Bitcoin is a Black Hole with Harry Sudock

 
 

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“The economy is not a combustion engine, where you change a fan belt, and it starts or stops. The economy is a large, complex multivariate emergent social phenomenon. And because of that, when you poke one side of the bear, you don’t know how it’s going to react. And it’s an incredibly volatile and incredibly complex place to try to play God. And so the best choice is not to do it.”
— Harry Sudock

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Harry Sudock is a Vice President of Strategy at Griid. In this interview, we discuss whether Bitcoin’s real innovation is the fusion of Proof of Work and the difficulty adjustment. This enables it to exert a gravitational pull that’s disrupting money, assets, technologies and organising structures.

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Bitcoin's impact on society is far exceeding what anyone could have envisioned. While its properties as sound money are well established, the 2nd and 3rd order effects are still being discovered.

Bitcoin is unique. It's centred on the combination of proof of work and the difficulty adjustment. These two fundamental parts of the system incentivise trustless honesty whilst providing security. In today's digital world with encroaching authoritarianism, there is no substitute.

Bitcoin's power is having a gravitational pull on the settled cosmos of modern society, drawing more things into the singularity of its innovation. If money touches everything in society, and Bitcoin is the best form of money, it's seemingly inevitable that Bitcoin will change everything. Bitcoin is a black hole.

TIMESTAMPS

00:03:37: Introductions
00:05:34: Bitcoin's core innovations
00:07:40: Proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and proof of stake
00:16:31: Bitcoin energy consumption
00:18:16: The difficulty adjustment and the fixed cap
00:26:25: The astronomy analogy
00:32:34: The unknown unknowns, and the monetisation of Bitcoin
00:37:35: Bitcoin extends your time preference
00:38:28: The impact of mining on energy markets
00:46:09: Stablecoins on Lightning, and the future of high street banks
00:53:56: The Constitution and the growth of the state
01:03:14: Impact of energy prices on mining
01:04:51: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

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