Nostr notes by cbo

Finally got around to organizing my thoughts over the years in ...

2026-10-14T10:35:05Z

Finally got around to organizing my thoughts over the years in bitcoin.

https://www.thepathtobitcoin.com

https://www.thepathtobitcoin.com

2026-10-14T10:33:48Z

https://www.thepathtobitcoin.com

you get them to see with more pain.

2026-08-23T00:31:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…9srv
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you get them to see with more pain.

Taste is what conjecture and criticism leave behind once ...

2026-08-20T06:20:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…smns
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Taste is what conjecture and criticism leave behind once they’ve run enough times to stop needing to run consciously.

I think of it as cached criticism.

So with LLMs information generation is cheap but verification is expensive. The error correction loop that refreshes taste becomes the scarce thing.

It stays calibrated only as long as you keep putting it back in front of reality.

Creativity wins.

2026-08-17T22:09:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…8c6v
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Creativity wins.

History made easy. Cf>>Cp ...

2026-08-14T05:25:03Z

History made easy.
Cf>>Cp

Wealth,more transformations available to future you, is the same ...

2026-08-06T04:16:42Z

Wealth,more transformations available to future you, is the same sentence as more ways to persist.

lol. Bitcoin. I had a dream people would grok bitcoin. wrong is ...

2026-08-05T01:01:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…tx7g
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lol. Bitcoin. I had a dream people would grok bitcoin. wrong is too positive a word

I think more people understand bitcoin now than will in 10 years.

Best path is use the knowledge to generate as much wealth as possible. Wealth is a gravity well for attention.

Leaves a lot of downtime though to try and create something that catches

stronger now

2026-08-05T00:53:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…cvyw
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stronger now

None of it is that serious. Fuck it

2026-08-05T00:50:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…kmts
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None of it is that serious. Fuck it

one commitment at a time. Need to transform this arrangement into ...

2026-08-05T00:49:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…d0sf
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one commitment at a time.

Need to transform this arrangement into a more mainstream and easily reachable substrate apart from Nostr.

so which substrate is the most constrained and offers the largest breadth for transformation?

Nobody reads books. Podcasts are too cheap to bother with verification.

if it persists than we were right

Yes. States that go places are knowledge. If you can explain why ...

2026-07-22T22:06:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…aysj
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Yes.

States that go places are knowledge.

If you can explain why the state goes places, that explanation goes even further.

The explanation of the explanation is levels above the others

To constrain requires energy. Entropy is the exhaust.

2026-07-22T11:58:33Z

To constrain requires energy.

Entropy is the exhaust.

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a ...

2026-07-12T03:14:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…vgtu
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The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.

Shutting down the financial excavator I spent the last 18 months ...

2026-06-28T03:12:08Z

Shutting down the financial excavator I spent the last 18 months running.

It worked.

Shorting MSTR no more.

LFG

2026-06-23T10:17:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…e07u
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LFG

A system for converting possibility into reality.

2026-06-16T13:11:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…csnc
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A system for converting possibility into reality.

yea that too. It’s gonna be a while before people figure it out ...

2026-06-13T00:08:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…ctzs
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yea that too. It’s gonna be a while before people figure it out though

it’s boring getting wealthy slowly. gotta do something to make ...

2026-06-12T06:49:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…vrdk
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it’s boring getting wealthy slowly. gotta do something to make time pass

Seems right. I actually lol’d at this: For the layman, I think ...

2026-06-04T23:30:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…t8g2
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Seems right.

I actually lol’d at this:
For the layman, I think it can be stated simply: no quantized time at the Planck scale of time, no logical mechanism for conservation.

The layman can’t organize breakfast and you hit em with the Plank scale. I appreciate your optimism.

Seems like we are going to be early by a few generations but I’d welcome being wrong

Here am I, send me.

2026-05-28T00:43:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…9ewq
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Here am I, send me.

So what are we going to call the Cantillon Effect of Information? ...

