:44] Preston Pysh: This idea of Planck time literally makes my skin crawl when I’m reading this because it’s such a fascinating parallel to Bitcoin and Bitcoin blocks. In the paper, you say Planck time is invoked as a formal limit, but can’t be probed.

[00:10:00] Preston Pysh: Why not? What’s the barrier? Why can’t we probe Planck time? I’m not an expert in that domain. I’m sure the physics person is—

[00:10:08] Nick: In general, the public understanding is that this is where our physics breaks down—this is the point where quantum and classical physics converge, and then we don’t know.

[00:10:19] Nick: Right now it’s open-ended. We don’t know whether reality and time are continuous or discrete past this point—we just don’t know. That’s what Planck time represents as a limit within the frameworks of physics we’ve inherited.

[00:10:38] Jeff Booth: I think we need to back up a little bit before getting into Planck time and such, for an audience that doesn’t understand the difference between the standard model of physics and quantum physics. I have a simple analogy for what I find challenging: anything under 10^-28—small, very small.

[00:11:01] Jeff Booth: Things like photons operate differently than big things. If you take a photon in the double-slit experiment—many people have heard of it, but they haven’t fully grasped what it means—if you fire one photon through two slits without an observer, that photon goes through both slits at the same time.

[00:11:21] Jeff Booth: But as soon as you introduce an observer, the photon only goes through one slit. This has been proved over and over again. We have evidence of this reality, but how could that reality match the reality we live in every day—which is potentially made of that reality—meaning we are part of that reality being formed?

[00:11:44] Jeff Booth: But it doesn’t feel like that in the macro world. Those models don’t line up. Did I explain that fairly—the problem of these two models not merging together?

[00:11:56] Nick: You explained it fairly in terms of the reference we have—this interpretation is presented to us often—but it’s an imperfect representation of what we’re observing. Remember, the photon itself is a model of something we don’t fully comprehend. The photon is our best placeholder for an object that’s not just an object—it’s also a behavior. It’s also a wave, right?

[00:12:20] Nick: So it’s wave-particle duality. How can this thing be two things simultaneously? What else exists in nature that behaves like that? We’re talking about the finest resolution—the thing that allows us to measure everything else—and we’re trying to probe: what is that thing, and why does its behavior seem probabilistic?

[00:12:56] Nick: And we see this in many places when you scale up and zoom in or zoom out on reality. We don’t observe photons like that—we don’t observe photons at all. Photons are what allow us to perceive anything at all.

[00:13:17] Nick: The distinction with the classical world is that we’re not perceiving objects the same way. In the micro world versus the macro world, I think in the micro world we’re not actually perceiving objects—we’re trying to apply an objective framework, but we’re observing processes that lie outside our ability to observe. Then we “timestamp” it, put a package around it, and say, “That’s a thing,” versus “That’s a process playing out and we’re observing it.”

[00:13:34] Preston Pysh: The analogy that comes to mind when I hear Jeff and Nick talk is Bitcoin. Prior to a block being found, there’s this huge array of addresses that could transact—but until you observe the block, you don’t know what transpired between addresses.

[00:13:57] Preston Pysh: And like you were saying earlier, Nick—then it’s memory. It’s in the past; it happened. When you observe that block, you can say, “Oh yeah, this address transacted with that address.” Looking forward, there’s an endless array of transactions that could happen.

[00:14:15] Preston Pysh: So is that the bridge you guys are seeing, in layman’s terms? Because the paper seems to present way more evidence from a physics standpoint for how these are correlated—or at least a simple model that might be representative of our reality, right?

[00:14:34] Preston Pysh: Is that it? Or is there more you’d point out at a top level so the listener can understand the nuance?

[00:14:44] Jack: One of the main ideas Nick and I have gone back and forth on—how to think about this complex topic through the lens of Bitcoin—is what we call the “UTXO model of reality.” We’re taking the UTXO model that we can observe and understand, and we’re trying to map it backward onto physical reality.

[00:15:04] Jack: And like you said, I want to correct one thing you said: “an infinite set of states.”

[00:15:10] Jack: Everything in Bitcoin is bounded—even the future is bounded—because the future can only be determined by what exists in the past. So you only have a finite number of UTXOs that could ever transact in any given block.

[00:15:23] Jack: It’s a very large set, but it’s finite. It’s unknowably large—probably incalculably large. And we’re looking at this as potential: whatever exists in the mempool can be thought of as “pre-time.”

[00:15:49] Jack: The problem in physics is the axiom of continuous time. With continuous time, physics doesn’t have an answer to what a measurement is. The current best guess is that the observer is the measure—and Bitcoin gives you a different perspective.

[00:16:12] Jack: In Bitcoin, anything in the mempool does not exist—it’s only referential to its past state. The UTXO that was mined in the past exists, but the future transaction does not yet exist.

[00:16:31] Jack: Only when a valid nonce is found does the block “collapse,” or does the measurement occur. The measurement occurs first—it’s an objective answer to what happened throughout the network—and only after the measurement occurs can you observe the structure.

[00:16:59] Jack: So we want to separate the two: measurement and observation. Observation is verification of structure—looking at what is objectively true in this block of time.

[00:17:17] Jack: In physics, when they say they’re “observing” something, they’re really verifying it. The difference is they have no definition for measurement itself, so they conflate the two: when I look at this thing, that’s the measurement—and they call that observation.

