In this solo episode, Fundamentals discusses the concept of mathematics and Bitcoin as time machines. He explores how math can solve problems more efficiently and how Bitcoin's ability to traverse space enables it to provide a sense of time. Fundamentals also delves into the importance of learning math and how Bitcoin can enhance the learning process. He emphasizes the significance of Bitcoin in the context of the real work that needs to be done and highlights the need to adopt Bitcoin to progress further. The episode concludes with a discussion on the importance of spending Bitcoin and participating in a circular economy.
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Hey guys, this is Fundamentals and I decided to start doing something a little different here. I'm doing some solo rips just because I find myself with time in my day and I have a lot of shit to say. I don't blue check on Twitter so I'm only really able to use 100 whatever characters and can't really express myself that well that way. Have a lot to say but I feel like I'm going to do maybe these little five or six minute rips. Just to get a few thoughts out there, get us talking about it. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go through just a couple of tweets I tried to send out but then really expand on them and tell you guys what I'm really meaning over it.
So let me read real quick here. If I do release this with the video, I'm sharing my screen with my Twitter here. So here we go. I should tell you guys, I had my mind blown yesterday from a book and it's the beginning of a book series that I discovered. I'm a math student. I study math obsessively. I can talk about why that happened but in my travels I just came across this book and it shocked me because the book is called Math Girls and it looks like a novella, like a juvenile novella or like some anime thing that you would see in a graphic novel. And it's a very juvenile story about these Japanese teenagers that are just dealing with weird things but in their doing what they're doing, they're teaching each other math and I figured out that they're actually able to teach some really difficult math concepts in this form and I'm blown away by it.
And there was just something mentioned in passing and this stimulated this tweet. So here it is. Maths and Bitcoin have something in common. When used a certain way, it enables time and space to be traversed in a way that the purely physical world doesn't. Math is a time machine. Anyone who's ever tried to solve a problem without algebra only to discover it understands this. So this notion that math is a time machine should be fairly self-evident but if it's not, think about if I asked you, if I said the equation x plus y equals 100, tell me what, you know, write as many pairs of x and y as you can.
This is probably a bad example but if then I told you one of these classic algebra problems like Adam is twice the age of Jamie and then their ages add up to 90, you know, what are their ages? You ever try to solve a problem like that, you find that you can plug in the two ages for as long as it takes to solve that problem or you use algebra and you solve it within seconds. And so that's really just an example really of how math is a time machine. Like it could take something that could take on the order of forever and then make something actually solvable in a finite amount of time.
Bitcoin mining competitions are a version of this. And then it actually got me thinking what if somebody actually solved the time machine, what if somebody did build the time machine to kind of figure out shot 256, what do we do then? So I mean, my mind started going to all these places. But here is the tweet was just this other insight that Bitcoin is also a time machine. We talk about it often as a time machine. It may actually just be a really a space machine and the time that it solves for is because of how easy it is to transport across space, but it gets us like it gives us time.
We tend to age backwards. That sounds stupid, but we just tend to you tend to figure out what's really important when you discover Bitcoin. And so from that perspective, it's a time machine. So I found it very interesting to look at these two things as time machines. And for me, when I like, you know, studying math very hard, and it's a it's a subject, like abstract algebra number theory that's not typical of what people are studying, what people typically study. People typically study engineering. They learn calculus, differential equations, etc. They don't study number theory or abstract algebra.
So I wonder why I'm doing that. And then maybe it's related to this time machine concept. I'm always just looking for clues. So then I had a follow up, I had two follow ups. The next one was obsessing over what jobs you can do with math is the number one barrier to learning math. Learning requires being present and willing to do it for the sake of learning and not caring what it will yield. Bitcoin will fix our ability to learn mathematics. And this is now this now gets into like, what does it take to really learn math? I mean, you would the main thing is you actually have to sit there and be curious.
And you have to be in the present in the moment. And the reason like what where Bitcoin comes in is that when you are a bit coiner, you tend to be pretty sure that what you're doing in a moment is the right thing. You have a lot of conviction about where how you should spend your time. So whatever it took you to be curious about solving a certain problem in the moment that you're learning the math, you can actually be very confident that that's what you should be doing. And when you lower your time preference, you can now certain activities become available that were not available to you before.
