While on my own Bitcoin journey I often heard the claim that “Bitcoin is not an invention, it is a discovery.” At first, the statement struck me as bombastic. Of course Bitcoin is an invention: it is a technology created by a person, just like all other inventions in human history. Yet, as I continued to study Bitcoin, I began to understand that there were some kernels of truth in the statement. For example, it is now obvious to me that Bitcoin represents the discovery of how to bring the laws and constraints of the physical universe into the digital world.This discovery makes Bitcoin’s invention unique compared with all the digital‑money projects that came before it.
Yet this revelation has only barely scratched the surface of what Bitcoin may be. A handful of academic papers have surfaced that are truly inspiring. They do not simply view Bitcoin through the Austrian economic, financial, or cypherpunk lens; rather, each points out something unique about Bitcoin that makes it more than just money. Bitcoin is indeed money, but it also appears to be something more: a tool that we humans can use to better understand economics, the world around us, and perhaps even ourselves. Perhaps it is not that Bitcoin is more than money, but money is more than what we previously conceived.
Before diving into the various academic articles to be explored here, it is worth elaborating on what it means for Bitcoin to be a scientific instrument. The core idea is that aspects of Bitcoin, including why it works, how it works, and why humans find it valuable, serve as a mirror through which we can reflect on ourselves. By observing Bitcoin, we can gain insights into human nature and the universe at large.
An early example of this perspective can be found in Nick Szabo’s work on the origins of money. In his article titled Shelling Out, Szabo describes money as a token of trust, where that trust derives from the commodity’s ability to be backed by physical work (Szabo, 2002). In other words, money can function because local people recognize that the object cannot be easily counterfeited, given its scarcity in the local environment. This allows it to be exchanged trustfully because there is little expectation that such a rare item can be forged frequently.
In many early societies, objects such as shells functioned as money not simply because people agreed they had value, but because their scarcity reflected the effort required to obtain them. Since these objects were difficult to produce or counterfeit, members of the community could trust that they represented real work embedded in the physical world.
Here Szabo introduces a concept of money that differs from the traditional view found in economic literature, which holds that money developed to solve the “double coincidence of wants” problem in barter economies. Szabo instead suggests that money evolved as a reliable way to store and transmit value across time and space because of the trust reinforced by the Proof of Work. As the inventor of Bit Gold, a conceptual predecessor to Bitcoin, Szabo may have potentially used the observation of why Bitcoin is valuable through Proof of Work to extrapolate backward and correctly uncover an important story of how money developed anthropologically.
Similarly, Jesse Myers, another individual working in the Bitcoin industry, points out a gene that, according to his hypothesis, gave humans the ability to detect scarce assets so we could use money, differentiating us from our Homo neanderthalensis relatives (Myers, 2025). Here, two people who use and observe Bitcoin have stumbled upon insights into human economics and anthropology that were seemingly unnoticed before. In an age where Bitcoin did not exist, academics were largely reliant on logical reasoning to deduce human behavior related to economics; now we have Bitcoin as a new method of investigation.
There have been other suggestions that Bitcoin can serve as a scientific instrument. For example, physicist Giovanni Santostasi, one of the first to notice that Bitcoin’s price follows a power law, frequently highlights how this behavior demands inquiry through a scientific lens. A power law is a simple rule where one quantity changes in proportion to another raised to a constant exponent; when the data are plotted on a log‑log graph they line up as a straight line. This pattern shows up in many natural systems: the frequency of earthquakes falls off predictably as their magnitude grows, there are many small towns but only a few very large cities, and an animal’s metabolic rate scales with its body mass. Trends that follow power laws are rampant in nature, energy systems, and networks, but they are not typically found in financial assets. Seeing Bitcoin’s price follow a power law is intriguing because it suggests Bitcoin’s dynamics may be driven by the same broad, self‑reinforcing forces that shape these diverse phenomena of our natural world. According to Santostasi’s research, not only does the price follow a power law, but so do addresses versus time, price versus hashrate, hashrate versus time, price versus addresses, etc. (Santostasi, 2024) This line of scientific inquiry has the potential to teach us much about how energy systems work, how networks grow, and how human behavior operates.