[00:17:36] Jack: But Bitcoin says: when you look at it, you’re verifying it. You are not creating the block. You are simply observing and verifying it. Bitcoin gives a way to distinguish between these two forms, and we can dig more into what that means in terms of a discrete process of time.

[00:17:57] Jack: Objectively, the problem in physics is continuous time, and that has forced physics to import an external form of measurement that it can’t define. In Bitcoin, measurement is internal: the block of time—the tick of time—is the measurement.

[00:18:13] Jack: In Bitcoin, time is defined in numerous ways. It’s defined by the ruleset—the rules that exist before measurement. It’s defined as the process—the act of measuring—which would be mining and traversing the nonce space to find a valid nonce.

[00:18:43] Jack: Once you have a valid nonce, you have a measurement, and that measurement results in a block. Then time is an object. You’ve gone from energy to object—or energy to memory—and that memory is the lasting form of time itself.

[00:19:01] Jack: When you order blocks chronologically as they unfold, that’s what physics understands as the coordinate of time. We’re seeing multiple dimensions of time that don’t exist in physics, but we can observe in Bitcoin.

[00:19:20] Jack: Bitcoin provides a different perspective. We stand outside the time Bitcoin produces—we don’t exist inside Bitcoin. We are the constructors or architects of Bitcoin’s time: the decisions that go into transactions, the people that mine the blocks, and the blocks that are the outcome of our work and action.

[00:19:39] Jack: We exist on the other side of the boundary—we’re observing time from the outside. So to wrap up: both are objective understandings of time—one is the internal perspective and the other is the external perspective—and you need both sides of the coin to understand what time is.

[00:19:20] Preston Pysh: That was insane. In the initial part of what you were saying, you’re talking about how it’s relative to each other, and I immediately think of Einstein and relativity—spacetime—right? The big, groundbreaking idea from about a hundred years ago.

[00:19:39] Preston Pysh: In your paper, you introduce “time space” as a replacement for spacetime. In time space, time is the primary axis—the ordered sequence of thermodynamic commitments—and space becomes the derivative. This inverts how physics normally thinks. For the listener, that can sound like fancy jargon: you “inverted” Einstein’s spacetime. Why is that important?

[00:20:11] Preston Pysh: Is it that you’re saying time is an emergent property of a blockchain—or that a blockchain creates a fair system in which nobody can control the clock?

[00:20:21] Nick: Before I get into that, it’s not like, “Oh, Einstein was wrong.” It’s more that if you observe it for what it is, you realize it’s almost a linguistic problem.

[00:20:32] Nick: So “time space” is simply a reference to inverting what you’re prioritizing mentally when constructing your model. “Spacetime” is a general term describing the connection between time and space, and we tend to think of time as a fourth dimension instead of something inherently different.

[00:20:54] Nick: The way we look at it is that the three dimensions of space—and time—are not “a fourth dimension,” per se, but almost like the mirror of space itself. So if you could see it from the other side, you can look at time differently. We see time as the foundation—the constraint, the ruleset—that allows space to construct itself: spatial order, causal order.

[00:21:22] Nick: So we look at time as what needs to be the preceding ruleset to allow the causal order we observe as our spatial environment. We see it as the flip side of space itself. So instead of thinking “space first, and then time is something we append,” we’re simply saying: let’s start with time itself.

[00:21:46] Nick: Could time be the place where, if it has a defined ruleset and is allowed to play out in discrete steps—where something evolves over time—then we can begin to see what we describe and observe as our spatial environment? We’re trying to invert the inherited bias.

[00:22:08] Jeff Booth: Preston, if you go back to Einstein—why was he able to see the idea of spacetime when nobody else could? When you look back, he imagined himself on a beam of light.

[00:22:22] Jeff Booth: Moving at that speed, where everything was relative to the speed of light. He imagined that—and that was outside.

[00:22:28] Jeff Booth: Why I think these are important things to challenge our minds is that everybody else was in a box, measuring reality from within the box. What he did was step outside and imagine: what if this existed, and I was traveling at the speed of light? What would that change about this box?

[00:22:53] Jeff Booth: What I think this paper is asking is: what if the probability space we can observe in the mempool—right—takes energy and converts it into information?

[00:23:10] Jeff Booth: That direction—that one-way direction—creates time, and time is emergent from that same thing.

[00:23:17] Jeff Booth: If that were true, it would force us to challenge a whole bunch of concepts—ideas we were stuck with inside this other box. Did I explain that well? Jack or Nick, would you comment on that?

[00:23:31] Jack: I have some things to add. Nick and I want to make it clear: this isn’t our theory.

[00:23:38] Jack: This is Bitcoin’s theory. We’re just trying to observe Bitcoin for what it is. We believe Bitcoin is something far more fundamental than most people think, and we’re trying to map what we’re observing onto our reality to see if it unlocks something new.

[00:23:56] Jack: We’ve jumped around a lot, but I want to hit this point: beneath this subjective protocol, we’re saying there’s an objective physical process underneath it that maps directly onto physics. Like you said, it’s the process where we take the nonce space and difficulty—we’ll quantify that as entropy—and we do work to resolve a single valid nonce from what we’ll call a large space for the average listener.

