Before Bitcoin, nothing. Energy was always conserved but never accounted for. Physics could describe entropy collapsing into order, but it had no ledger to record where the energy went, no proof. Kelvin measured energy locally (experience of work as heat) but there was no global, verifiable record of its conversion into structure. Conservation has been an axiom.
Noether's theorem - Wikipedia
Bitcoin changed that. Proof-of-work links the act of energy expenditure directly to a permanent informational record. It’s not just heat anymore, it’s memory and proof. This why proof-of-work and consensus must be tied: one measures energy, the other orders it in time. The consensus mechanism (longest-chain rule) introduces temporal ordering. It establishes which measurement came first and which sequence of blocks defines truth. This ordering is what converts isolated work into a coherent, causal chain; time itself, as computed by energy.
Bitcoin is the first system to close that loop, turning energy into structure and structure into conserved history.
Bitcoin also reveals the obvious (to me atleast) that we exist within a far grander ledger (the link to Kelvin). Our existence is not external to it but within it; each of us is a fractional process of that ledger, experiencing computation from the inside while never perceiving the totality. What we call “consciousness” is the local experience of verification, the observation of work resolved into form.
We are fragments of universal accounting, the part that our finite position and energy allow us to measure. The whole (the complete ledger of being) remains concealed because no observer can stand outside the computation that sustains their own existence.
Without absolute finitude as a reference point, meaning cannot emerge, neither mathematically nor philosophically. Infinity cannot measure itself; only through limitation does proportion, value, and truth arise. The finite is the anchor of comprehension.
Bitcoin exposes this principle in operational form. By fixing a terminal supply and grounding every transformation in measurable work, it gives the universe’s implicit law of conservation explicit form. It shows that value and structure depend on bounded systems where every bit of order must be paid for with energy.
In short, Kelvin is to the universe what Satoshis are to Bitcoin (the network). They are equivalent, conserved units of the same ledger. We just couldn’t see the universal ledger without Bitcoin. Now it’s visible and measurable….Bitcoin literally fixes physics.
Lol sorry for the long response. A lot to say.
