Money has always been corruptible, subject to structures of power rather than the certainty of mathematics. This was true both of various gold and silver-based currencies that were devalued through admixture of less valuable metals into coins as a form of taxation, as well as fiat currencies backed by law and state power. Bitcoin’s surge past $109,000 in January 2025, doubling its 2021 peak, may be a signal that this new technology has finally broken this deep historical pattern. As institutional capital flows into the first digital asset, Bitcoin is making good on its promise to become an “internet of money.”

Bitcoin’s core innovation is its distributed ledger, with each transaction verified through network-wide computation instead of an authority like a corporation or government. Consensus about the correct state of the ledger emerges from thousands of nodes independently validating the same mathematical rules. The result is a truly independent, self-perpetuating monetary network.

President Donald Trump’s stated cryptocurrency policy marks a decisive shift from that of the previous administration, which had restrained Bitcoin adoption through capricious regulatory enforcement and ambiguous rules. The new regime sees Bitcoin as a key avenue of innovation and essential to national interests. Gaining momentum in Congress, Senator Cynthia Lummis’s BITCOIN Act of 2024 would establish a federal bitcoin reserve. If passed, the act would move Bitcoin from the fringes of finance toward the center of America’s grand strategy. 

The Bitcoin network has the same basic architecture as other digital networks, where nodes exchange information across lines of communication. But it is unique in that it allows a specific type of information to be shared which then cannot be copied or manipulated without following certain rules. This is very different from the malleable digital data to which we are accustomed. A line of text can be copied and pasted an infinite number of times without the text changing, and without the ability to copy it “running out.” It can be edited as many times as needed. In fact, digital data is so easy to copy that it tends to leak and propagate online unless we are very careful with passwords and other cybersecurity measures.

In contrast, Bitcoin’s protocol enables digital scarcity. Violating its rules is not just prohibitively expensive but ultimately self-defeating. To unilaterally change how many bitcoins exist or how they move from one owner to another would require control of more than half of the network’s computational power. As of January 2025, the Bitcoin network operates at close to 800 exahashes per second, which is hundreds of times more powerful than that of the world’s most performant supercomputers. An attacker would need to marshal resources at a scale that transcends practical possibility, requiring both prohibitive initial capital and unsustainable ongoing energy expenditure. Such an attack would be visible in global supply chains long before execution, and even if mounted, could be neutralized by Bitcoin’s users through a simple protocol update that preserves the ledger’s pre-attack state. 

On the other hand, an entity that controls a large amount of computation, energy, or capital could profit by joining the Bitcoin network rather than by attempting to destroy it. This dynamic produces a self-reinforcing cycle of ever-stronger security. As more and more energy is used to secure the ledger, it becomes more widely trusted, which drives further network participation, which then increases the value of the network and further heightens the incentive to participate honestly. That is why Bitcoin represents a breakthrough in the architecture of trust. Its ledger is a record of who owns what that can maintain its integrity for a theoretically unlimited time.

Critics argue that Bitcoin poses practical and ethical challenges that outweigh its benefits. Environmentalists note that bitcoin mining, the process of ordering transactions and packaging them into blocks of data, is energy-intensive. Traditional investors, accustomed to assets like bonds and blue-chip stocks that tend to maintain stable purchasing power, balk at Bitcoin’s dramatic price swings. Central bankers and their political allies fear that Bitcoin’s inbuilt constraints threaten their ability to manipulate the money supply, a tool they’ve long used to shape economic behavior.

So far, these concerns have not stopped Bitcoin’s ascent. The protocol’s design ensures that advances in technology will only strengthen Bitcoin’s unbroken record of ownership far into the future. This enables something unprecedented: projects that span centuries can now anchor themselves to an immutable record of property claims, allowing humanity to structure commitments across timeframes previously bounded by institutional decay. 

Unlocking the ability to secure multi-generational financial covenants could widen the scope of human civilization. Consider today’s most ambitious proposals: the Qattara Depression Project in Egypt, which would transform 7,500 square miles of desert into a flourishing ecological zone by flooding it with Mediterranean seawater; the terraforming of Australia’s interior with engineered waterways and nuclear-powered desalination; a space elevator made with a cable of carbon nanotubes that reduces orbital insertion costs by 93%; floating habitats in Venus’s upper atmosphere, where air pressure and temperature match Earth’s habitable range. 

Mega-projects like these face many challenges, from technology hurdles to legal roadblocks to environmental risks. Bitcoin doesn’t overcome these complexities. It won’t manufacture stronger carbon nanotubes or negotiate treaties between nations. However, just as important, it offers a means of finance that matches the scale of big ideas. Because it operates with the reliability of physical laws, it lets us underwrite initiatives that require extremely long timescales, and expand the horizon of our civilization in the process.