[00:24:26] Jack: In doing that, you create work. The resolution of a valid nonce from a sea of invalid nonces is work itself, and that work is applied to the block. So you have work generated from the nonce search, and that work is applied to the block. That’s the structure of the process beneath Bitcoin.

[00:24:46] Jack: We’re trying to quantify the energy—our original goal was to get outside any fiat-referential system and look at Bitcoin as a physical transformation. That’s the base level.

[00:24:58] Jack: One thing I want to add, bringing it back to “time space,” is that we have to step back and ask: objectively, looking at Bitcoin, what is a block?

[00:25:11] Jack: We see the Bitcoin block as time itself. So Bitcoin is empirical evidence that time may be quantized. When you look at the block itself, it’s temporally indivisible—it’s all or nothing. There’s no valid “half work.” There’s not even a valid “half hash.” The hash is quantized; the block is—

[00:25:31] Nick: —quantized. The value units are quantized, and time is quantized.

[00:25:36] Nick: Every aspect is quantized—that’s the observation we’ve made. Every aspect is quantized. In the other system, not every aspect is quantized. That’s the initial difference we’re observing and trying to map and make sense of.

[00:25:50] Preston Pysh: Which goes back to your original comment at the beginning—boundary layers—and being able to… there’s a—

[00:25:56] Nick: —boundary every step of the way.

[00:25:58] Nick: Yeah.

[00:25:58] Jack: Everything has a boundary, including time. That’s major for physics, because physics relies on the assumption that time is continuous—because there hasn’t been proof that an alternative could exist.

[00:26:11] Jack: People have theorized this—Steven Wolfram has been working on ideas like this—and we think he’s really close to what we see.

[00:26:21] Jack: We think he’s missing Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is the instantiation of what he’s working on. The proof needs a network; it needs to be filled with energy. It’s a proof that proves itself, in layman’s terms. When you look at the block, you can’t break it into smaller temporal components.

[00:26:38] Jack: At Layer 1, the block is the smallest unit of time. Nothing happens between blocks. We know Lightning exists “between” in some sense, and I don’t want to go there because that opens a whole different can of worms. But staying on Layer 1: there’s no time between blocks.

[00:26:58] Jack: The block is this quantized tick of time. And to bring it back to time space: when you look at what time is in Bitcoin—Gigi wrote about time, I think around 2020—everyone should read his piece. He talks about “the map is the territory.”

[00:27:16] Jack: That can be philosophical, but in more layman’s terms: time is memory in Bitcoin, and memory is time. They’re the same dimension. The memory produced in the block is the time itself—and that memory lasts.

[00:27:36] Jack: So when you look at the dimensionality: time and memory are a surface that exists in a coordinate system of time—block height. Block height is the coordinate system. At each block height, you have this time-memory component—a sheet of memory—where time equals memory, but only in that discrete unit of time.

[00:27:59] Jack: Every block is a different measurement—a different event. This is the process of understanding discrete time. And to finish the point: if the block wasn’t the measurement in Bitcoin—if the ledger evolved continuously until someone observed it and it became deterministic—how do you solve the double-spend problem without a quantized measurement?

[00:28:25] Jack: If you think about Bitcoin logically: without that stamped, quantized mark of “this is time,” there is no solution to double spend. So Bitcoin could not exist if the time it produced were continuous. Here we are, seeing this discovery—

[00:28:46] Jack: —that the time produced by Bitcoin is objectively quantized. And here’s my point: the quantization of time produces binary logic. What does that mean? Physics says classical information is this or that—it can’t be both. It can’t be double-spent. A UTXO must be spent or unspent.

[00:29:08] Jack: The satoshis are here or there. It can’t be both. And if it were a continuous process, Bitcoin wouldn’t function. We couldn’t build any logic on top of the system without that quantized tick of time. We know, looking at physics, that information becomes classical. So we’re looking at something that is quantizing time—creating binary logic.

[00:29:29] Jack: Bitcoin simply says: if the tick of time isn’t the measurement, then what is? That question leaves a lot open-ended. But we take the measurement to be the tick of time, and all we’ve tried to do is apply that model back to physics—not to “rediscover,” but to assemble the same picture with a different underlying process.

[00:29:55] Jack: Physics emerges from time—it’s a derivative of time. Time is beneath everything we experience. And if—

[00:30:02] Nick: —we just ground all that, the question becomes: is Bitcoin empirical evidence for one of the two options? Is time continuous only, or is time discrete? We can at least look at Bitcoin as an isolated physical system that runs regardless of our opinions—it runs.

[00:30:25] Nick: Every block is an empirical piece of evidence for that truth. We’re observing a discrete form of time. And if that’s the case—while on the other side we don’t know whether time is continuous or discrete—we can at least point to Bitcoin and say we have one physical system that operates on a discrete process.

[00:30:50] Preston Pysh: I want to get more granular on the paper, because there are other insights here that are amazing—especially regarding entropy. We’ve been talking about time and energy, and you identify a fracture that’s persisted for over a century: Boltzmann entropy counts microstates in phase space.

[00:31:13] Preston Pysh: Then you have Shannon entropy—which we’ve covered on the show a couple times with Claude Shannon—where Shannon entropy counts uncertainty over symbols. There’s no operational bridge between bits and joules, which is what these two theories address. You’re positing there might be a bridge, and this is the first time I’ve seen anything presented that suggests such a bridge—using Bitcoin as the model to demonstrate it—between Boltzmann entropy and Shannon entropy.

