Arrow of Time and Embodiment of Value

It all begins with time. You see, time is not just sort of important for the burgeoning of the cosmos, but also business. We all know instinctively, even without economists⁷⁰ telling us, that business loathes risks⁷¹. Risks involves uncertainty⁷², which relates to information and time. And unscrupulously, information and time are married in cosmic ways – since they have an illegitimate child called money.

Seriously? What the heck?!

You see, before time, there is certainty. With certainty, you don’t need information – since you are already safe. Safety first is our evolutionary instinct toward information. Other concerns regarding information, such as curiosity, enlightenment and entertainment, are secondary and less important comparing to safety. Safety is also important for blockchains – that’s why we discussed so much on security earlier – and safety is just (system) security with a point of view (earlier we conceptualized such notion of safety to decentralized security[28]), which relates to (individual) volition. Remember this point – it links system to the individual.

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⁷⁰ Those brainy economists, they all want to tell us something, but we just ignored them like Laocoön.

⁷¹ Micro level Business risk and macro level Economic risk.

⁷² Uncertainty “involves unknown information, applies to predictions of future events”.

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What does this have to do with money though? Because beyond time, there is uncertainty. With uncertainty, you do not feel safe, so you need information⁷³. Although we are told⁷⁴ that information resolves uncertainty, it is crucial to understand that information is not a time machine – no one, and nothing, jumps beyond time. Only time itself processes beyond time. Which means, to get beyond time, you need to adhere to a process – a real process, not a fake process – or token of a process. Token of a process – that’s what money’s role really is. Money is the stand-in of a process that pretends to jump beyond time – only that it doesn’t and can’t jump beyond time. It is a cheat masqueraded as the greatest hack in human history. Nothing cheats time – but money hacks our mind and soul to let us believe so.

How did that happen? How did money make us believe that it can cheat time? It did so by exploiting our instinctive need to feel safe – by twisting and hijacking our point of view, our volition. That point of view of ours, distilled from our volition, which measures our concern of safety – is called value. Value is the natural product of our survival instinct – a mental device evolutionarily refined by our volition, our intelligence as a species. Value is both an individual and a collective device – the latter is also what binds us into societies and civilizations. Value as a collective device propelled us beyond other species. We humans are more than a colony of ants, a pack of wolves, a sleuth of bears, or a swarm of bees – because we use value in more ingenious ways as a communication device passing information among us to reduce uncertainty⁷⁵ – a boon for our survival. Nevertheless, as a product of evolution, our mind works in differential ways⁷⁶, which means our sense of value – our instinct, our point of view – dwells at the present, and is relative and shortsighted – a great setup for exploitation. Money succeeds at the hack toward our minds through manipulation of value – as pointed out earlier in our discussion, money hijacks our sense of value in a form called the preordainment of value[9]. It should be pointed out that money as preordainment of value, refers to any token value form, e.g., debt, credit, etc. – not just fiat currency[9].

Preordainment of value is an impostor in place of real value. Soddened by money the impostor of value for so long, a question arises – so what is real value? Well, it is quite simple actually – the truth. As a point of view real value must stay true to time – a process that is the embodiment of time. Aside from being fake value, money, as a point of view, is static and rigid – whereas value as a process is dynamic and adaptive. The latter hints at us that value as a process resembles computer programs, machines and virtual machines – maybe blockchains?

This brings us to some preessential questions about blockchain – what is its nature? what is its purpose? We’ve heard that blockchain is a ledger⁷⁷, but what is a ledger, really? In our earlier discussion we mentioned that value is a mental device to measure our sense of safety and thus survival. Initially value the mental device is just a physical token – still a stand-in, not a process,

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⁷³ Information “can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty”.

⁷⁴ From information theory – “information entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty”.

⁷⁵ Uncertainty reduction theory, which is also a communication theory.

⁷⁶ This generally refers to backpropagation (BP) – computing the gradient – which is how deep learning functions; lately it is believed that Brains can also do BP, also this.

⁷⁷ See Blockchain is a distributed ledger, and Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) - The World Bank.

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thus not the real value, but let’s put that point on hold for a minute. Physical tokens, such as gold coins, are fungible (exchangeable) and you can even say that it is decentralized – which Bitcoin tries to mimic, obviously – but they are less efficient money forms to carry out the ever bigger illusions to the scale of an empire’s ambition. Ledger breaks money free from that primitive, individual mental device form of physical tokens and reinvent it into a collective mental device form, suitable for the throne rooms, treasury ministries and accounting departments of empires. Ledger is the dominant form of money now across the global economy. Starting from Bitcoin, blockchain bid itself to return money to that primitive form, coins, only digitally – it is what the world see as a distributed digital ledger (DLT) [31] for cryptocurrencies. Yet as we have discussed, tokens are not real value either, so why stop here (DLT), why not become a real value – a root process that is an embodiment of time – a time machine? That should be the new purpose of the blockchain – a root device of real value.

What mechanism can capture the procession of time? Not a clock – computers all have clocks built into them – clocks can be faked. Actually we don’t need to recreate a clock, what we need to recreate is the arrow of time⁷⁸. Arrow of time is closely related to our old friend entropy[12]. As we have discussed earlier, consensus service[23] provided by blockchains, whether by POW or POS, or some other algorithms⁷⁹, created the kind of irreversible process that simulates the arrow of time. So, instead of using a ledger to simulate a coin, which is pointless to say the least, the new purpose of blockchain should focus on simulating the arrow of time – to be a log⁸⁰ rather than a ledger.

Looking back on history, the rise of money as preordainment of value has its reason – our ancestors lack the technology to create reliable processes to use as mental device of real value – so money was created in place of processes. If we are being lighthearted we could shrug it off as an UX⁸¹ problem – think money as the beads or stones on the ancient abacus – but it is time to let go the old mental model. Before we can’t operate our society and economy with real value, now with blockchain as embodiment device of real value, we can.