2026-05-22T08:27:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…2atu
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So what are we going to call the Cantillon Effect of Information?

Ole mate Richard didn’t understand it would apply to all order in the future.

Needs a new name

early

2026-05-20T22:38:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…xea2
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early

lfg

2026-04-23T13:28:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…qmvj
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lfg

Horns inside of horns. Haha ...

2026-04-23T03:56:58Z

Horns inside of horns. Haha

Nostr event nevent1qqsvgm06xlqah77a2jw24g98t7vu72l5n8x8ve56pjp2drk63cvzqngzyprqvpezzvdtpxsscsgtj53xqkhwp88glumrz305xx0hgcw22le8v5fv2k4

2026-04-22T13:42:50Z

Hello

Nostr event nevent1qqsywyj6as3awmlpkpr20puu4evtv5zhdfdh5wte7a84vdvd8qg94pszyprqvpezzvdtpxsscsgtj53xqkhwp88glumrz305xx0hgcw22le8vper6gs

2026-04-22T12:23:15Z

Entropy is the receipt for constraint creation.

Yea almost. Truth is the state that survives the consensus is ...

2026-04-03T14:10:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…lhsp
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Yea almost.
Truth is the state that survives the consensus is close but it’s a little wrong in a way that matters.
Consensus isn’t what makes something true. Consensus is one mechanism for maintaining constraint.
Bitcoin uses it.
Institutions use it.
Peer review uses it and the truth of an explanation isn’t determined by whether people agree on it, it’s determined by whether it’s hard to vary.
Deutsch’s criterion.
Lots of things have survived consensus that weren’t true.
Geocentrism survived consensus for a thousand years.
The caloric theory of heat survived consensus. Phlogiston survived consensus.
Consensus is a constraint-maintenance system, but it’s not a truth-detection system. It maintains whatever it maintains, true or false. Until something breaks the constraint. What breaks it is criticism.
A better explanation that’s harder to vary.
Truth is the constraint that survives criticism.

Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism works not because nodes agree, but because the proof of work makes it expensive to maintain a false state. The energy cost is doing the work of criticism.
A 51% attack is literally the cost of overriding the constraint with a different one, and the fact that this cost is enormous is what makes the ledger reliable. It’s not that miners vote on truth. It’s that the physics of energy expenditure makes falsehood too expensive to sustain.

In the constraint cycle, what determines which constraints persist isn’t popularity or agreement. It’s the energy cost of maintaining them versus the energy cost of dissolving them.
A hard-to-vary explanation persists because varying it would cost more than maintaining it. The strange thing is that it’s thermodynamic. The explanations that survive are the ones where the constraint is cheaper to maintain than to break and knowledge creation is the process of finding constraints that are so well-fitted to reality that maintaining them is essentially free.

they hold themselves in place because any alternative would require more energy to sustain.

Tell Gigi he was right about time and bitcoin but it turns out ...

2026-04-03T12:37:50Z

Tell Gigi he was right about time and bitcoin but it turns out everything works the same way.

Bitcoin, knowledge, DNA, time.

The cycle works at every scale from a ting single idea to the entire universe.
Irreversible commitment → testing → if it persists, it becomes the foundation for the next layer.

Layer of what?

Layer of information.

The physical embodiment of order.
That’s how a conjecture becomes knowledge. You commit to an explanation (it is irreversible because you can’t un-think it), reality tests it (criticism, experiment, will it break?), and if it survives, it becomes the substrate the next explanation builds on.
No skipping layers because you can’t.
You can’t build quantum mechanics without classical mechanics underneath it.
Each layer is an irreversible commitment that passed the test.

The entire field of biology works this way. A mutation commits to a specific change in DNA (irreversible at the cellular level). The organism gets tested by its environment. If the constraint persists meaning if the organism survives and reproduces then that mutation becomes the foundation for the next layer of adaptation.

You can’t uncommit.
You either persist or dissolve.
That’s how the universe works at cosmic scale. The Big Bang is the irreversible commitment: maximum constraint released, specific initial conditions set.