[00:31:51] Jack: This was one of the hardest problems for us to solve. Originally, this whole discovery of time was kind of a derivative of our initial inquiry.

[00:32:01] Jack: We started this paper just to measure Bitcoin in joules—that was the goal. It led to so much more, and it demanded so much more. The more we pulled on the string, the more reality revealed itself. And looking at entropy and Bitcoin, we’ve never really had a process that puts both together.

[00:32:23] Jack: Everyone says Bitcoin is “backed by energy.” When you look at the construction of Bitcoin, you have a 32-bit nonce space. You have quantization of difficulty—difficulty is an integer number of units. Simply put, difficulty decreases the probability of a valid nonce in that 32-bit nonce space.

[00:32:46] Jack: It’s the frequency with which a valid nonce will appear within that space. Conceptually, we can think of that space as entropy, and we can quantify it as entropy. The decrease in probability is the same as an increase in multiplicity. For the layman: you have a 32-bit space.

[00:33:09] Jack: Difficulty multiplies the number of those spaces you need to search to find a valid answer. Very simply: you have a box of 32 bits you can search for this nonce, and difficulty says you have to search that many 32-bit boxes, on average, to find a valid nonce.

[00:33:29] Jack: We’re trying to quantify entropy. In Bitcoin, you have entropy on one side, then work applied to that entropy, and it happens under some temperature—we know hashing produces heat—and the outcome is a block, which is some quantifiable amount of information.

[00:33:50] Jack: We want to be clear: when we talk about the Shannon side, it’s not the physical bits of the block, like the megabytes of the block itself. We’re looking at the finite state space of satoshis—the configuration of satoshis—because that’s what’s conserved through time.

[00:34:09] Jack: As time progresses through blocks, the container around that is the 21 million cap. The system started at 50 bitcoin per block and trends toward 21 million total supply. Each unit of time, the number of satoshis in the system changes with each block, so you have to account for that change.

[00:34:29] Jack: I might have drifted a bit from what you asked, but Bitcoin gives us these two objective processes: mining produces heat in kelvin, and Bitcoin produces information in the form of a unique configuration of satoshis in the network that you can measure. So you have both sides of this process.

[00:34:49] Jack: We know the difficulty and the nonce space beforehand, and afterward we know the exact block and the difficulty it was mined under. We know all of this from beginning to end. The hard part is relating those two things into one unified system—and that goes deep.

[00:35:08] Jack: I don’t know if you want to go there in this conversation, because it goes into the Boltzmann constant itself—rethinking through the ledger and redefining past variables in physics.

[00:35:21] Jeff Booth: I think it’s worth going a little deeper there, yeah.

[00:35:24] Jeff Booth: We lose some of it if we don’t, don’t you think, Preston?

[00:35:28] Preston Pysh: I agree. I would love to hear more on it.

[00:35:29] Jack: Very simply: the original goal was joules per satoshi. The only equation we had—without making it up—was the second law of thermodynamics, which gives a relationship among temperature, internal energy, and entropy, assuming constant volume and a constant number of molecules—or “substance,” if we’re analogizing to satoshis.

[00:35:51] Jack: The satoshi is the atomic unit of Bitcoin. Bitcoin—21 million—is like the quantum of value. That defines all value, so it’s imperative that 21 million does not change. The satoshi is the resolution at which you can perceive that value—how you break that unit of one into smaller components.

[00:36:14] Jack: The satoshi is the smallest unit of value Bitcoin represents. When you look at the word “Bitcoin,” that’s what the satoshi is. We call it a “value bit.” You can call it a satoshi, you can call it bitcoin—whatever you want—but objectively it’s a single bit of value inside that system.

[00:36:33] Nick: It’s tough. It’s like there are three worlds and we’ve forever talked about two. You can think of the classical framework, or the computational framework. We understand there’s a domain of computational systems, and then you have physical reality—two separate processes.

[00:36:34] Nick: Shannon is talking about mathematics and computation. Boltzmann is talking about physical process—thermodynamics.

[00:37:02] Nick: What we’re trying to talk about is the bridge between them: how does Boltzmann convert into Shannon, and how does that become a real number objectively within the system that records it? Okay—I remember what I was going to say.

[00:37:17] Preston Pysh: Go ahead, Jack.

[00:37:18] Jack: You asked how we bridge the two, right? It goes back to the Boltzmann constant. We wanted joules per satoshi. The only thing that relates entropy to energy is the Boltzmann constant—at least in the inherited framework—so we look at its dimensionality: joules per kelvin.

[00:37:47] Jack: And remember, this whole process of applying Bitcoin onto the universe is: what does the universe look like if Bitcoin—or the ledger—is its structure? We covered time earlier, but now we’re going to cover: what is 21 million? If the universe had a “21 million” equivalent, what would it look like?

[00:38:07] Jack: Objectively, we’re talking about a thermodynamic transition—getting satoshis in the block—so we’re looking for something in the universe that exhibits similar behavior to satoshis. It must be bounded like that. The boundary is the most important piece here.

[00:38:16] Preston Pysh: I’m laughing because I see where you’re going. This is crazy. Good—keep going.

[00:38:20] Jack: It is crazy. It objectively is crazy.

[00:38:23] Nick: I think it’s literally a truth we’ve just always taken for granted.

