We can understand the relationship between Bitcoin and time from two dimensions:

• The source of Bitcoin’s trust is time.
• The source of Bitcoin’s drive is also time.
  

When Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin, its theoretical foundation can be traced back to Alan Turing’s doctoral dissertation “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals.” In this paper, Turing proposed the idea of transfinite iteration, which fundamentally relies on time: a form of human mental perception of the future, corresponding to thermodynamic diffusion in the physical world.

Satoshi engineered this idea into reality. The first thing he did was design a hash collision algorithm that simulates thermodynamic diffusion.

Through this algorithm, he built a decentralized time server, thereby capturing and defining the existence of “time” within a decentralized system.

On this basis, Bitcoin was designed as a 21-million-supply system, with 32 halving events.

This mechanism of evolution over time constitutes the fundamental driving force of Bitcoin.

Ultimately, Bitcoin’s design logic can be reduced to an undecidable self-referential problem:

The existence of a transaction (TX) or block—namely, the so-called double-spending problem.

This problem cannot be resolved by internal system rules; it can only be judged through the iteration of external time sequences.

Therefore, we can summarize it this way:Bitcoin trusts in time.