What does a world on a Time Standard look like?
It looks like a world that stops running out of time.
Time Standard
shibuya@getalby.com
npub1s777...xfyy
Time Standard explores how an accounting system based on time is realigning global incentives.
Fountain: https://fountain.fm/show/xXGroUZAmM2F8dsO5fbF
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1gLdI80eBS2eKUtEbPRbIl
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/time-standard/id1795787407
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TimeStandard
The Rational Trap
Under the existing system, no villain is required.
Each layer is "rational" locally:
🔹households want shelter
🔹banks want predictable cash flow
🔹pensions want safe yield
🔹governments want stability
But globally, the system consumes the very thing it needs to survive:
Uncommitted future time.


Time Standard preserves optionality by protecting the time you save.


The Architecture of Bitcoin, and Life.
Bitcoin behaves like a physical system, not a financial one.
Bitcoin's architecture maps perfectly to a gyroscope with built in inertia control.
As hashrate grows, cumulative Proof-of-Work (PoW) accumulates, increasing the system's angular momentum.
Difficulty dynamically adjusts to maintain a stable precessional frequency—block time—despite changes in energy input.
As angular momentum increases, it becomes progressively harder for external forces such as speculation, leverage, or macro shocks to deflect the system's behavior, constraining disruption within a narrowing precessional cone.
Periodic halvings reduce the effective lever arm through which external torque is applied by cutting issuance driven sell pressure, catalyzing further narrowing of the volatility envelope.
Inefficient hashrate sheds and is replaced by more efficient energy input, allowing total hashrate, and therefore angular momentum, to continue growing.
The result is a system that becomes more stable, more efficient, and more resistant to external disturbance over time.
This is why Bitcoin can be very noisy locally but has a clear global structure.
Without the difficulty adjustment, precessional frequency maps perfectly (1:1) to block interval.
Bitcoin's behavior is often counterintuitive because it behaves exactly like a gyroscope, one of the most unintuitive physical systems!
So what is the incentive to fix precessional frequency (block time)?
I believe it has less to do with money and more to do with energy. By engineering a system that fixes block time, you maximize the system's ability to accumulate, store, and release energy without losing orientation.
This is the architecture of life.
Difficulty dynamically adjusts to maintain a stable precessional frequency—block time—despite changes in energy input.
As angular momentum increases, it becomes progressively harder for external forces such as speculation, leverage, or macro shocks to deflect the system's behavior, constraining disruption within a narrowing precessional cone.
Periodic halvings reduce the effective lever arm through which external torque is applied by cutting issuance driven sell pressure, catalyzing further narrowing of the volatility envelope.
Inefficient hashrate sheds and is replaced by more efficient energy input, allowing total hashrate, and therefore angular momentum, to continue growing.
The result is a system that becomes more stable, more efficient, and more resistant to external disturbance over time.
This is why Bitcoin can be very noisy locally but has a clear global structure.
Without the difficulty adjustment, precessional frequency maps perfectly (1:1) to block interval.
Bitcoin's behavior is often counterintuitive because it behaves exactly like a gyroscope, one of the most unintuitive physical systems!
So what is the incentive to fix precessional frequency (block time)?
I believe it has less to do with money and more to do with energy. By engineering a system that fixes block time, you maximize the system's ability to accumulate, store, and release energy without losing orientation.
This is the architecture of life.Metabolism, not money, is the hallmark of life.
We have always told the story of civilization backwards.
Energy per capita is the physical form of prosperity.
The current form of energy is uneven and brittle.
Bitcoin is more than money; it is a system that binds energy, time, and coordination.
When issuance is fixed, energy becomes the variable input.
Hashrate is electricity.
A load that obeys purchasing power, not politics.
The emergent phenomenon of Optionality.
Power laws punish linear intuition.
Stranded energy becomes valuable.
A planetary energy network, owned by no one.
A deep pattern emerges.
This cannot be uninvented.
Find more information at https://www.timestandard.org/
We have always told the story of civilization backwards.
Energy per capita is the physical form of prosperity.
The current form of energy is uneven and brittle.
Bitcoin is more than money; it is a system that binds energy, time, and coordination.
When issuance is fixed, energy becomes the variable input.
Hashrate is electricity.
A load that obeys purchasing power, not politics.
The emergent phenomenon of Optionality.
Power laws punish linear intuition.
Stranded energy becomes valuable.
A planetary energy network, owned by no one.
A deep pattern emerges.
This cannot be uninvented.
Find more information at https://www.timestandard.org/A civilization that exhausts its optionality doesn’t collapse from scarcity—it collapses from rigidity.
Most systems measure time externally.
Bitcoin measures time internally.
Bitcoin turns wealth from a noun into a verb.
In an increasingly volatile world, the Time Standard begins with a simple premise:
Time is the invariant we must organize around, not money. When we optimize for our most valuable asset—time—it becomes the constant that bends the rest of the world.


