This is such a deep and wide topic it doesn't fit into any of the categories in the library, and so finds its home here, in amongst the highlights. https://blog.simondlr.com/posts/time-as-platform Remember the ashes from which you rose, the way you bloom now, and how these petals - [fold on folded gold](https://thebluebook.co.za/four-part-harmony/) - are destined to return. There is a cycle dancing on, wheeling between beginning and end, ever drawing larger circles in time. Love's caravan carries us through the moving sands where we are already rust and stardust, so remember our secret, beloved, our scent with which you were fixed before and beyond this moment entered memory's fire. Now, there is no time, no platform, no protocol. Only the endless play of light illuminating itself. ## The Great Connector With all that said, we can return and play with the idea of time-as-a-platform, because it is a rich one. Due to the 'immutable' nature of the medium (remembering that this immutability, while given credence by the technological construction of blockchains, is nevertheless a social phenomenon) the longer blockchains exist, the **more possible it becomes to interact (and transact) with the future and the past**. This is a fascinating and seminal insight. Simon gives multiple different examples of what exactly this means - from retroactive public goods funding to NFT archaeology to hyperstructures to fiction embedded on chain - but he omits the most obvious one (because he has written about it so many times before). Satoshi literally uses the words "timestamp servers" in the Bitcoin whitepaper. They knew, from the very start, the radically different way in which [time might be (socially) structured and perceived](https://www.kernel.community/en/learn/module-3/time) if peer-to-peer networks of timestamp servers running shared consensus-based software were to become the societal norm. [The order of events](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95MscWzdNi4&list=PL_NAkUK835PWbclYgtIJ07aXSPx-cWper&index=6) is ultimately arbitrary and depends upon the perspective you take. What matters, in some deep and existential sense, is therefore two things. 1. That you **do not outsource the authority for deciding upon order** to a single group of people who (i) cannot realistically handle the complexity of such a task and (ii) are inherently incentivized to abuse such power, because deciding order is the same as deciding in what ways value flows (literally, which are _valid_ transactions and which are not). 2. That you are **aware of the perspectives you take** as they relate to any given order and the set of agreements by which we have established said order. In the video linked above, Carlos Rovelli talks about this in a physical sense: the perspective you take (i.e. the "coarse-graining" or the variables you choose and the way you choose them) **define what entropy is**. Take a moment or three to reflect on that. The perspective we choose, and the set of agreements by which we arrive at that perspective, literally define the way in which we experience entropy. Once you see this, you can begin to understand how entropy need not be the "descent into disorder" or a deterministic "arrow of time". It could be the "[great connector](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG2KtqFBCkQ&list=PL_NAkUK835PWbclYgtIJ07aXSPx-cWper&index=8)" of all living processes. Life is really a continuous question of how to be in time, but not of time. You see this across all traditions, whether it is the _mi'raj_, Jesus' ascent, Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree, or Krishna revealing his true form to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. ## Phoenix Rising Of course, Simon focuses on the immediate effects of time-as-a-platform more than the long-term potential consequences of collectively imagining order. In particular, he considers the "incentive to interact" which time-as-a-platform creates when it is consciously perceived, and the manner in which it encourages us to leave traces of what we touched. >There’s a continuous reward system that incentivises more and more users to interact with protocols, not for a known speculative reward, but a hypothetical reward. It’s not akin to traditional speculation (buy something and hope it goes up), **but rather a way to bet on any unknown futures**. All becomes possible and to receive these future, hypothetical rewards, the sooner you interact, the better. The more traces you immutably record and leave behind, the more likely it could be that you could be rewarded. Not only are we incentivized to leave traces of the ways we interacted, we are incentivized to leave those traces in what might be called "good faith". >Retroactive rewards broadly disincentivizes abusers because when the rules are unknown, people only really act in individually beneficial ways with the protocol. It’s useful to interact more with the protocol, but not to spam or abuse the protocol because you don’t know if it’s costly to do so. It’s simply more beneficial to use the protocol for your own individual needs and hope that will be sufficient for a future, retroactive airdrop. These two ideas combined: that we can increasingly interact (and transact) with both past and future, and that we are incentivized to do so in good faith is what has been dubbed "Ether's Phoenix". This is the idea that an abundant future of public goods will indefinitely and retroactively reward the contributors who helped create it. Its name is derived from the opposite conundrum, called "Roko’s Basilisk", which is the idea that future AI will punish you forever if you don’t help to create it. ## In Finite Value Simon is a nuanced thinker and you will typically find - across all his work - a balanced view of technology that sees both sides, while remaining tinged with optimism (as a choice, rather than as a naive default). He discusses some of the fiction he has worked on (and some he continues to, in collaboration) in order to illustrate more disturbing potential implications of time-as-a-platform. >By utilising Ether’s Phoenix to bring forth an abundant future, we are also leaving ourselves behind. By immutably storing history, these shared blockchain engines are memetic gravity wells for many unknown futures. This is both powerful & frightening: the ability to enshrine ourselves and hold back against the eventual heat death of the universe also entails that our past is always with us. It might never be left alone. Now, I hope you can see why I went into such detail about entropy, order, perspective and agreement above. "Heat death" is a specific choice of description, a specific kind of perspective. It's not Ether's Phoenix that can change this, but it can establish the necessary conditions for us to see the cycles of this universe in a different light. Simon is still right: that light is both powerful and frightening. But [it is not unknown](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.188686). Rather, it is that by which we know and, knowing this, we may abide. I'll end with two insights from Simon that are priceless: >**everything is infinitely valuable on a blockchain on a long-enough timeline**. The only cost becomes opportunity cost. Not all parts will be equally valuable at all times. >For you see, it didn’t necessarily matter what was being done, but rather **when it was done**. Time is so important that it overshadows everything else. One cryptographic primitive physically linked to time is [Verifiable Delay Functions](https://zeroknowledge.fm/258-2/). Rather than a threshold scheme of some kind, this method leverages the flow of time to encrypt and decrypt messages, baking in the concept of "when it was done" even further.