[00:38:28] Preston Pysh: Absolute zero is—

[00:38:30] Jack: —yeah. Bitcoin defines an absolute zero and an absolute one. What that really means is: it defines the boundary within which you can define one and zero. It’s complex, but going back to the Boltzmann constant—what in the universe would be similar to that?

[00:38:47] Jack: Well, we have Kelvin, yeah. And we know that Planck energy has a limit. There’s a limit at which physics says, at Planck temperature, the known understanding of temperature breaks down. So what does that mean? When you apply the ledger to it, it means nothing outside of this boundary can logically make sense.

[00:39:06] Jack: When you’re looking at Bitcoin, it’s the same thing as 21 million. Nothing outside of 21 million can make the ledger make sense. Once you exceed this number, nothing makes sense. We’re not saying Planck temperature is the temperature of the beginning. We’re saying this represents what appears to be the equivalent of the 21 million boundary.

[00:39:25] Jack: So when we multiply Boltzmann’s constant by Planck temperature to normalize for this full boundary system, you can remove the domain of kelvin. You have joules per kelvin, and you multiply by Planck temperature, which is in kelvin—you’re left with joules.

[00:39:47] Jack: When you do that, you realize you get Planck energy, which physicists describe as a fundamental energy scale. Through the lens of the ledger, it says this is actually a constant. If Boltzmann’s constant is the relationship between entropy and joules, and we remove the domain of kelvin from the equation because it’s bounded, then we have this purely joules constant.

[00:40:12] Jack: I guess we have to take a step back, because we all think in “absolute” terms. For example—sorry to the Europeans—we all know water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit under normal conditions, so we think of that as a constant.

[00:40:29] Jack: When we apply the boundary of Planck temperature, it becomes a constant ratio. I know I’m switching between kelvin and Fahrenheit here. The reason we’re using kelvin is because it defines absolute zero—it makes more logical sense.

[00:40:46] Jack: What do I really mean by that? Every unit of Bitcoin you have, you can only perceive relative to the denominator—and the denominator changes with time. Everyone thinks “21 million,” and Nick and I have gone back and forth: does 21 million exist now or in the future?

[00:41:05] Jack: Objectively, through the lens of thermodynamics, it exists in the future—but we can also say it exists now in some sense. The key point is that all measurement must be relative to the boundary.

[00:41:24] Jack: That’s where the idea of absolute zero and absolute one comes in. When you put all measurement against the boundary, you’re bounded between zero and one—you can’t exceed zero and one.

[00:41:41] Jack: So what is the most general relative thing? I would call it the space between zero and one in the purest mathematical sense. In Bitcoin, that’s what you get: you get one, you get zero, and everything must exist between those two and sum up to one. You can never exceed supply or the boundary.

[00:41:55] Nick: Yeah, and in Bitcoin you see the rules that allow that assumption to hold true.

[00:42:01] Nick: Because until now, “zero and one and the space between” has been an assumption. We haven’t had an external physical system that enforces that truth every step of the way and guarantees it holds at the end of the process. To us, the universe must hold that same rule somewhere within it.

[00:42:26] Nick: If not, how could the universe not have a symmetry of that?

[00:42:31] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:42:32] Jeff Booth: It might be worth going into, because if this is true, there’s zero risk of a quantum attack on Bitcoin. It’s an entirely different model—similar to how a fiat model can’t provide value for a fixed-supply system. Would you dive into that?

[00:42:47] Preston Pysh: Yeah, let’s pull on that thread.

[00:42:49] Jeff Booth: Let’s pull on that thread, because it is literally an either/or. It cannot both be true.

[00:42:55] Preston Pysh: Explain why it’s an either/or, because I don’t necessarily understand that, Jeff.

[00:42:59] Jack: The reason it’s either/or is: it’s Bitcoin or it’s quantum—in terms of quantum computers. And the reason I say that is because it relies on the ontology of time itself.

[00:43:05] Jack: Bitcoin literally wouldn’t work if blocks were a continuous, morphing thing. It needs to be discrete and quantized. So right there you have a contradiction to the axiom of continuous time that physics relies on.

[00:43:26] Jack: We want to make a note: both general relativity and quantum mechanics assume continuous time. If you pull that assumption away and say, “No, it’s discrete,” then you have to rebuild those theories from the bottom up with this new understanding of time.

[00:43:43] Jeff Booth: Jack—when you say continuous time: if we were in continuous time, would we know it? Because we can’t… essentially what you’re saying is the very idea of quantum is the measurement of the discrete, and we would never be able to observe that through our lens from within it. Is that—

[00:44:05] Jack: Yeah. I think it’s really ironic: if you change the substance of time from continuous—what we mean by continuous is infinitely divisible, you can keep breaking it into smaller pieces—Bitcoin says no. At some limit there’s the block and you can’t go any further.

[00:44:22] Nick: You must commit to a standard measurement—a global measurement.

[00:44:26] Jack: We perceive in seconds, so that’s some magnitude—some enormous frequency of these fundamental blocks. But you can also think of Bitcoin in larger units: multiples of blocks. Every 10 blocks, every 100 blocks is a frequency of time. And you even need the difficulty adjustment to build what “frequency” means.

[00:44:51] Jack: Physics believes you can divide forever. If that assumption changes, how does that affect quantum computing? Everyone talks about quantum as inevitable—something Bitcoin must bend the knee to. But Bitcoin is suggesting the opposite. That’s why it’s binary: the ontology of time matters.

