BITCOIN: THE ENTROPY ENGINE

[romor]

Hello everyone

I recently came across a fascinating article titled “BITCOIN: THE ENTROPY ENGINE” written by Sydney Bright and published in Bitcoin Magazine.

This reminded me of a book I read a few months ago, “Entropy Demystified: Order, Life & Money” written in 2000 by Valery Chalidze (1938-2018), a physicist and human rights activist. In his book, Chalidze explores how the concepts of entropy can be applied to various aspects of life, including economics and money.

This brings me to an intriguing question: Is it possible that Bitcoin is the work of a physicist?

Chalidze, with his expertise in physics and his interest in human rights and economics, could he have envisioned or even influenced the idea of Bitcoin, a digital currency secured by complex mathematical & physical principles?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts and if you have read Sydney Bright’s article. Do you think there could be a connection between the scientific concepts of entropy explored by Chalidze and the foundations of Bitcoin? Your insights and theories are welcome!

Thank you in advance for your responses.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

In his book, Chalidze explores how the concepts of entropy can be applied to various aspects of life, including economics and money.

When I studied chemistry in college, my professor said in no uncertain terms that the way the average person uses the word entropy has little to do with how it was originally defined by Rudolph J.C.E. Clausius.  In other words, entropy doesn't just mean disorder, and all the calculus used to calculate entropy in the thermodynamic sense wouldn't apply when it comes to economics or anything to do with human behavior.

I haven't read the article, and it'd be nice if the AI program you used to write your post elaborated on it a little, because it's damn hard to have a discussion about a topic like this without reading what you claim to have read.

All these newbies writing posts in perfect English lately.  Makes me four steps beyond suspicious.

[romor]

It doesn't change anything, I'm French, the AI ​​serves as my translator.

What might be interesting is to first read Valery Chalidze's book.
https://archive.org/details/entropy-demystified-potential-order-life-and-mone/page/n1/mode/2up
https://medium.com/@Valery_Chalidze/the-entropy-of-social-life-1997-412218a8737f

I find this incredible condescension to focus on the form of the message rather than the substance.

---

BENSON - Valery Nikolaevich Chalidze, 79, a long-time international human-rights activist, died unexpectedly at his home in Benson Wednesday morning, January 3, 2018.

He was born on November 25, 1938 in Moscow, the son of the Prince Nikolai Chalidze and Francheska Yansen.
Chalidze grew up in Moscow and was educated as a physicist at the University of Moscow and University of Tblisi.

Early in his career he became the head of a secret Soviet physics laboratory in Moscow. On November 4, 1970 he, along with two other scientists - Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Andrei Sakharov - founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee, began publishing a samizdatmagazine "bshchestvennye problemy" ("Social Problems"). The Committee was the first non-governmental organizations in the history of the Soviet Union, and offered free legal advice to persons whose human rights had been violated by the Soviet Government, and also to advise the Soviet Government on its legal obligations in regard to human rights under international and Soviet law. In 1972, he was invited to deliver a lecture in the United States at the Georgetown University and NYU, once there he was deprived by the USSR authorities of his Soviet citizenship and prevented from returning to the Soviet Union. He remained in the U.S., and in exile became a resident of Manhattan until 1983 when he and his wife relocated to Benson. He became a U.S. citizen in 1979.

He founded and was president of Khronika Press, a Russian-language publisher of human-rights material from 1972 until 1992. In 1980 he established Chalidze Publications to publish Russian-language books and human-rights periodicals that were banned due to censorship in the USSR, then smuggled into that country for readers there. He retired from those endeavors in 2000.

Chalidze has written more than twenty books on human rights and theoretical physics, including To Defend These Rights (1974), Criminal Russia (1977), Entropy Demystified: Potential Order, Life and Money (2000), and Mass and Electric Charge in the Vertex Theory of Matter(2001) and the co-editor of Papers on Soviet Law (1977-81). He was the author and published several articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and several other newspapers defending human rights.
He enjoyed cooking, designing and building homes, and designing and casting jewelry.

Chalidze received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his work in international human rights.
He developed the Vortex Theory of Matter. Since its publication ten years ago, the large volume of information received via space telescopes and Voyager seems to substantiate this theory.

He was predeceased by his parents.
A celebration of his life will be held on Sunday January 7, 2017, from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. at the Fair Haven Inn.

---

Good reading

[The Sceptical Chymist]

It doesn't change anything, I'm French, the AI ​​serves as my translator.

Mmm.  I suspected there was some sort of AI being used here, and that being said I have no idea to what extent you relied on such a program to write your post.  Perhaps others can chime in.

Aside from that, I did comment on the entropy theme but there's no way I or anyone else is going to read a book before making a relevant post.

