Time is money, money is time. In math, this interplay is known as the commutative property. In this case, I would like to coin the operation of Bitcoin as the commutative property of time. It is a timechain holding money in its asymptotic vector trajectory. Money is time denominated in Bitcoin blocks. For instance, the time now is Block Height 827,866. The money is forever 21 million Bitcoin. Understanding the concept of time, like Bitcoin, is a tour de force of so many threads. Let’s hope it doesn’t get unwieldy. As you probably know, we believe that time is relative. It is a function of the space-time continuum. We can’t know precisely where we stand in the universe, it is so vast and never-ending. We can barely go beyond our neighboring planets, let alone our home galaxy, the milky way. Instead, we use our star, the Sun, to set our watches, give structure to our days and define our lifetimes. It is just a reference, give or take a few minutes. Who cares? In fact, Cal Tech does. They have a bunch of time engineers way down in their basement, measuring time down to infinitesimal decimal points based on the atomic model of matter. These guys are not satisfied with the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), a dividing line in the sands, so to speak, between arbitrary time zones. In a bit worthy of divine comedy, a watchmaker was the one who finally figured out how best to measure longitudes, GMT being one of them, after many failed attempts by astronomers and mathematicians, to map it. The problem was opened up to the general public as a competition, with an actual bounty, such was the failure of the experts. Reminds me of someone called Satoshi Nakamoto who discovered how to do perfect money with all the failures of the banks. Satoshi gave us a whole new clock, a conceptualization of existence that is in relation to immutable blocks of money transactions instead of the stars. Thank goodness because we were lost in space. We thought we were flying towards the horizon but in reality we were bound to crash and ended up on the ocean floor. Our flying instruments are off, the sensors do not work. We celebrate the winter and summer solstices on the wrong days and are none the wiser. Google and the observatories aimed at the sky tell us it is December 21st and June 21st. The heavens beg to differ; it’s actually January 3rd and September 3rd. The Golden Gate bridge has missed its rendez-vous with the heavens. It was left wanting after promises of grandeur to meet with its cosmic fate, it’s raison d’etre. The bridge has travelled expectantly around the sun to find the door closed to the space horizon. How is it that we the creatures of the earth live on despite undoing time’s Hermetic polarity? Shouldn’t we be extinct, so at odds are we with the laws of nature? Can the universe be that generous to excuse our wayward ways? Why haven’t they sent us an emissary to set us straight and put us back on course, in keeping with the hands of time? Will we have to wake up the dead to remember our true destiny in the stars? The ancients knew how to tell time just by looking up. They figured out the earth did a quirky little dance around its axis every 26,000 years just because. Maybe precession is a reminder to the people to pay attention, recalibrate their internal clocks, be humble about their place in the universe. Now, our overloads, the government, impose a meaningless daylight savings time. The heavens weep at our stupidity. The ancients gave us milestones as keepers of the memories. They erected monuments to align with the planets in the form of pyramids. They built a yardstick for the world to know its boundaries. From the great pyramid of Giza, to the humble-sized but thousands of years more ancient Nubian pyramids in northern Sudan, to the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey which is even more ancient, we are transported back to a time period well over 12,000 years before the birth of Christ in human ingenuity and civilization. Nature itself lent a helping hand, sending great floods into the South western American plains, marking its presence forever in the grooves, peaks, valleys and dried out riverbeds to document antiquity. And yet, we ignore it. We forgot it. Our children barely look at the night sky and wonder about the distance of the stars. Our schools do not teach astronomy. Our best teachers can’t point out the little and big dipper. They can’t animate the bull of Orion. We abdicated that to Hollywood. We have lost that magical feeling. Our history is no longer nourishing, it beats us down with its emphasis on human darkness, made up of half-truth and outlandish lies to assuage the egos of the dominant and powerful. We are left to pick up the pieces of our forgotten past like breadcrumbs left in the time machine. Our TVs when they were analog reminded us it is capturing the very distant but real light and sound waves who began their journey 14 billion years before. They are hurling towards us at unbearable speeds from the beginning of time, marking the big bang. The waves are on a mission; they are intent on expanding the net of existence to its breaking limit, triggering a tsunami that will drown us whole, the likes of which we can never fathom. Shakespeare memorialized our tragic condition in a fateful tale, formulating turns of phrases in a manner that only he can. He called our lives “a walking shadow. A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth is indeed dark stuff. Did I scare you, dear reader? Don’t fret. Focus on the light. It is Bitcoin. We are only a brief history of time. A teenage wasteland.