So what comes to mind to me is reading, walking, like really long walking, you know, the kind of stuff that like you do for a long enough time, you start asking yourself, am I supposed to be doing this? Or like, how do I have time for this? I shouldn't have time for this. This is wrong. I shouldn't be doing this. And studying a math that is not on the typical track definitely like comes on that list. So in my past, I've spent leisure time studying calculus, linear algebra, differential equations. I've done self-studying. And when I did that, I didn't have the type of doubt that I was doing the right thing with my time because it's such a, you know, accepted thing.
And it's clear in my job how I would benefit from it, et cetera. But then studying, but now I have this craving to study abstract algebra and number theory. There's no necessarily benefit at the end of that tunnel, but there's something driving me and I trust it. And that is really what it takes. And the thing is, like I have to block and tackle so much for my kids, particularly I'm the daughter who really wants to learn math and she's majoring in math and it's been so much work shielding her from the people who just want to ask her what she's going to do with it.
What are you going to do with it? Who's going to hire you? Why would you want to do that? It's pretty aggravating to deal with those forces, but they're constant. Okay. So anyway, now the next one was kind of a follow-up, third follow-up here was that, oh, here it is. So being that math and Bitcoin are both precious time machines, you can understand why I find conversations about the price of Bitcoin and the jobs people can do with math to be boring and borderline hostile, but certainly pathetic. So yeah, like I actually, if you want to like bring up anger in me, you know, really try to focus on the price of Bitcoin or really try to focus on math from a vocational perspective of, oh, what can you do with it?
You know, really, you know, it's all coming from the same place where the thing is not enough and it's not important unless you can validate it with a job or you can validate it by price. And I reject both of those notions wholeheartedly and come at me, come at me on any of those things. And then I think the last thing is this last tweet, I was on a roll this morning. Bitcoin is a tiny, tiny, tiny microscopic part of the overall picture of what needs to happen in the world, but it's the singular most important terrible grammar, but it's the singular most important because its adoption is holding up the real work to be done.
So he's really now kind of what I want to say, right? Bitcoin is so important, but the reason it's important is because it is what people will call in the critical path of the actual real work that needs to be done. If all we do is Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't fix anything, right? But there's this long list of things that need to be fixed once the money is fixed, right? But none of that work can really start until the current system is remade around Bitcoin. So that is why the generation we occupy just views Bitcoin as the absolute, absolute, absolute most important thing to ever exist in the world.
But I think it's important that we understand that there will come a time and hopefully it's sooner than later, hopefully there will come a time where we never talk about Bitcoin the way we do, right? We never talk about it persuasively. People make fun of Bitcoiners and they say, oh, no one ever says, oh, you have to adopt the dollar. Nobody has any dollar meetups. These people are fucking stupid. And you should ignore them. However, there should come a day. There should come a day where we don't have to have such deliberate conversations about adopting Bitcoin.
Adopting Bitcoin is the thing that's actually in the way of doing the real work. And I hope that there is a lot of people whose eyes on the price of whatever that is. And I think when you think about a lot of people talk about rabbit holes, they're in rabbit holes. So I'm in a math rabbit hole. It doesn't quite make sense. It's not to do Bitcoin, right? It was motivated by cryptography, but I don't really know what it's for. And a lot of people are in rabbit holes that they don't know what they're for. And I think that they are to do the real work once Bitcoin is adopted. And that purpose will become evident in that time, right?
But you have to start, you're going to know, you're going to look back and say, yeah, I had to start doing that work 15 years ago and start that rabbit hole before I even knew why I was doing it. And yeah, it turned out all I really need was Bitcoin to be adopted predominantly in my area. And then it all made sense. So that's just perspective that I think I want to make sure people have, right? It deserves to be talked about as the most important thing right now because its adoption is holding up everything. I'm going to read one more, talk about it, and then wrap this up.
So here it is. Hottling isn't hoarding. You have to spend it. Whoa, what? No, but if you're not in a circular economy, you're toast. You'll drain your stack surviving the war and you'll end up back on zero. You have to be able to earn Bitcoin. But who will give it to you and why? I'm going to leave that one at that. Let you guys churn, let the two of you who listen to this churn on it. And I'm going to listen back to this and see if I want to continue doing this. But thanks guys. Whoever made it this far, you're my boys, my girls. Love you guys.