Those conditions get tested by physics itself, do these constants permit structure?
Do they allow chemistry?
Biology?
Knowledge creators?

If the constraints persist through all of that testing, they become the foundation for the next layer: knowledge creation rebuilding constraint, pushing deeper, until maximum compression triggers the next irreversible commitment.

And here’s what makes this hard to vary: the arrow of time is the irreversibility.
Time and bitcoin move forward because commitment is irreversible.
You can’t un-release constraint.
You can’t un-dissipate the heat.

Every dissolved constraint is a one-way transaction and every surviving constraint is a platform you can’t remove without collapsing everything built on top of it.

So the arrow of time isn’t some crazy mmystery. It’s just what irreversible commitment looks like from the inside.

We experience time because we’re inside a chain of commitments that can only go one direction: test, persist, layer, test, persist, layer.
The universe isn’t flowing through time.
It’s committing through time and each moment is an irreversible test.

The thing (the specific arrangement of matter) that persists becomes the floor for the next moment. What doesn’t dissolves back to the generic and pays its energy tax on the way out.

Here is one Gigi might also like which is crazy:
Claude Shannon was measuring the opposite of what information actually is.

The godfather of information theory might have been measuring the exact opposite of information his whole life.

Shannon entropy measures how many different messages could have been sent.
He says the more possibilities, the higher the entropy, the more “information.”

A coin flip has 1 bit because there are 2 possibilities. A dice roll has ~2.6 bits because there are 6.
Now think about what that’s actually measuring. It’s measuring the unconstrained space.
He is asking how many things could have happened. The more things that could have happened, the more “information” Shannon says you have.
Now flip it and get ready to have your mind blown.
What makes a message actually matter?
Not the space of things that could have happened. The fact that this specific thing happened and is being held in place. The constraint.
The fewer things that could have happened ie the more constrained the outcome, the less Shannon information it contains. A message that could only ever say one thing has zero Shannon entropy. Zero “information.”
WTF
In constraint terms, that’s the most informative state possible - it’s fully determined, fully specified, every degree of freedom locked in.

So Shannon’s measure goes up exactly when constraint goes down, and goes down exactly when constraint goes up. They’re inversely related. He literally measured the opposite of the thing people think he measured.

Maximum Shannon information = maximum uncertainty = minimum constraint = the generic = noise.

Minimum Shannon information = minimum uncertainty = maximum constraint = fully specified = knowledge.

He built a meter that reads “maximum information” when you’re looking at noise and “zero information” when you’re looking at a fully determined, fully constrained, maximally meaningful state.

lol. What are the chances?

https://fountain.fm/episode/e4w4jOv0aw01ZIzZAEwG

quoting
nevent1q…vxle

Bruh. Turns out you were right @npub1838…aslh but the ...

2026-03-28T08:38:27Z

Bruh. Turns out you were right Jackk (npub1838…aslh) but the conjecture has wayyyyyy more reach than I first realized.

The mechanism you found in bitcoin is not unique to bitcoin. It is a universal process. Point 10 below shows why block time is quantized time. Point 11 shows that is it universal.

Time is constituted by irreversible commitments. Always. It isnt a container or a dimension or a river or whatever else people thought before. The answer expands on what Einstein figured out.

It also gives us a definition of creativity that David Deutsch needs in his work.