One anecdotal point surrounds a comment made by Michael Saylor, who argued that Bitcoin allows economics to become a hard science. Consider how the hard sciences (chemistry, biology, physics) can be studied and measured precisely because they rely on concrete measurement tools. Social sciences, on the other hand, such as economics and sociology, have traditionally been studied mainly within the confines of mental formulations, with limited means of objectively measuring their subject. Bitcoin potentially changes this by providing a true measurement tool for economic activity and human economic behavior. It is the invention of a fixed economic ruler.
All of this said, these observations exist alongside academic literature that attempts to describe Bitcoin beyond the lens of money. The first noteworthy work is the MIT dissertation by Major Jason P. Lowery of the United States Space Force, titled Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin (Lowery, 2023). In his thesis, Lowery presents what he calls the Power Projection Theory, which explores how, through the second law of thermodynamics, life organizes itself toward the most organizationally efficient dissipation of energy. More specifically, individual units of biological life use the projection of energy (referred to as power) to claim energy for processing (referred to as resources). This can be observed from the cellular level, where a cell’s lipid‑bilayer membrane projects power to segregate the outside world from the interior, to the way animals use violence to defend their food. In each case, energy is projected outward to preserve energy inwardly. The ongoing conflict we observe in nature over power and resources, life and death, creation and destruction, is the universe’s way of determining which forms of life are most fit to facilitate the flow of energy and entropy foundational to our reality.
Lowery argues that human society is not exempt from this rule of nature. He points out that we find it distasteful to use power projection to resolve resource allocation; instead, we prefer abstract power projection (words, civil structures, courts) to allocate resources without physical force. While this is favorable to most people, history shows periods of peace inevitably followed by war, civil war, or revolution. Nature does not understand abstract power projection, only physical power projection; eventually, the allocation of physical resources must be met with physical power.
In the thesis, Lowery illustrates his power‑projection model through two animal species: the wolf and the deer. The wolf, like humans, must physically fight among themselves to determine who is the alpha and who deserves more food and mates. The deer, evolutionarily, has antlers that can be used as power‑projection tools for other species, but when competing internally, they merely tangle without harming each other. Lowery proposes that Bitcoin is the invention of the human antler: a way of using physical power (through mining) to secure and allocate resources without kinetic violence.
Thus, a soldier in the United States military, through his observation of Bitcoin and reflection upon the natural world, stumbled upon a scientific discovery. It is as if Bitcoin helped this soldier uncover an aspect of both the natural world and human society. It proposes an answer to why human societies are constantly engaged in war and violence despite most humans despising it, and suggests that humanity has discovered the world’s most profound peace machine.
Beyond helping us understand power and property, Bitcoin also appears to be a means of understanding language. In Ella Hough’s thesis Bitcoin: The Language for Discovering, Speaking, Settling, and Preserving Truth, Bitcoin is described as the world’s first non‑sovereign, censorship‑resistant, and non‑extractive language (Hough, 2025). Her thesis covers many aspects of academic analysis of our linguistic systems. She notes that humans have developed many kinds of languages (mathematics, writing, code, and money) and highlights how spoken language and monetary language share similar properties. Both can be used as techniques of oppression, and Bitcoin could solve issues regarding the loss of local language and culture, serving as a tool to help us better understand reality without the need for us to learn the other’s linguistic language.
Importantly, Hough distinguishes between “communication” and “language.” Animals communicate, but their communication is static; certain sounds have fixed meanings. Human language, however, is fluid, dynamic, adaptive, and constantly evolving to serve as “a pathway, a catalyst, and a system of communicating meaning.” She further elaborates that language goes beyond mere communication; it is our “most robust interface of reality, not just for perception, but for active communication, interaction, and shared meaning.” Thus, Hough not only uses Bitcoin as a tool to understand the nature of human languages, but also proposes that Bitcoin itself is a powerful language we can use to interpret reality. This may help explain why Bitcoin can serve as a tool for scientific discovery: because it is a language, and languages are tools we use to communicate meaning and interface with reality.