We have long labored under the delusion that civilization runs on pieces of paper.
In reality, money is merely a claim on energy and time, whereas metabolism is the energy and time in motion.
A civilization thrives only when it optimizes its metabolic efficiency, allowing it to move beyond base survival toward expanded carrying capacity.
Bitcoin is like a piano; the instrument is universal, but the music you play with it is uniquely your own.
Bitcoin makes savings not a claim on someone else's debt, but on everyone's progress.
The Bitcoin network doesn't just tell time, it appears to manufacture it.
Most clocks are passive. They observe a rhythm. They report what already exists.
Bitcoin creates a temporal reality by requiring energy to advance it.
The chain is less like a record of history, and more like the factory floor where history is being made.
Do we need Jobs?
@Jeff Booth joined me for a second time to help unpack the question on everyone's mind. This is not a new question, but it has never been more relevant. I tried to stay out of Jeff's way on this one and revisited a few thoughts at the end.
It is a consequential topic, and I'd love to know what you think!
Bitcoin quietly optimizes human behavior around saved time.
Nature implemented the difficulty adjustment before Satoshi did.
Bitcoin behaves like a fixed thermodynamic chamber.
Avogadro’s law shows that nature allocates a constant number of energy events per geometric volume, and Bitcoin reflects this principle perfectly.
The Bitcoin network enforces a constant time (block interval/temperature) and constant volume (block size/volume).
These two together define Bitcoin’s transaction throughput envelope.
This is Bitcoin’s “container.”
It does not grow with user demand.
Difficulty (pressure) adjusts so that the number of energy events (hashes) per volume remains invariant.
As the number of miners increases, the system expands the difficulty so the “pressure” stays constant.
In this graph, the steps represent the difficulty epochs applied to Avogadro's Law.
A total energy accounting system requires 3 invariants:
🔹A constant rate of measurement (a clock).
🔹A mechanism that normalizes unequal energy inputs
🔹A way to convert energy expenditure into a single comparable unit.
Historically, we have never had all three because:
🔸Currencies inflate
🔸Commodity weights vary
🔸Requirements for external governance or calibration
🔸No system self-calibrates based on energy input
Bitcoin changes this.
Bitcoin behaves like a natural law, not a human standard.
Bitcoin behaves like a fixed thermodynamic chamber.
Avogadro’s law shows that nature allocates a constant number of energy events per geometric volume, and Bitcoin reflects this principle perfectly.
The Bitcoin network enforces a constant time (block interval/temperature) and constant volume (block size/volume).
These two together define Bitcoin’s transaction throughput envelope.
This is Bitcoin’s “container.”
It does not grow with user demand.
Difficulty (pressure) adjusts so that the number of energy events (hashes) per volume remains invariant.
As the number of miners increases, the system expands the difficulty so the “pressure” stays constant.
In this graph, the steps represent the difficulty epochs applied to Avogadro's Law.
A total energy accounting system requires 3 invariants:
🔹A constant rate of measurement (a clock).
🔹A mechanism that normalizes unequal energy inputs
🔹A way to convert energy expenditure into a single comparable unit.
Historically, we have never had all three because:
🔸Currencies inflate
🔸Commodity weights vary
🔸Requirements for external governance or calibration
🔸No system self-calibrates based on energy input
Bitcoin changes this.
Bitcoin behaves like a natural law, not a human standard.If you put information on a distorted map...
You get distorted information.


Three steps to changing our perspective.
First, we view the world through our currency.
Then we begin converting our currency to BTC.
Eventually, we stop converting everything into an arbitrary piece of paper and denominate everything in BTC.

Then we begin converting our currency to BTC.
Eventually, we stop converting everything into an arbitrary piece of paper and denominate everything in BTC.

Without tying money to time and energy, you end up with a distorted economy divorced from physics, one that can “grow” on paper while actually consuming itself.
Wealth is not pieces of paper.

