https://www.citadel21.com/deeper-down-the-rabbit-hole

Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole

by Knut Svanholm | Aug. 21st, 2020 | vol.5

One of the weirdest concepts in mathematics is the Banach–Tarski paradox.

According to Wikipedia, it’s a “theorem in set-theoretic geometry, which states the following: Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them without changing their shape.”

In other words, a way to make identical copies of an object by disassembling and reassembling said object in a certain way. The theory is based around the concepts of countable and uncountable sets of infinities and it would therefore literally take forever to even conduct an experiment to test the theory, but the mathematical proofs are there. Some physicists argue that the concept could have use cases in the subatomic world, the quantum realm. Could the theory be a first glimpse into the multiverse? A hint at the possibility of parallel universes?

And more importantly, what the hell am I rambling on about and what has it got to do with Bitcoin?

Infinity

Infinity, meet finity.

A friendly fellow born in 2009. Bitcoin is a mathematical concept, but it’s linked to the physical world in a different way than other mathematical concepts. Most basic mathematics are easy to visualize, like Pythagoras theorem. Just draw squares from the three edges of the triangle, and you can easily see that the square drawn from the hypotenuse is equal in size to the other two.

A concept like Banach–Tarski is of course much harder to translate into a real world drawing. The concepts that make up Bitcoin can all be fairly easily translated into graphs and sketches, but Bitcoin has another layer on top which is much harder to wrap one’s head around. Its connection to reality. Its value.

Value is a strange concept because while it is arguably very real, it is entirely subjective, and because of this there is no yardstick or kilogram to measure it against.

Most websites that try to show you the value of a bitcoin use the US dollar as the unit of value measurement. The US dollar is itself a very poor tool for measurement, because no one knows how many of them there really are, and more importantly, how many of them there will be in the future. Our current global crisis, a virus with a 99.9% survivability rate, has made the money printers of the world go brrrr at an unprecedented rate.

So what’s a fair way of measuring the value of a Bitcoin?

follow link to continue…