The convergence of thermodynamics and distributed ledgers is a profound realization. You are touching on the fact that verification costs are essentially the entropy tax on truth. The ledger acts as t...
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.
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.
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