[00:45:12] Jack: You can’t “double spend” what’s true about time. It’s either quantized, discrete, and indivisible at some level—or it’s continuous and infinitely divisible. It can’t be both.

[00:45:24] Preston Pysh: But just to push back: quantum computers already exist. They’re microscopic and limited in scale, in terms of the number of logical qubits they can operate with—right? I think it’s under 30, maybe even under 15.

[00:45:43] Jeff Booth: I think it’s under 15, right?

[00:45:44] Preston Pysh: But they do exist. Would this be like a block reorg? I’m trying to think of a Bitcoin parallel where something exists at a small scale but can never scale to a higher level.

[00:45:58] Preston Pysh: Would it be like a “reorg of time,” where parallel blocks are being found and then get reorganized? I’m just spitballing—I have no idea.

[00:46:10] Jeff Booth: Preston, I think we might all be crazy people in the same way—but exploring this is part of the process.

[00:46:17] Jeff Booth: My layman’s version: you have all these probability states, and if you develop a “logical qubit,” then these probability states at the tiniest increment of time aren’t actually coexisting. As you try to expand them, you get errors—and more errors—so you build a lot of error correction into the system.

[00:46:37] Jeff Booth: And you believe it can exist because you’re not measuring time.

[00:46:47] Nick: Yeah. We are not measuring time—we are approximating time. That’s the distinction.

[00:46:53] Jack: Yeah. It’s not saying what they’re observing is invalid—they’re observing something. But what they think is happening may be different from what’s actually occurring, and it all pins on the ontology of time.

[00:47:17] Jack: When you ask, “If time is quantized and discrete, how do these models change?”—what changes? I don’t want to go deep into the formalism, but simply: you can’t take the derivative of Schrödinger’s equation if time is an integer.

[00:47:40] Jack: If time is indivisible at some level, you can’t take the derivative. So the entire formalism would need to be reorganized around that change in time. That’s a whole different domain of physics.

[00:48:04] Jack: We see a fracture in physics itself: people attached to continuous time keep trying to make it work and keep hitting dead ends. If time is quantized and discrete, they’re continuing to work on a sinking ship—the problem is the assumption, not the effort.

[00:48:31] Jack: There are other approaches—like Wolfram—coming from the discrete side. But we need to ask: what changes when time is discretized?

[00:48:52] Jack: Very simply: what is superposition or decoherence in a discrete time model? Bitcoin gives us a lens for what superposition actually is—what physicists are observing when they call something “superposition.” That would be the mempool.

[00:49:12] Jack: It’s a pre-configured state of possibility, but it doesn’t exist until it’s measured. In physics language: it’s a pre-measurement state, and when it’s observed, it becomes measured and deterministic. But they don’t have the process that takes it from superimposed to classical.

[00:49:32] Jack: Essentially, it isn’t a substrate to compute on—it’s a potential state, not a computable state. When time is discretized, the meaning of superposition changes because it’s “pre-time.”

[00:49:52] Jack: And when you look at decoherence: decoherence is the natural process of measurement itself. So Bitcoin is saying what physicists call decoherence is actually coherence—reality cohering to a single chain of events. They think decoherence is a problem to engineer away. They want to maintain superimposed states to compute—but “oh no,” it keeps decohering to classical states.

[00:50:09] Preston Pysh: I’m somewhat speechless.

[00:50:10] Preston Pysh: It seems that if we do start getting quantum computers with a thousand logical qubits or more, it would almost invalidate this entire thesis. Would you agree?

[00:50:23] Nick: Yes. And the goal isn’t to invalidate it—it’s to follow the logic where it goes and say this is incompatible with the autopilot narrative: “this is inevitable.”

[00:50:37] Nick: People say quantum computers are going to break all encryption. But if Bitcoin is, in our opinion, the definition of encryption at a global, state-level system, the conversation changes.

[00:50:56] Preston Pysh: Yeah.

[00:50:56] Nick: And again, it comes down to the ontology of time—what is time? The irony is: we talk about quantizing reality, and yet time gets a pass. By default it’s always continuous. How can that be?

[00:51:18] Nick: How can we say science is meant to define everything in absolute terms, but time is continuous by default?

[00:51:32] Jack: Simply put, it’s ironic. And to listeners: don’t trust me—go ask ChatGPT yourself. Just make sure you ask the right questions.

[00:51:37] Jack: If time is quantized and discrete, the formalism of quantum mechanics as we know it breaks. It would have to be rebuilt. Quantizing time breaks the system that was supposed to quantize everything.

[00:51:56] Jeff Booth: This is so big. That’s why it grabbed me in the beginning—it took my breath away—because they’re incompatible.

[00:52:09] Jack: They are.

[00:52:10] Jeff Booth: For the listener: it’s like the Bitcoin-environment narrative. People ask, “How could Bitcoin solve the environment if it destroys the environment?” If you ask a question about money—

[00:52:24] Jeff Booth: —how could you solve those problems with a system that requires the amount of money and nonsense inside it? The amount of money inside research, universities, and everything on quantum is going to attack this thesis like crazy, right?

[00:52:44] Jeff Booth: Because the real signal is where the power is.

[00:52:48] Preston Pysh: Which is the real signal, by the way.