When you lock value in Bitcoin’s blockchain, you create a commitment more permanent than any government promise or legal agreement. The term timechain, which appears in the early writings of Bitcoin’s inventors, is perhaps a more accurate alternative to “blockchain.” While this word describes a sequence of linked blocks of data, timechain captures the concept of a ledger that records irreversible, time-stamped transactions. Bitcoin’s timechain is robust in the extreme. We might even say that once a transaction enters the ledger, it becomes set in stone—a useful metaphor, but one that understates the case.

Set in Stone

In fifth-century BC Athens, the government maintained the Athenian Tribute Lists, which may have been the world’s first public financial database. These massive marble slabs recorded contributions from every city-state in the Delian League, an alliance originally formed to unite Greek city-states against the Persian Empire. Here was accounting at its most literal: financial records carved into stone, visible to anyone who cared to inspect them.

The Athenian Tribute Lists were the ancient world’s most ambitious attempt at permanent financial records. They were certainly better than some later record-keeping systems used in industrial civilization. In Britain, wooden tally sticks kept track of financial records for hundreds of years, until most of this financial history went up in smoke in the Great Fire of 1834. The survival of the Athenian Tribute Lists across millennia demonstrates the remarkable durability of marble as a substrate for information storage. The slabs and the data they carry outlasted the rise and fall of empires. But even marble’s permanence has its limits.

Imagine you are a distant descendant of one of the administrators of the Aegean island of Samos, a member of the Delian League whose tribute is recorded in the Athenian Tribute Lists, and you want to erase the contributions of Miletus, a rival city. What would it take to undetectably alter these ancient records?

The largest surviving slab, known as the Lapis Primus, stands over 3.5 meters tall and more than a meter wide. To alter its text, you would need to melt the surface to a depth of about 5 millimeters. Marble, essentially recrystallized calcite, has a specific heat capacity of about 0.88 kilojoules per kilogram per Kelvin, so it would need to be heated to about 900 degrees Celsius. To wipe the data off the surface you would need to spend about 14.3 kilowatt-hours of energy. 

For context, that is about the same amount of energy as a space heater uses in a few hours. That doesn’t sound like much, but it would be a major and messy undertaking. You would have to haul the slab to a furnace—or bring a furnace to the slab—raise and maintain extreme temperatures, and re-form the molten surface. Difficult? Absolutely. Impossible? No.

Let’s compare the energy required to modify the Lapis Primus to that of a Bitcoin transaction that was validated just one hour ago. Because a block is mined about every 10 minutes, a transaction that took place one hour in the past is buried six blocks deep in Bitcoin’s timechain.

A ballpark figure for the Bitcoin network’s recent annual power consumption is 100 terawatt-hours. 

$\frac{100\mathit{TWh}/\mathit{year}}{8760\mathit{hours}/\mathit{year}}\approx 0.0114\mathit{TWh}/\mathit{hour}$

The entire network, running at full tilt, consumes about 11 gigawatt-hours each hour. To “re-carve” a transaction that was verified six  blocks in the past, an attacker would need to redo all of the computational work for those six blocks faster than the honest network can continue adding new blocks, so that the rest of the network would recognize the attacker’s version of history as valid.

If you assume that the average U.S. household consumes about 30 kilowatt-hours per day, 11 gigawatt-hours could power about 366,000 homes for a day. Put another way, altering only the most recent hour of Bitcoin’s history would consume the daily energy budget of a mid-sized American city.

How does this compare to the Lapis Primus?

$\frac{\mathrm{11,000,000}\mathit{kWh}}{14.3\mathit{kWh}}\approx 770000$

Six bitcoin blocks are about seven hundred seventy thousand times stronger than the ancient marble. 

To go further back and rewrite Bitcoin’s history from ten hours ago (sixty blocks), you would have to redo, and then surpass, the computational work for all of those blocks while the honest chain keeps growing. The task would be like the mythological labors of Sisyphus, but with the boulder growing larger with each attempt.

To unilaterally change Bitcoin’s history isn’t merely difficult, it is effectively impossible. Bitcoin has created something unprecedented in information theory: absolute, verifiable immutability. In this light, comparing Bitcoin’s permanence to stone tablets almost seems quaint, like comparing a candle to a supernova.

Bitcoin’s defenses may be strong, but does that mean it will last? It might. Other widely-adopted protocols for encoding and transmitting information, from written language, to currency, to mathematical algorithms, tend to have remarkable staying power, often outlasting the civilizations that created them. Cuneiform script, the earliest known writing system, persisted for over 3,000 years. Its core innovation was to use wedge-shaped marks to represent numerals. This convention became so widely adopted that it spread across multiple languages and civilizations. Currency can also be thought of as a protocol for creating bearer monetary instruments within bounded jurisdictions. The oldest contemporary currency, the British pound, began circulating about 1,200 years ago.

The Euclidean algorithm for identifying the greatest common divisor between two numbers, first described around 300 BC, remains not just valid but actively used in modern cryptography, including in Bitcoin’s codebase. This algorithm has outlived empires, survived dark ages, and crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries because it is a fundamental discovery about the nature of numbers themselves.