The significance of this idea should not be overstated, as it may offer a new way to expand the study of physics itself. Bitcoin: The Architecture of Time, by Jack and Nick, presents a similar observation: Bitcoin is not merely a monetary system, but a tool that allows us to study the physics of our universe (Jack & Nick, 2026). The authors argue that a core limitation in physics is that we attempt to study the nature of time while always existing within it. Because every experiment unfolds inside time, we cannot step outside it to test whether time is truly continuous or discrete. Consequently, time has largely been treated as an assumption rather than something directly measurable.
Bitcoin, however, may provide the first opportunity to study time from the outside. In Bitcoin, time does not flow continuously; it advances only when a block is created through Proof of Work. Each block represents an irreversible act where energy is converted into permanent ledger memory, creating a discrete and countable “tick” of time. In this way, Bitcoin reveals “the boundary conditions physics has always assumed but could never access within its own empirical constraints”(Jack & Nick, 2026). By structuring time as a sequence of irreversible memory commitments within a bounded system, the thesis suggests that time, conservation, and information may be better understood as products of recorded change rather than as smooth background parameters.
Consider the similarities Bitcoin holds with our current understanding of physics. In quantum mechanics, a system exists in a superposition of possible states until a measurement forces it into one definite outcome. Schrödinger’s cat illustrates this: before observation, the system is mathematically represented as a combination of “alive” and “dead” states; once measured, only one outcome remains physically realized.
A similar structural pattern appears in Bitcoin. The mempool represents a bounded set of valid but uncommitted transactions, embodying multiple admissible futures consistent with the current ledger. These transactions are real proposals, but they are not yet part of history. Miners then perform Proof of Work by searching the nonce space. When a valid nonce is found and a block is accepted, one specific configuration of transactions is irreversibly committed to the ledger. At that moment, alternative configurations are excluded unless the full thermodynamic cost is paid again. Just as measurement in quantum mechanics yields a single real event in time, block discovery in Bitcoin collapses a field of valid proposals into one concrete, conserved state written into memory.
Bitcoin shares properties with the very fabric of our universe. From this perspective, it is plausible that it serves as a means for us to investigate the nature of time in a way we never have before. Where a microscope allowed us to discover aspects of physical objects previously unseen, Bitcoin may allow us to view time, for the first time, from the outside.
In summary, it seems plausible that Bitcoin is more than just money: it is a scientific instrument. That being said, this raises the question of whether money itself is merely an economic tool, or something more. Perhaps money is a sail, one we use to navigate as we traverse the river of entropy. This entropy engine appears to act as a mirror that lets us reflect upon our own species while also serving as a scientific instrument that helps us understand the surrounding universe. Money facilitates human beings in fulfilling our biological nature as dissipative structures. While this may seem obvious from an economic standpoint, as money evolves technologically it may reveal itself as a means of doing so in many other ways previously unrealized. Either way, Bitcoin is likely much more than meets the eye.
References
Hough, E. R. (2025). Bitcoin: The language for discovering, speaking, settling, and preserving truth (K. Basu (ed.)). Cornell University.
Jack & Nick. (2026). Bitcoin: The architecture of time. https://bitcoinlens.net/
Lowery, J. (2023). Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin: Lowery, Jason Paul: 9798371524188: Amazon.com: Books. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Myers, J. (2025, April 8). Once-in-a-Species. Once-in-a-Species. https://www.onceinaspecies.com/p/once-in-a-species-73b
Santostasi, G. (2024, March 20). The Bitcoin Power Law Theory – Giovanni Santostasi. Medium. https://giovannisantostasi.medium.com/the-bitcoin-power-law-theory-962dfaf99ee9
Szabo, N. (2002). Shelling Out: The Origins of Money. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