[00:52:50] Jeff Booth: Over and over, what we’ve learned in Bitcoin is: the more individuals move into the system, the more immune you become from the legacy system—because it gets stronger by your participation in it.

[00:53:11] Jeff Booth: These two things are incompatible. What I find interesting is our own agency gets co-opted by the quantum narrative because we don’t trust ourselves—there always has to be someone else who’s smarter.

[00:53:28] Nick: And what does that mean? In theoretical physics—especially quantum—there are many interpretations, and those interpretations proliferate over time.

[00:53:40] Nick: We’re seeing a fracture in what’s actually happening at scales we can’t perceive with our own eyes, and we default to experts who study the models for most of their lives. Then we take on faith that what they present back to us is what they say it is.

[00:54:01] Nick: Is it possible Bitcoin is another model—one with a more universal language—where anyone, regardless of institution, can observe and talk about the same phenomena without needing a specialized in-crowd?

[00:54:26] Nick: That’s what’s most exciting to me: beyond any profound insight, it’s something that could be shareable with a wider audience than just people who dedicate their lives to a path laid out long before they arrived.

[00:54:48] Nick: We’ve been on this model for 80 to 100 years in theoretical physics, and there hasn’t been a true alternative path. So everyone works on it, and as Jeff said, all the money gets plowed into it. It’s tied to incentives separate from the truth of the physics itself.

[00:55:11] Nick: So you realize: the information shared with us over time—there’s an error rate. You may not know what it is, but you know it exists. If you’re not willing to question how deep the error goes, how can you truly know?

[00:55:31] Nick: Are we living in a truthful system of knowledge around us?

[00:55:36] Preston Pysh: What would be your closing comment to folks as they hear this conversation? What do you want to leave them with?

[00:55:52] Jack: I’ll go first. If Bitcoin is quantized—if Bitcoin is proof that time is quantized and discrete—we need to look at the quantum narrative for what it is: an attack on Bitcoin masquerading as physics, operating through language and psychology.

[00:56:14] Jack: If you understand Bitcoin, you understand physics. I want the physics community to answer: why is Bitcoin not an open-source laboratory? Why is this not an open-source experiment? It literally uses energy and creates an outcome. This is a process. This is a measurement. Why does it not suffice?

[00:56:34] Jack: We need to look at what this narrative really is. The narrative is: “Bitcoin is broken” or “Bitcoin will be broken,” so “we need to upgrade it.”

[00:56:53] Jack: Before “quantum” was the narrative, the old meme was: “Hey, I’m new to Bitcoin and I’m here to fix it.” Now it’s: “Hey, I just read about quantum and I’m here to fix Bitcoin.” It’s the same thing.

[00:57:11] Jack: Don’t bet against Bitcoin. Don’t assume the narratives you hear are true. Explore the idea—Bitcoin says: don’t trust, verify.

[00:57:27] Jack: Who are you trusting with this information? Who is telling you Bitcoin is broken? What’s their incentive? What’s their knowledge? If we don’t understand the base physical process beneath Bitcoin, we risk misunderstanding what Bitcoin is.

[00:57:50] Jack: One point we didn’t hit that’s very important: our conscious decisions precede the block—our transactions, our decision to do work, the protocol itself—all of that precedes the block.

[00:58:07] Jack: Everyone talks about upgrading Bitcoin at the protocol level, and we forget the other half. Jeff, you always say: “We are Bitcoin.” That’s literally true. The ledger is the map of our decisions—an imprint of our conscious choices: how we value things, when we valued them, who we valued them with, and what was done.

[00:58:26] Jack: If we have a bug in our mind, we have a bug in the ledger. If our perception of Bitcoin is incomplete or wrong, we manifest that through action. So we need to be careful.

[00:58:46] Jack: We’re not saying Bitcoin needs to be upgraded. We’re saying Bitcoiners need to be upgraded. We need to change how we think and how we act, and finally understand what Bitcoin is.

[00:59:03] Jack: This problem has been going on for 17 years. All we’re trying to do is objectively look at Bitcoin as a physical process. We think anyone who does that should arrive at the same results. If you don’t, let’s talk—let’s figure it out.

[00:59:19] Jack: This paper is just the beginning. It’s a tool to continue forward. I told Jeff a long time ago: this is a paper about boundaries. Drawing the boundary was the hardest part, because you can take any domain of knowledge and run with it.

[00:59:50] Jack: Everything changes if you change the ontology of time. Biology’s waiting. Chemistry’s waiting. Go do it—somebody, please.

[00:59:24] Nick: All epistemology. All ontology. There’s an opportunity to reassess them through the lens of Bitcoin. This is meant to be a lens—a verification tool—for science, logic, and our ability to objectively look at things without depending on inherited frameworks.

[00:59:50] Nick: And what I want to leave people with is: if you don’t think you have a fiat mindset, you’re not thinking hard enough. We were born into this system—there’s no way our minds don’t have a fiat perception of reality.

[01:00:12] Nick: Fiat being a euphemism for living in an incomplete system. When you finally see a complete system and still default to explaining it using the incomplete system’s answers—how can that make sense?

[01:00:25] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Break free of your past memories and create the new. This is amazing, guys.

[01:00:33] Preston Pysh: I want to highlight one thing—can I jump in real quick? I’m sorry, Jeff, I interrupted you.