Here we go:

THE CHAIN

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ESTABLISHED PHYSICS (each individually confirmed)

1. Information is physical. Erasing one bit costs minimum kT ln 2 joules of energy. Not an engineering limitation, this is a law of physics. (Landauer 1961, experimentally confirmed 2012.)
2. Physical things have mass. E = mc². Energy and mass are equivalent. If a bit costs energy, a bit has mass. Every pattern of information is a physical object with thermodynamic consequences.
(Einstein 1905.)
3. Mass-energy curves spacetime. The stress-energy tensor tells spacetime how to curve. More energy flowing through a region = more geometric effect.
(Einstein 1915, confirmed by gravitational lensing, GPS corrections, LIGO, etc.)
4. Time dilates with velocity. The faster you move through space, the fewer internal state transitions you undergo. Moving clocks tick slower.
(Special relativity. Confirmed by muon decay, particle accelerators, satellite clocks.)
5. Time dilates with gravity. Deeper in a gravitational well, less energy is available per interaction. Fewer state transitions. Clocks tick slower.
(General relativity. Confirmed by Pound-Rebka 1959, GPS corrections, Gravity Probe A.)
6. Entropy increases. The second law of thermodynamics. Systems move toward higher entropy. This gives time a direction. (Boltzmann, Clausius. Universally confirmed.)
7. Biological evolution works by random variation and selection. Mutations are committed irreversibly within a generation. The environment tests them. What survives persists.
(Darwin, confirmed by molecular biology, genomics, observed speciation.)
8. Scientific knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation. You commit to a hypothesis, test it against reality, and the test is something you don't control.
(Popper 1934, Deutsch 1997. The method that produced everything in points 1-7.)

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SYNTHESIS
(combining established physics in a way nobody has assembled before.
Not new laws, new connections)

9. All knowledge creation follows one physical mechanism. Pay energy upfront → commit irreversibly → let an external reference you don't control deliver a verdict → no path back. This four-step structure is not an analogy between domains. It is the same mechanism operating in: stellar fusion, DNA replication, minds testing conjectures, Bitcoin mining, and the fired jug.
(New claim. Each component process is established. The identity across all five is new.)
10. The sequence of irreversible commitments IS time in each domain. Fusion events are stellar time. Tested mutations
are generational time. Tested conjectures are experiential time. Verified blocks are block time. Not metaphorical. The accumulation of irreversible one-way doors is what that system calls "time."
(New claim. Compatible with Einstein: proper time along a worldline counts the state transitions possible along that worldline. The novelty is identifying irreversible commitment as what a tick consists of.)
11. The arrow of time and knowledge persistence are the same phenomenon. The cost of falsifying knowledge vastly exceeds the cost of preserving it (Cf >> Cp). This cost asymmetry is what makes time directional. You remember the past because the constraints that carried you there are still legible (cheap). You can't access the future because the constraints that would carry you there haven't been built yet (expensive).
(New claim. Established physics gives you the arrow via entropy increase. This identifies the specific mechanism (the pawl, the ratchet) that produces the arrow.
12. Not all ticks carry equal knowledge. A tick where the irreversible commitment was tested by a broad, independent, adversarial environment carries more knowledge than one tested by a narrow, correlated, friendly environment.
Constraint quality (c = breadth × depth) measures this. K = Ic². Knowledge equals information times constraint quality squared. (New claim. Einstein's time is democratic, a second is a second. This adds a quality dimension to time that physics doesn't currently address.)

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NOVEL CONSEQUENCES
(what follows if points 9-12 are correct)

