At the core of digital systems and civilizational evolution lies one fundamental structure: trust.
With technological advancement, human society’s mechanisms of trust have gradually evolved into three essentially distinct paths:
The trust mechanism we’re most familiar with: trust in people.
Whether it’s social platforms, e-commerce systems, banks, or courts, the underlying logic is: You trust that an organization or individual won’t abuse power, tamper with records, or break promises.
This is a centralized trust structure, maintained by laws, regulations, and identity verification. But its flaws are obvious:
With the advent of blockchain, some systems shifted trust from humans to code.
“Code is Law” became a new consensus.
Smart contract systems like Ethereum attempt to define rules precisely using formal languages, executing them without human judgment.
But there are limits:
Code can be trusted—but it is not the ultimate foundation of reality.
Bitcoin is a system built on “trust in time”.
It doesn’t rely on people or smart contracts, but on the physical timestamp of each block and the thermodynamically irreversible process of energy consumption—forming a globally agreed, unforgeable historical chain.
This is a trust mechanism that transcends formal systems, with philosophical roots tracing back to Turing’s doctoral dissertation:
“Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals”, where he introduced the concept of transfinite iteration—treating logical reasoning as an infinite evolutionary process indexed by ordinals.
Bitcoin materializes this idea in the real world, using the nonlinear recursive structure of block timestamps to express transfinite iteration through physical order.
Why trust time?
Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine emphasized in his “dissipative structures” theory:
any scientific theory that lacks a temporal dimension is merely a static approximation.
The real world is always in a state of thermodynamic irreversibility.
As Einstein said: “Time itself does not exist. What truly exists is the law of thermodynamic diffusion.”
In this sense, time is perception, is irreversible evolution, is a synonym for reality.
To trust time is to trust ‘nothing’: Laozi, Turing, and Bitcoin.
Daoism speaks of the Wu (nothingness), the “Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to all things.”
This “nothingness” is not void—it is the source of all order and structure.
It cannot be predefined or reversed; it is a natural diffusion that continuously evolves.
Bitcoin operates precisely in this way:
To trust time is to trust nothingness.
The foundation of trust evolves from people, to code, and ultimately returns to the thermodynamic essence.
Turing and Prigogine: A Meeting from Two Directions
Prigogine once stated that his theory of dissipative structures (which earned him a Nobel Prize)
was initially inspired by Alan Turing’s insights on system evolution and irreversibility.
Turing approached it from logic, Prigogine from physics— yet both were exploring different facets of the same fundamental question:
How to build real, sustainable order out of disorder.
Bitcoin is a miraculous convergence of both their ideas in engineering practice.
Conclusion: From “Trust in Entities” to “Trust in Physics”
We are witnessing a paradigm shift in trust:
Bitcoin relies neither on people nor code, but implants trust directly into time itself.
Time is our only unalterable contract with reality. And Bitcoin is the embodiment of this contract in the digital world.
