What is the great limiter of a human being? Death and
decline. Human impermanence is the foundation of the app economy (saving you
valuable time) as well as Buddhism (relinquishment of attachment to things that
will fail and fade away). Because human lives all terminate, and as living
beings we relish our aliveness, time becomes the most valuable item. That is why, when people cross social norms
(or unscrupulous despots), time is what is taken from them through prison (or
worse). In certain cultures, the fetish of youth lionizes that unholdable
virtue of vigorous life that time takes from everyone.
Human beings are collector monkeys. We are primates that delight
in and excel at collecting and storing things. This is how early womankind
probably shifted from sustenance-level hunter-gathering (also a collecting and
storing activity) to civilization-making agriculture. Collect and store. “The individual
(and competing) collection of shiny things” describes the core of our current
economic model. People collect things, ideas, status, power, and other people.
The one thing we have so far failed at successfully collecting is time.
Time continues to slip through our fingers just as it has
for millennia. The inescapable and melancholy passage of time, that takes
everything from us, inspires and directs our most sincere art, or religious
ideals and practices, as well as the structures of our families and social
orders.
The race to bottle up time has been on for a long time and
modern medicine, from the mundane (antibiotics) to the bizarre (cryogenic
freezing), is a response to that deep human need to try to collect time. Just a
bit more. Before we go.
Modern management gurus are learning that time is the new
gold watch. Retirement and pensions are becoming laughable bygone Technicolors,
rendering a heartless fraud the promise of future time to be with family in
exchange for unrelenting work now. Time was invented in the factory mills to
order humans as laborers. The company stopwatch timed the part-worker and
determined if they would be kept on tomorrow. Wages are paid by the hour;
lawyers bill by the fraction of an hour; and politicians govern in tranches of
years. Time limits and motivates us all.
Enter Bitcoin. What does this have to do with Bitcoin (or
more importantly, the future economy)? Hashcash; Solomon shell money; and the
proof-of-work. Bitcoin is built on a decentralized model that rewards
time-consuming work (calculating a valid block hash), essentially the
investment of time (and energy and hardware - also made up of someone’s time).
This process is at base the same as the millennia-old practice of adding shells
to strings used as currency in the Solomon Islands. The demonstration of the
effort (and time) expended on the strands is immediately self-evident to an
observer seeing all the little shells tightly bound in neat rows. This is how winning blocks are verified on
the Bitcoin protocol - a first-to-the-post proof-of-work, neatly combing the ancient
value in time investment with modern concepts of “first-is-best”.
Bitcoin, therefore, rewards the investment of time (not only
in running the hashes, but in setting up the hardware and facilities to compute
the hashes). A brief review of some other human endeavors shows how widespread
and deeply ingrained this proof-of-work (i.e. proof-of-time-spent) value is in
the human psyche.
In sport, the proof-of-work is the demonstration of hours,
months, and years of practice, training, and toning, be it in individual exercise
and time spent honing the body, or in group sports and time spent developing
and executing strategy and skill. In e-sports (yes, playing video games is a
sport now, ever since watching people gamble became a sport[1]),
becoming a champion player is a clear expression of the intense amount of time
invested in the effort.
Art, in all its forms, tends to convey the time the artist
spent developing their skill and then crafting their art. The rapper who has
developed her style and poetry from an early age; the 16th century academia-trained
classical painter; the lifetime masterpiece of the composer; the years of
experience in the hands of a craftswoman; the novelist hammering out words for
days, weeks, years.
The concept of the meritocracy values time (as it translates
to experienced skill) above all else.
It is possible, and I believe, that the proof-of-work, recently
popularized as a concept by Bitcoin, is a fundament of human valuation. It seems
to be a universal value, seen across time and cultures. It could be the atomic
building block of our value system and in turn our civilizations. Bitcoin will
fail; the Westfalian state will fail. All fall to the ceaseless master of time.
That is why we value time above all else and value those people, places[2],
and things that readily show us that time (the most valuable resource to a
human being) has been preciously spent.
This understanding/belief about human value is a cornerstone
is sheparding in the next economy. The current economy is broken and dead, staggering
on as reflected in the recent popular fascination with zombies (from Romero to GoT).
The mill’s wage hour does not compute a sustainable life. The relentless and successful
collection of money and power over time has reached an unstainable level. Automation
and artificial intelligence change what is means to be a human with respect to
the value of work and time spent working. Adjustment is coming, either in
disconcerting increments or rending tumult. Work is dead, but the people
considered “workers” are not.[3]
A new economy that values humans as beyond workers or consumers must be born.
[1]
It’s interesting to reflect on societies’ difficult relationship with gambling.
Could this relate to the apparent disconnect between a reward (equally possible
for the one-time ticket buyer as for the daily lifetime lottery buyer) and time
investment? Gambling appears to offend our underlying value that things are
valuable because of the time spent on them, not the “unfair” results of random
outcomes.
[2] It
is notable that people spend tremendous sums planning trips to see ancient
buildings, while the 1950’s US tract-house tourism industry has yet to gain any
momentum.
[3]
Proponents of human life and dignity must struggle against forces who would
rather kill the worker along with the work, or reduce economic population
pressures by unnaturally decreasing our numbers (birth control is a good idea,
killing fields are bad).
