Time is an intricate concept Philosophers chewed on since the beginning of time, but did you know it matters to Bitcoin?
What is Time? Concave Philosophers Answer:
Let’s read what our Philosopher Torbern had to say about time:
Time isn’t a substance because it is common to all experienced beings. It’s not individuatable in the right way. Time isn’t property because we don’t predicate it universally on substances.
“Being at T1” looks like property because it can be predicated universally, and “being at” looks like a relation. But if “S is at T1” is the relation, then we have the same problem with T1 that we did with Time itself.
This motivates claims about Time as an abstract structural feature of reality, a coordinating system of some sort, and then have to deal with whether you take abstract structures as necessarily mental or as objectively existent entities a la our boy Plato.
Time is a human concept to measure day and night. But it is abstract at the beginning since humans haven’t invented numbers just yet, but they know something is moving constantly like stars are changing day and night. People observe the universe from the beginning of human culture. They measure anything around them. From Sun, Moon, and Stars. It’s just a moment to symbolize something, the concept of changing pace of the Universe can sometimes be calculated, and now we call it Time. — Degen Solana added.
Philosopher Lazy had a different description of time, letting us know that time isn’t really what it appears to be, and that its “frames” are not really the continuum we perceive…
Unfortunately, there is no theory or experiment that can confirm whether time flows in a continuous manner or is like every frame in a movie, giving the impression of continuity, in fact, it is an intermittent succession.
The study of the continuity or discontinuity of time also involves another question, that is, whether time has a beginning or not.
To this, there is no definite answer yet. Because the famous Big Bang theory believes that time-space has a beginning; while some other scientists have pointed out that the scale of “time” does not have an instant start.
Because according to the principles of quantum mechanics, time intervals smaller than the so-called Planck Time are undetectable. Planck time is 10 -43 seconds.
Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the new state of the universe in a very short period of time. In short, based on the current theory, the first cry about the universe will always be unknown.
The Twist: Concave Stuns Philosophers!
After this complex question, we asked our Philosophers to answer, we threw them a curveball and decided to present them with an even harder question to ponder.
This question was — Why is Bitcoin a Time-Chain?
Now, this took a bit more time of isolated thinking, but we know our Concavian Philosophers have the most brilliant minds in Crypto, hence they were able to answer.
Take a look at what they thought out…
Why is Bitcoin a Time-Chain?
Let’s start by taking a look at Philosopher DeusSiveCrypto’s answer:
Because there are at least two chains in Bitcoin: the blockchain and the transaction chain. This latter chain, less well known, is sufficient to trace the history of all transactions of a coin. Blockchain solidifies a particular chain of transactions into an authoritative order, thus avoiding double-spending. The blockchain and the chain of transactions together constitute an immutable chain of events over time, or in short: a timechain. The reference to time in terminology indicates that what has happened cannot be erased. The events of history are like set in stone, that’s my thoughts.
And as Satoshi said: “Nodes collect new transactions into a block, hash them into a hash tree, and scan through nonce values to make the block’s hash satisfy proof-of-work requirements. When they solve the proof-of-work, they broadcast the block to everyone, and the block is added to the timechain. The first transaction in the block is a special one that creates a new coin owned by the creator of the block.
Then, The Anonymous Philosopher answered:
`Why is Bitcoin called a time chain… firstly, most people don’t call it a time chain, other than hardcore bitcoiners. most people call it a blockchain.
Little known fact: in the original code base, Satoshi called it a “timechain” in his comments. not to mention the fact that Satoshi calls the blockchain a “timestamp server” all throughout the whitepaper.
It's called a time chain, because it solves the problem of determining which events happened at which time, in different parts of the world… aka, it solves the double spending problem.
If I’m in NYC and I send a bitcoin txn, and someone else is in China and sends a txn, how do we know which txn came first? in a decentralized, trustless, manner? the fact is, we cannot know.. and in real-time, it doesn't matter if the NYC txn happened first, because if the China txn gets in the blockchain first, then for all of our intents and purposes, it DID happen first.
A good blog post that goes into this is here:https://grisha.org/blog/2018/01/23/explaining-proof-of-work/the combination of proof of work, with bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment, which keeps block times around ~10min, allows the blockchain to be sort of a ‘clock’…
In fact, some bitcoiners on Twitter, as well as some bitcoin news websites, already cite the time, or timestamp their news articles, not with normal times such as Dec 4th at 9:30am, but rather with block numbers, aka the time is currently Block 712572`
We love getting our community to answer questions for us… but most of all we LOVE to read the thoughts of our Concavian Philosophers.
They are some really brilliant chads!