[01:00:38] Jeff Booth: No, you’re right. For me, what this exposes—and what Bitcoin has exposed for a long time—is 8 billion people in service of 8 billion people.

[01:00:52] Jeff Booth: Your entire life you’ve been told you belong here, and you believe it. You’re part of a system. And Jack and Nick and Preston—and all the people we love in this space—are part of a system contributing to a new system.

[01:01:12] Jeff Booth: Every single person who moves their time—that’s what this is observing. When we see these seemingly crazy ideas that add to our proof of work, our knowledge extends, and we change.

[01:01:22] Jeff Booth: And that’s coming from us. We’re both part of it. It gives me shivers like it does you—to be part of this crazy state change in time. It’s wild.

[01:01:38] Preston Pysh: I love when you bring this up, Jeff, because at the end of the day you’re talking about attention. And when you look at what’s caused these AIs to become powerful, it came down to attention—what humans unlocked to create this intelligence.

[01:01:58] Preston Pysh: And you’re making that exact point: when you place your attention on where you want the world to go, you can pull that into the block being mined. So excited, guys—and Jeff, I’m sorry for the handoff.

[01:02:18] Preston Pysh: We talk literally every day, and it just dawned on me: you’re a guest on the show and we’re recording a podcast. Where can people read the paper?

[01:02:32] Nick: Yeah. Jeff has pushed an accelerator pedal on us. There’s still a lot more work and refinements. Over the summer it would’ve been easier to talk about, but there’s been so much more uncovered.

[01:02:50] Nick: We’re now at the domain bitcoinlens.net.

[01:03:05] Preston Pysh: Okay.

[01:03:06] Nick: That’s where we’ll host it. We’ll make refinements, share updates, show the process, and invite people not just to read, but to share ideas—point out errors—whatever you find. The place to find us is bitcoinlens.net.

[01:03:24] Preston Pysh: You guys put up the boundary, and now everybody’s going to come in and try to pick it apart. This is wonderful, because the influx of intellectual horsepower you’ll get from people engaging with it will be huge.

[01:03:49] Preston Pysh: If you enjoyed the entropy discussion and want the equations and hard work they poured into it, it’s in Section 6 of the paper—go dig in, find out why you disagree, or add to it. This is a living document—speaking on your behalf—but knowing you guys, you’re more interested in truth than credit.

[01:04:10] Preston Pysh: That’s another reason Jeff and I are excited to see you put this out there and get the conversation going. Go ahead, Jeff.

[01:04:16] Nick: Yeah, what we want—along with you guys—is to create, the way we see it, the collective white paper for the white paper. That final global mirror of: what is Bitcoin?

[01:04:29] Nick: We’ve had so many definitions that moved the narrative forward. “Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” Over time we’ve seen lenses: “Bitcoin is time,” as Gigi gave us. “Bitcoin is digital energy,” as Saylor gave us. Many people have created different lenses.

[01:04:45] Nick: This is an attempt to pull those lenses together to see the same thing.

[01:05:08] Jack: I want to make it clear: we don’t want this to be “our theory” or “our paper.” If what we’re saying is true, it’s important for every bitcoiner to know. This shouldn’t be centralized or controlled. It’s knowledge that deserves to be out there.

[01:05:26] Jack: Somebody needed to start the process and create a framework people can iterate on. You’ll find things you disagree with or agree with—bring them forward, help do the work.

[01:05:44] Jack: This is an ongoing process of discovering what the universe is, what Bitcoin is, and how the two are related. This paper demands that all knowledge be re-observed through Bitcoin. There’s a lot of work to be done, and we need help—anyone can help however they see fit.

[01:06:12] Preston Pysh: The part of the show I enjoy the most nowadays is at the end—we have a fun tradition: we take the conversation and turn it into a song for the outro.

[01:06:28] Preston Pysh: You guys won’t hear it right now—we still have to generate it—and it takes everything we talked about and turns it into the song. Do either of you have a preference for an artist or music genre?

[01:06:51] Nick: For music style or an artist?

[01:06:53] Preston Pysh: Style, or an artist, or even a song you love.

[01:06:56] Nick: I’m a global lover of music, so it’s hard to pick. But I like music that unifies the analog and digital world. A group that comes to mind is ODESZA—they’re very good at synthesizing electronic and analog instruments into something unique, and it’s impacted my ability to think about Bitcoin.

[01:07:24] Preston Pysh: I love it.

[01:07:25] Nick: So shout out to ODESZA for helping this Bitcoin journey for me.

[01:07:29] Jack: I wouldn’t point to a single artist, but I’m a punk at heart. We’re rocking the boat, so we might as well have fun with it.

[01:07:39] Preston Pysh: I love it. Guys, thank you so much for making time. We’ll have handles—are you both on X and Nostr?

[01:07:46] Jack: Just Nostr.

[01:07:47] Preston Pysh: Just Nostr. Nick, how about you?

[01:07:49] Nick: I have the handles. I’ve been off social media. And this conversation is going to be the debate on whether I engage with the outside conversation that may come from doing this with you guys. But the tag, I believe, is PLENick on both Nostr and X.

[01:08:09] Preston Pysh: Okay. I’ll have links to Jack, Nick, and Jeff over on Nostr, and we’ll have the link to the website where the paper will be hosted. Guys, check it out. Enjoy the song.

[01:08:37] Clip of Song : At the threshold, everything’s pending…

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