See ya.
Hey guys, this is Fundamentals and I decided to start doing something a little different here. I'm doing some solo rips just because I find myself with time in my day and I have a lot of shit to say. I don't blue check on Twitter so I'm only really able to use 100 whatever characters and can't really express myself that well that way. Have a lot to say but I feel like I'm going to do maybe these little five or six minute rips. Just to get a few thoughts out there, get us talking about it. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go through just a couple of tweets I tried to send out but then really expand on them and tell you guys what I'm really meaning over it.
So let me read real quick here. If I do release this with the video, I'm sharing my screen with my Twitter here. So here we go. I should tell you guys, I had my mind blown yesterday from a book and it's the beginning of a book series that I discovered. I'm a math student. I study math obsessively. I can talk about why that happened but in my travels I just came across this book and it shocked me because the book is called Math Girls and it looks like a novella, like a juvenile novella or like some anime thing that you would see in a graphic novel. And it's a very juvenile story about these Japanese teenagers that are just dealing with weird things but in their doing what they're doing, they're teaching each other math and I figured out that they're actually able to teach some really difficult math concepts in this form and I'm blown away by it.
And there was just something mentioned in passing and this stimulated this tweet. So here it is. Maths and Bitcoin have something in common. When used a certain way, it enables time and space to be traversed in a way that the purely physical world doesn't. Math is a time machine. Anyone who's ever tried to solve a problem without algebra only to discover it understands this. So this notion that math is a time machine should be fairly self-evident but if it's not, think about if I asked you, if I said the equation x plus y equals 100, tell me what, you know, write as many pairs of x and y as you can.
This is probably a bad example but if then I told you one of these classic algebra problems like Adam is twice the age of Jamie and then their ages add up to 90, you know, what are their ages? You ever try to solve a problem like that, you find that you can plug in the two ages for as long as it takes to solve that problem or you use algebra and you solve it within seconds. And so that's really just an example really of how math is a time machine. Like it could take something that could take on the order of forever and then make something actually solvable in a finite amount of time.
Bitcoin mining competitions are a version of this. And then it actually got me thinking what if somebody actually solved the time machine, what if somebody did build the time machine to kind of figure out shot 256, what do we do then? So I mean, my mind started going to all these places. But here is the tweet was just this other insight that Bitcoin is also a time machine. We talk about it often as a time machine. It may actually just be a really a space machine and the time that it solves for is because of how easy it is to transport across space, but it gets us like it gives us time.
We tend to age backwards. That sounds stupid, but we just tend to you tend to figure out what's really important when you discover Bitcoin. And so from that perspective, it's a time machine. So I found it very interesting to look at these two things as time machines. And for me, when I like, you know, studying math very hard, and it's a it's a subject, like abstract algebra number theory that's not typical of what people are studying, what people typically study. People typically study engineering. They learn calculus, differential equations, etc. They don't study number theory or abstract algebra.
So I wonder why I'm doing that. And then maybe it's related to this time machine concept. I'm always just looking for clues. So then I had a follow up, I had two follow ups. The next one was obsessing over what jobs you can do with math is the number one barrier to learning math. Learning requires being present and willing to do it for the sake of learning and not caring what it will yield. Bitcoin will fix our ability to learn mathematics. And this is now this now gets into like, what does it take to really learn math? I mean, you would the main thing is you actually have to sit there and be curious.
And you have to be in the present in the moment. And the reason like what where Bitcoin comes in is that when you are a bit coiner, you tend to be pretty sure that what you're doing in a moment is the right thing. You have a lot of conviction about where how you should spend your time. So whatever it took you to be curious about solving a certain problem in the moment that you're learning the math, you can actually be very confident that that's what you should be doing. And when you lower your time preference, you can now certain activities become available that were not available to you before.
