Energy & Information

Cycling for four to five hours most day provides a few opportunities. Fitness and thicker thighs are the obvious ones. But I also get a ton of time to think with a brain flush with oxygen.

Last week I had an idea that feels like its pointing to something bigger, something more fundamental.

I was cycling to the far east of Utrecht, the second furthest I have actually been out from the city centre, and, as it goes, I was busy with a fairly lengthy and steady uphill when it occurred to me. Paul Chek talks about the fact that food is information, food is rich with communication potential that fiddles with all the dials of our body, all the time. But, most people see food as only energy, a source of calories, the fuel to keep the engine turning. Most of us do not comprehend that food is energy AND information. Yes, food has the energy to keep us going, but it is also rich with information that shapes how we keep going.

Then, food is not just a scaler, with a quantity - it is a vector, with a quality too. Food is rich with information, not just energy.

The relationship of energy with information has captured my thoughts since.

Soon after, Michael Saylor drilled it into me, and Robert Breedlove too, that money is the highest form of energy. In fact, it is like the joker of energy, capable of becoming any other form of energy within human control, to no limit. Money is a way of storing energy, and trading with it for every other form of energy.

If you know Saylor and Breedlove, you know I'm heading towards Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a thousand times improvement on current money protocols, both as a store of value and as a means of exchange. The nuances of this are for another chat, just assume I am correct for the sake of this argument. Then, Bitcoin is on the verge of unleashing our collective productive energy, in a way that is so superior to what we are familiar with that we simply cannot wrap our heads around the meaning of it all.

Think of trying to explain to someone in 1990 what the internet is going to do for information by 2020. No ways. The way that we do every single thing has been completely transformed by this frictionless and information abundant network. Ineffably revolutionary.

And there it is again.

The internet unleashed our information, bitcoin is releasing our energy. What is this relationship between information and energy? Just like we saw with the flow of information and energy through our bodies from food to action, here we see this joint venture between the internet and bitcoin, the life blood of human action.

In the simplest terms, energy is that capacity to do work or action, it is measured as heat too. Information seems to arise from the organisation of energy. Energy is the quantity of activity contained, information is the quality of its arrangement.