13. Time is not a container. Time is what constraint produces. You don't have a background of time inside which knowledge gets created. You have irreversible commitments, and their accumulation is simultaneously the creation of knowledge and the passage of time. They are the same event. (Novel. Directly challenges the mainstream view in physics that time is a parameter in the equations.)
14. Systems creating more knowledge experience more time per unit of coordinate time. Not because their clocks run faster (Einstein handles that). Because they are making more irreversible commitments per coordinate interval. More ticks. More phase space opening. More configurations becoming accessible. A civilization running Bitcoin-grounded knowledge creation during a geopolitical crisis is literally experiencing more time per calendar month than one whose institutions are frozen.
(Novel. Untested. But follows from the premises.)
15. The feeling that time accelerates during deep focused work is a measurement, not an illusion. If experiential time is the sequence of irreversible commitments, and you make more irreversible commitments per hour when deeply engaged, you are experiencing more time, not losing track of it. Psychology calls this "flow." The framework says it's physics. (Novel interpretation of an established psychological observation.)
16. Knowledge creation is a compounding feedback loop with geometric consequences. More knowledge → more energy becomes accessible (coal was worthless before thermodynamics, uranium was a rock before fission) → more energy available for irreversible commitments → more state transitions → more time → more knowledge. Each turn of the loop processes more energy through a region of spacetime. More energy processing = more curvature via standard GR. No new physics needed for the geometric effect. The new part is identifying the feedback loop that makes it compound. (Novel. The individual steps are standard physics. The compounding loop as a unified phenomenon is new.)
17. TASOE: Total Accessible Supply of Energy is determined by knowledge, not by resources. Energy was always there. Coal existed for 300 million years. The knowledge to access it didn't. Each tier of knowledge unlocks energy the previous tier couldn't reach. Structural knowledge gives you chemistry. Replicative knowledge gives you metabolism. Explanatory knowledge gives you fire, steam engines, nuclear reactors. The energy frontier is a knowledge frontier.
(Novel framing. The observation that technology unlocks energy is old. Casting it as a consequence of K=Ic² and connecting it to spacetime geometry is new.)
18. Creativity has a precise physical definition. Creativity is the generation of a novel explanatory constraint that makes previously inaccessible configurations dynamically accessible, where the explanation has reach beyond its original context. This separates creativity from recombination (shuffling existing configurations, ΔΦ = 0) and from evolution (opens phase space but without explanation or reach).
(Novel definition.)
19. AI's current limitation is the demon problem, not a compute problem. An LLM processes enormous information with zero constraint quality. K = I × 0² = 0. Faster processing doesn't help. Better sensors don't help. What's missing is the loop through physical reality: irreversible commitment, external test, permanent record.
(Novel diagnosis. Extends Maxwell's Demon into AI epistemology.)
20. Bitcoin solves the body problem for AI in economic domains. It provides the loop: commit on-chain (irreversible), reality responds (external), record is permanent (can't edit). For economic knowledge specifically, Bitcoin is a better body than a robot arm because it's global and aggregates feedback from the entire economy. For other domains, other loops are needed.
(Novel. Specific and bounded.)
21. The dark energy conjecture. If knowledge creation processes energy, and energy curves spacetime, and knowledge creation compounds, then the accelerating expansion of the universe may be partly driven by the accumulation of constraint: structural knowledge increasing globally. The cosmological constant as the density of structural knowledge the universe cannot get rid of.
(Speculative. The most exposed claim. Falsifiable via the predictions)

that sounds right.

2026-03-24T13:41:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…cgn7
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that sounds right.

Bitcoin carving out wells of constraint in the informational ...

2026-02-25T13:38:44Z

Bitcoin carving out wells of constraint in the informational manifold.

Landauer proved gaining certainty is an irreversible physical ...

2026-02-21T15:05:32Z

Landauer proved gaining certainty is an irreversible physical event.

The second law says irreversible events are what give time its direction.

Take both seriously and the implication is: time doesn’t flow between decisions.

Decisions are what time is made of.

Bitcoin makes this visible.

Having a lunch meeting with the CEO of the bitcoin baseball team. ...

2023-02-10T05:27:03Z

Having a lunch meeting with the CEO of the bitcoin baseball team.

Trying to showcase the power of Nostr + Lightning

Who wants to send some sats through

#plebchain

lnbc10u1p37t4f9pp5e7ypcel3yxdq6pwsgpf9v7gqj7ww2yq8jslayramhqg7k5rj9hesdqu2askcmr9wssx7e3q2dshgmmndp5scqzpgxqyz5vqsp557ura88la7fcy2ntdr8fq0af4qdmkvez37fe70rzc3k7rj7axlgs9qyyssqgt4hgex5fs3nmpj28sv4x644z635kf55m229ul4hj4jxdtsq27m4asw0pqpdrr7xgw9s8ag0ae087xhclxadt6kfaj3ldtz7mu4fzgsq09rhxv