If you find it condescending, then you're not familiar with bitcointalk and all the problems we've had over the years with members who make incoherent posts in order to get paid.  And let me tell you, it is rare that a newbie writes in excellent English--so much so that it's a red flag.  So aside from the fact that you used AI, don't take offense.

[romor]

I am sending you the summary of the book, written by the author himself, it will be simpler and above all fairer.

---

About This Book

Although the concept of entropy has been under discussion for one and a half centuries, its philosophical depth has still not been properly explored and it is still one of the most complicated and controversial concepts of science. Its application to the study of social processes has started only in recent decades and no doubt this trend will continue. The author’s first goal in this book is to provide those who are interested in social studies, but not familiar with physics, with a comprehensible explanation of the concept of entropy. The value of the knowledge of entropy for the social scientist is at least two-fold:

1. Entropy is characteristic of a level of disorder in any statistical system and for this reason can be successfully used for the description of the communication process, music or economic activity as well as the behavior of inanimate matter. In this use, one is dealing with the order and disorder of a system independently of physics: entropic characteristics can be used no matter what makes a system orderly or disorderly, be it the laws of mechanics or our manipulations with symbols, like the alphabet letters of musical notes. The example of the use of the entropy concept as a characteristic of any statistical system is the well known Shannon’s Theory of Information which found its application not only in the technology of communications but in biology, linguistics and other areas.

2. Whenever we are dealing with matter and energy be it heat machines, biology, economy or the use of natural resources, we must take into account the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the level of disorder (entropy) in an enclosed system can not decrease and that one has to spend energy to decrease disorder in any part of the system. The processes of life and social life are characterized by increasing local order, but are still subject to limitation as dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. This brought scientists to the development of the physics of open systems thanks to the ideas of Schrodinger, Prigogine and others. Now we understand that the world is a place where destructive tendencies coexist with creative forces.

For many decades the traditional topic for passionate debate among scientists and moralists has been whether we are masters of our behavior or whether and to what extent we follow biological prescription - instincts. In this book, the author tries to go one step deeper, to the following inquiry: what are the inevitable consequences of the fact that we are built from matter, and how much our willing - together with instinctive - behavior is defined and limited by the laws of physics? Limitations imposed on life, social life, economics and the use of environment by the second law of thermodynamics are particularly interesting.

After an extensive explanation of what entropy is as a measure of disorder, the author shows how entropy can be used as a bulk characteristic to measure order. He introduces the concept of potential order, which characterizes the ability of an open system to become orderly or to create order in another system. Potential order is a property of fields of subatomic particles and atoms which provide for the primary organization of matter. It is also a property of complex molecules within the living cell which provide for the organized behavior of living entities. Further, human will and economic enterprise possess potential order to increase order around us, be it material order or the creation of information.

The author is showing that the second law of thermodynamics is fundamental in putting limitations on certain automatic behavioral patterns of all living creatures - including humans - such as entropy lowering activity and self-isolation from the disorderly matter surrounding us.

The entropic approach permits the author to do further inquiry into the connection between physics and economics. It is well known that the ideas of classical mechanics provided the basis for the development of mathematical economics since the time it was established in the nineteenth century. In recent decades more economists started to realize the limitation of such an approach and started to connect economic thinking with a thermodynamic approach as well as with systems’ theory.

The concept of entropy in relation to economics and sociology was under discussion in the works of Faber, Georgesku-Roegen, and others. More authors started to see the deep analogy of economic development and the behavior of a thermodynamic system. After all, human activity, which is the subject of economic study, is a local entropy lowering process and it is exactly physics which can permit us to see the unavoidable limits of this activity.

The author shows that the low-entropic component of an economy, which is the order producing activity of people, should not be treated in theory the same way as the purely energetic component. On the basis of this, the author shows the limitations for the use of variational calculus in economics, discussing particularly the maximization of utility function.

In his analysis of the monetary measurement of order and potential order, the author shows that some important problems connected with the evaluation of goods produced by economy, inflation and monetary policy come from the fact that the same measuring device—money— is used for both—the purely energetic and low-entropic components of the economy.

[JiiBs]

I tried to verify on the possibility of the OP to have been an AI written piece but, didn’t come up with anything. Although, some of OP’s responses was clearly taken from the source of which, OP have done well to reference.
Even then, it’s undeniable as OP has also stated the extent to which AI was used which is in translation.

OP says his French and as such, you just might be translating from French to English but, the link I referred to on the summary is clearly written in English posted on X (tweeter) by the author but, that’s as far as I got.
https://twitter.com/Valery_Chalidze/status/1741707148881469778
I guess other user could chip in as The Sceptical Chymist have said.


However, without having to read the books you’ve referred in detail, I doubt the Bitcoin we have today or the idea behind it’s creation came out of a random discovery in a disordered financial system. Also, I can’t give you insights on what I don’t know about like, if this and that was linked to the Satoshi Nakamoto or where the persona got the ideas.

