Greetings, Bitcoin community! And, congratulations on the 11th birthday of the Original Bitcoin! Yes, it’s true: 9 January 2020 marks exactly 11 years since Satoshi Nakamoto released version 0.1 of the Bitcoin protocol software and mined the very first block (aka, the Genesis block).

I’d say that the rest is history, but the truth is that we’re still very much in the process of discovering the full potential and implications of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Given the somewhat dramatic changes in our understanding of what Bitcoin is over the past 5 years, we considered it time to rewrite our eBook on the topic.

And so, considering the momentous day we celebrate today, we present to you the foreword of our upcoming eBook, What is Bitcoin? 11th Birthday Edition, by Bitstocks CEO and Founder, Michael Hudson.

Make sure you don’t miss out on future editions by following us on social media, subscribing to our blog, and ordering your (free) copy of the eBook over here.

Bitcoin, the Keeper of Time

by Michael Hudson, Bitstocks CEO-Founder

Every moment of every day, countless data interactions take place - information transmitted between humans, between humans and machines, and also between machines. A cacophony of noise. Randomness. Chaos.

Enter Bitcoin.

As a global and public ledger, Bitcoin is capable of not only recording all these interactions of data transfer but also doing so in chronological (timestamped) order, providing us with an auditable, immutable trail of evidence.

Bitcoin brings order and transparency to the chaos.

An example of this order is how Bitcoin can address one of the greatest downfalls of fiat currency: the murkiness of the fractional-reserve system. The issue here isn’t the debt issuance in itself, but the fact that it’s happening behind closed doors. Do commercial banks uphold reserves ratio as mandated by their central bank? All we’ve got to judge by is their annual reports and the word of their (easily corruptible) auditors. Beyond that, we simply don’t know.

If fiat currencies were tokenised on top of Bitcoin, meaning that each Pound in a bank’s vault was recorded on the Bitcoin ledger, the fractional reserve system would be auditable by all, in real-time! This mechanism of provable solvency would be a huge boost to the individual’s financial sovereignty. More than that, it also creates a lucrative opportunity for a new generation of banking institutions - ones built on the pillars of transparency and accountability.

Another powerful application of tokenisation is to allow us to break down the smallest denomination of fiat currency, i.e. a penny or a cent, to an eighth decimal place! When payments of a fraction of a penny or cent become possible, we gain the potential to charge for services in any unit of time, from an hour, right down to a millisecond.

Let’s consider distributed computation as an example use case.

Currently, access to supercomputer computational processing is restricted by prohibitive contracts that are charged in the region of $2,000 per hour. This naturally limits access to the general public. Now, if we imagine a supercomputer with a bitcoin payment API, the service could be billed in second increments ($0.56 p/second) or even milliseconds ($0.00056 p/ms).

By offering payment contracts in such small units, we unlock the world of computational power to a much larger and broader user base! This intelligence becomes accessible to anyone within the Bitcoin network who wishes to query the API - perhaps a university student writing a dissertation on supercomputing who wants to validate a theory but can’t afford the bloated contracts or payment arrangements. With the bitcoin payment API, he can pay for the necessary computation, by the second or minute, and complete his thesis!

The example illustrates how Bitcoin harmonises the relationship between time and money, two critical aspects of the modern human condition.

And, this is the world we are looking to build with Bitstocks’ Gravity. To bring to the fore the technology that enables a world of equal access, a world of options, a world of choice; where technology works for humanity, not against it. A world where people are empowered to make decisions from a place of sovereignty. And Bitcoin plays a critical role in this world. As all in life is governed by time, time represents order. Bitcoin is the keeper of time with limitless capacity. It is the digital recreation of the Akashic Records, where all is known and retrievable. Bitcoin is far beyond a pure monetary application. At its core, it’s planetary memory, and therefore capable of eradicating distortions and manipulations. This is what we aim to deliver to humanity.