What makes all of these different protocols so durable? First, they solve fundamental coordination problems. Second, they are system-agnostic, working across languages and cultures. Third, they are self-reinforcing, with greater adoption increasing utility. Finally, they can be transmitted with minimal information loss. Bitcoin shares these qualities. At its core, it is a universal protocol for expressing and proving claims to property, a concept that transcends any particular political or economic system.

A Protocol For Economic Coordination

It seems then that Bitcoin is also a fundamental discovery that can serve as the basis, or substrate, for organizing new kinds of human endeavors. One day its impact may be recognized as comparable to that of the joint-stock company, another innovation that rewired humanity’s capacity to organize itself. When joint-stock companies emerged in the early 17th century, they were also a solution to hard constraints of its era. Before joint-stock companies existed, a wealthy merchant might risk his entire fortune on a single voyage to the East Indies. If the ship sank, he was ruined. If he died mid-voyage, the enterprise collapsed. Time preference was necessarily short, risk concentration extreme, and the scale of projects severely limited.

Corporations that issued joint-stock developed around the same time as the infamous three-year episode of Tulip Mania. However, far from being a passing fad, joint-stock irrevocably changed how capital was raised and deployed, how risk was shared, and how ambitions were scaled. The Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials VOC, is the canonical example of an early joint-stock company. When the VOC launched a public offering in 1602, it raised 6.4 million guilders, equivalent to hundreds of millions of today’s dollars. Soon, new ventures cropped up that simply could not have existed before: multi-year expeditions, permanent foreign trading posts, and, eventually, the Industrial Revolution itself. 

The VOC operated for nearly two centuries, maintaining a complex network of ships, warehouses, and colonial operations that reshaped the globe. Dividing ownership and risk into tradable shares, and turning them into bearer instruments, joint-stock companies would eventually lead to the concept of a “going concern”—a functionally immortal commercial entity that could outlive its founders and aggregate capital at scale.

Although joint-stock companies transformed the way commercial ventures were organized, they operated within the monetary constraints of their era. Even in this world of metal coins and competing bank notes, the manipulation of money by rulers and banks remained a persistent problem—though the systematic debasement that fiat money makes possible was still centuries away.

Under pure fiat monetary systems like the U.S. dollar, government-issued currencies constantly lose purchasing power with the vicissitudes of politics and policy. This motivates those who hold cash to deploy it with relative haste simply because the alternative, holding on to rapidly inflating currency, guarantees erosion of wealth. This dynamic creates what we might call “inflation-driven malinvestment.” Projects with immediate returns are often prioritized because risk is easier to model on shorter timescales. The further you look into the future, the more you must discount due to risk of the unknown.

By contrast, Bitcoin’s circulating supply cannot be unilaterally changed, so holders logically expect their purchasing power to remain stable or rise over time as the economy grows. This inverts the investment calculus. On a “Bitcoin standard,” capital naturally gravitates to initiatives that can outrun Bitcoin’s built-in appreciation. Bitcoin thus removes a category of systemic risk from long-term contracts. Although mega-projects don’t necessarily become less risky, an investor’s ability to accurately price and hedge risk is dramatically improved.

The industrialization of the Solar System—orbital manufacturing facilities, asteroid mining fleets, outposts on planets and moons—will demand continuous investment, maintenance, and expansion across multiple generations. Bitcoin breaks down the temporal and institutional barriers to such planning with its ability to transmit value into the future, just as copper wires can transmit electricity and radio waves can transmit information. Once discovered, capabilities like these are not forgotten.

We can access Bitcoin’s ability to reach into the future through its native scripting language, which allows us to create time-locked contracts that mature at specific future “block heights”—points in the timechain that correspond to future dates. The Bitcoin network operates like a universal clock by consistently adding a block to the timechain about every ten minutes, no matter how much computation is devoted to mining. This lets us reliably calculate when a time-locked transaction will activate. Today, time-locked transactions are used to secure bitcoin inheritance plans, but they can also be used to write other types of contracts.

When we lock money in a contract until a distant future block height, we set terms today that nobody can break tomorrow, or in a century, or even in multiple centuries. After all, the block height specified in the contract can be any number we choose. Want to fund a trust that releases capital in the year 3025? Specify block height 52,560,000. Whether such a contract would be useful is another question, but the point is that Bitcoin makes this possible. When we enter this block height into the contract, we can be certain that one day far in the future, the terms of the contract will be executed without further human intervention.

As long as humans can share information and do math, Bitcoin will persist, immune to the rise and fall of empires, the evolution of language, and the transformation of markets and commerce. A contract based on Bitcoin’s protocol is like a message in a bottle that can carry value across oceans of time. Bitcoin allows us to dream bigger, plan longer, and build for epochs rather than quarters. It is the financial substrate that will form the basis for our boldest aspirations to govern the future.