[odolvlobo]

This brings me to an intriguing question: Is it possible that Bitcoin is the work of a physicist?

Of course it is possible, but the fact that Bitcoin uses processes that involve entropy doesn't mean that its inventor was a physicist.

Bitcoin makes use of many concepts and technologies, so then by your logic, Satoshi also could have been one of millions of other people who have knowledge of those concepts and technologies. And she probably is one of those millions, but picking one and claiming that Satoshi must have been a particular person is absurd.

[peter0425]

This brings me to an intriguing question: Is it possible that Bitcoin is the work of a physicist?

Of course, the possibilities are endless. We do not know the real person behind the creation of bitcoin so it’s difficult to say for sure but if I were to guess, I would say that Satoshi leaned more on being an information tech rather than a physicist.

Chalidze, with his expertise in physics and his interest in human rights and economics, could he have envisioned or even influenced the idea of Bitcoin, a digital currency secured by complex mathematical & physical principles?

While I do see the connection of entropy to cryptography, there are still plenty of aspects that contributed to the creation of bitcoin that someone whose expertise only lies in physics might not be able to create. His discussion of economics in relation to physics has more something to do with analogies and not really technical innovation.

[tread93]

Hello everyone

I recently came across a fascinating article titled “BITCOIN: THE ENTROPY ENGINE” written by Sydney Bright and published in Bitcoin Magazine.

This reminded me of a book I read a few months ago, “Entropy Demystified: Order, Life & Money” written in 2000 by Valery Chalidze (1938-2018), a physicist and human rights activist. In his book, Chalidze explores how the concepts of entropy can be applied to various aspects of life, including economics and money.

This brings me to an intriguing question: Is it possible that Bitcoin is the work of a physicist?

Chalidze, with his expertise in physics and his interest in human rights and economics, could he have envisioned or even influenced the idea of Bitcoin, a digital currency secured by complex mathematical & physical principles?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts and if you have read Sydney Bright’s article. Do you think there could be a connection between the scientific concepts of entropy explored by Chalidze and the foundations of Bitcoin? Your insights and theories are welcome!

Thank you in advance for your responses.

It honestly might have well been invented by a physicist, the sheer attention to the smaller details that affect the larger population at scale- it is quite something what Satoshi has done. The forethought and innovation in his work was definitely a build off of other cyberpunk work and other electronic methods of cash but he took it to the next level.

[romor]

Everything can and must be thought of as a clock. Bitcoin is a ledger of information that serves as a monetary clock. Quantum thermodynamics and related disciplines concern the flow of information and energy, providing the appropriate language to describe clocks. All clocks operate by proof of work to depict the consumption of information/energy. When you truly understand this perspective, it becomes clear that a clock is essentially a thermal machine that creates the illusion of time. Like an engine, a clock uses the flow of energy to perform work, producing exhaust gases in the process. Engines use this energy for propulsion; clocks use it to tick. The exhaust gases in cells are encoded in the CO2 and water created with the amount of heat generated. Entropy, in the form of energy or information, is the quantity whose relentless increase in the universe is closely associated with the arrow of time.

A clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes where energy is distributed among more particles or over a larger area. Energy tends to dissipate, and entropy, a measure of this dissipation, tends to increase, simply because there are many more ways for energy to spread out than for it to be highly concentrated.

Since all clocks operate by proof of work, it should be clear why you would not want your money denominated in a proof-of-stake currency.

How do you create the concept of a singular time if your system spans the galaxy? How do you measure time in a timeless realm? To answer these questions, we need to closely examine the concept of time itself and how cells and Bitcoin handle it. The physics of organisms creates time for cells. Cellular organization creates time by using sunlight. Sunlight or the photons that comprise it are timeless. They never experience time. As for Bitcoin, money in the form of tokens is timeless, but monetary ledgers are not.

Bitcoin does the same. Bitcoin creates its own time: block time, more commonly known as block height. Block height allows Bitcoin to track things: cells and Bitcoin are decentralized timekeepers that track energy and information. There are two decentralized systems, one naturally created by evolution and the other by humans. Here is an irony: there is no absolute time in a decentralized system. Absolute time exists only in the Newtonian mechanistic world that Einstein disrupted in 1905 with the theory of relativity.

Bitcoin and cells uses causality and unpre­dictability to build its own sense of now.  Timekeeping devices have trans­formed civiliza­tions more than once. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in 1934: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern indus­trial age.” Today, it is again a timekeeping device that is trans­forming our civiliza­tion: a clock, not computers, is the true key-machine of the modern infor­ma­tional age. And this clock is Bitcoin.

---

I encourage you to read the book by Valery Chalidze (1938-2018) titled *Entropy Demystified: Order, Life & Money* (2000), written eight years before Bitcoin.