The Illusion Of Tangible Assets
Gold and silver investors have taken issue with Bitcoin, claiming that it is not a tangible asset, like gold and silver.
Their hypothesis is usually stooped in the notion that anything is truly “physical” as we perceive it in the first place. What if, counter-intuitively, the entire universe was composed of 0′s and 1′s itself? What if the universe was digital? Wouldn’t that mean that gold, silver, platinum and palladium are all, in fact, digital as well?
In other words, the 0′s and 1′s of a Bitcoin are just as tangible as anything in the universe, because the universe is merely comprised of 0′s and 1′s itself, and it has the capacity to be “physical.” A Bitcoin does as well. How else to explain a Casascius coin?
According to Wikipedia, tangible assets are those assets with physical substance, like currencies, buildings, real estate, vehicles, inventories, equipment and precious metals. Under this definition, then, in my opinion, digital currencies like Bitcoin would be a tangible asset under basic practical and economic definitions.
Since the paper on which a dollar is printed is not the value of the dollar itself, the paper is merely a medium for the data which composes a dollar or $5 or $10 or $50 or $100. There can be no delusion about this, as the most expensive Federal Reserve Note is the $100 bill, which costs 7.8 cents to print.
A corollary in the decentralized virtual currency world would be, say, a USB or hard-drive onto which bitcoins have been saved. In these two cases, the paper and the USB act as mere vehicles for the actual assets. These vehicles are one way in which these two things are made tangible.
But, there is still a more fundamental point to make. If the universe itself is 0′s and 1′s, then what is the physical gold we hold? It would seem to imply that the physical gold and silver in our safes at home is really just a computer code that produces in the processor of our mind the tool of a precious metal, a physical thing. The safe as well, for that matter. And you…and me…
The holographic principle suggests that everything is a hologram. And that our minds are the projectors with the conductors of all the precious metals found in a computer, in our body. It’s a cliche in the 21st century, that we are stardust. It pains me to type it…
But, the implications of all this is that, on one level, tangible assets are illusion. And, thus, to argue Bitcoin as an intangible in the face of gold’s perceived “tangibility” – as many do – is to mis-understand the fundamental nature of reality, as the high-sages currently understand it in physics. (all hail!)
As I wrote in, “In A Digital Universe, Does Anything Make More Sense Than Digital Money?”
When applying the holographic principle to a digital currency like Bitcoin, one can view the public ledger as the history of the system. In this history, all the information there ever was to know is stored. After all, it’s a hologram. The most recent block on this tree remembers its root , the genesis block.
In this way, Bitcoin is little more than a memory of its self. An autonomous, holographic universe nudged into existence with knowledge of the self.
And thus, the universe is its own block chain.
The universe is it’s own block chain. The block chain is its own universe. And so is the hologram just the knowledge of itself. In one gruesome experiment, a mad scientist chopped up mice brains and put them back together. He was surprised at how well the mice were able to complete a maze to get some cheese no matter how he discombobulated their mind.
Our impulse towards division of reality arises only when the opportunity for unison also exists. There must, for instance, be something to divide.
Sounds like cliche and high fallutin’ mumbo-jumbo, but on a serious level people hold these truths about the universe as digital to be confusing yet self-evident. That means, over time, there will be the trickle-down effect of thought, in which the public will digest the truths. Might as well apply them to money as soon as possible, since money is key to our lifestyle.
Scientists have found that subatomics particles like electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other no matter the distance separating them. Thus, communication travels faster than the speed of light. This is the only way the “time barrier” can be broken.
This led David Bohm, University of London physicist, to conclude that objective reality does not exist. There is no solid in the universe, “it is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.”
So, what’s a hologram, exactly?
A hologram represents a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. When its halves are divided over and over, each snippet of film always contains a smaller but intact version of the original image. This is not like photographs, as each part of the hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. This means of traditional methodology of western science hasn’t made sense. It is not best to understand fog, frogs and atoms by dissecting them and studying their divided parts.
In Bohm’s mind, there is no faster-than-light communication taking place. There is rather no separation with which to begin. Everything is an expression of the same thing. We call this thing the Universe. It’s probably a multi-verse of some sort, like an orchestra is both one and many things all at the same time. There is something, no doubt, we don’t know about. Some sort of infinite interconnectedness.
“Information means distinctions between things,” explained Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind during a lecture. “It is a very basic principle of physics that distinctions never disappear. They might get scrambled or all mixed up, but they never go away.”
Trace Mayer told me that Bitcoin is like gold you can send like e-mail. In this sense, Bitcoin is like gold and silver in a post quantum-physics world. It’s truly Gold v. 2.0.