So what comes to mind to me is reading, walking, like really long walking, you know, the kind of stuff that like you do for a long enough time, you start asking yourself, am I supposed to be doing this? Or like, how do I have time for this? I shouldn't have time for this. This is wrong. I shouldn't be doing this. And studying a math that is not on the typical track definitely like comes on that list. So in my past, I've spent leisure time studying calculus, linear algebra, differential equations. I've done self-studying. And when I did that, I didn't have the type of doubt that I was doing the right thing with my time because it's such a, you know, accepted thing.
And it's clear in my job how I would benefit from it, et cetera. But then studying, but now I have this craving to study abstract algebra and number theory. There's no necessarily benefit at the end of that tunnel, but there's something driving me and I trust it. And that is really what it takes. And the thing is, like I have to block and tackle so much for my kids, particularly I'm the daughter who really wants to learn math and she's majoring in math and it's been so much work shielding her from the people who just want to ask her what she's going to do with it.
What are you going to do with it? Who's going to hire you? Why would you want to do that? It's pretty aggravating to deal with those forces, but they're constant. Okay. So anyway, now the next one was kind of a follow-up, third follow-up here was that, oh, here it is. So being that math and Bitcoin are both precious time machines, you can understand why I find conversations about the price of Bitcoin and the jobs people can do with math to be boring and borderline hostile, but certainly pathetic. So yeah, like I actually, if you want to like bring up anger in me, you know, really try to focus on the price of Bitcoin or really try to focus on math from a vocational perspective of, oh, what can you do with it?
You know, really, you know, it's all coming from the same place where the thing is not enough and it's not important unless you can validate it with a job or you can validate it by price. And I reject both of those notions wholeheartedly and come at me, come at me on any of those things. And then I think the last thing is this last tweet, I was on a roll this morning. Bitcoin is a tiny, tiny, tiny microscopic part of the overall picture of what needs to happen in the world, but it's the singular most important terrible grammar, but it's the singular most important because its adoption is holding up the real work to be done.
So he's really now kind of what I want to say, right? Bitcoin is so important, but the reason it's important is because it is what people will call in the critical path of the actual real work that needs to be done. If all we do is Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't fix anything, right? But there's this long list of things that need to be fixed once the money is fixed, right? But none of that work can really start until the current system is remade around Bitcoin. So that is why the generation we occupy just views Bitcoin as the absolute, absolute, absolute most important thing to ever exist in the world.
But I think it's important that we understand that there will come a time and hopefully it's sooner than later, hopefully there will come a time where we never talk about Bitcoin the way we do, right? We never talk about it persuasively. People make fun of Bitcoiners and they say, oh, no one ever says, oh, you have to adopt the dollar. Nobody has any dollar meetups. These people are fucking stupid. And you should ignore them. However, there should come a day. There should come a day where we don't have to have such deliberate conversations about adopting Bitcoin.
Adopting Bitcoin is the thing that's actually in the way of doing the real work. And I hope that there is a lot of people whose eyes on the price of whatever that is. And I think when you think about a lot of people talk about rabbit holes, they're in rabbit holes. So I'm in a math rabbit hole. It doesn't quite make sense. It's not to do Bitcoin, right? It was motivated by cryptography, but I don't really know what it's for. And a lot of people are in rabbit holes that they don't know what they're for. And I think that they are to do the real work once Bitcoin is adopted. And that purpose will become evident in that time, right?
But you have to start, you're going to know, you're going to look back and say, yeah, I had to start doing that work 15 years ago and start that rabbit hole before I even knew why I was doing it. And yeah, it turned out all I really need was Bitcoin to be adopted predominantly in my area. And then it all made sense. So that's just perspective that I think I want to make sure people have, right? It deserves to be talked about as the most important thing right now because its adoption is holding up everything. I'm going to read one more, talk about it, and then wrap this up.
So here it is. Hottling isn't hoarding. You have to spend it. Whoa, what? No, but if you're not in a circular economy, you're toast. You'll drain your stack surviving the war and you'll end up back on zero. You have to be able to earn Bitcoin. But who will give it to you and why? I'm going to leave that one at that. Let you guys churn, let the two of you who listen to this churn on it. And I'm going to listen back to this and see if I want to continue doing this. But thanks guys. Whoever made it this far, you're my boys, my girls. Love you guys.
See ya.
