—When all currencies decay, only one is resisting the universe
The coldest law in the universe
The second law of thermodynamics, also known as the entropy increase law, is called by physicists “the highest-grade metaphysical law of the entire natural world.”
It told a hopeless thing: in an isolated system, entropy can only increase and never decrease. Order gives way to disorder, structure to collapse, and everything inevitably decays irreversibly.
Stars will burn out, mountains will weather, cities will collapse, and civilizations will perish. These are the iron laws of the cosmos—no exceptions.
—until Bitcoin came along.
You may think I’m exaggerating. What does a cryptocurrency have to do with the second law of thermodynamics?
The relationship is beyond anything you can imagine. Because Bitcoin is the first, and also the only, entropy-decreasing system in human monetary history—it has reversed direction for the first time in the five-thousand-year river of money, which had inevitably been heading toward decay.
Human money: a history of collapse governed by the law of entropy increase
Let us lay out five thousand years of monetary history.
In 27 BC, the Roman Empire began minting the denarius silver coin. At first, the denarius was nearly 95% silver, a genuine hard currency. But over the next three hundred years, with every new emperor ascending the throne, every war breaking out, and every fiscal crunch, the silver content in the coin dropped a little more. By 268 AD, the denarius was only 5% silver—silver plating on the outside, with nothing but lead and copper inside. The "wages" Roman soldiers received were still called denarii in name, but in substance they had become a pile of worthless junk metal.
This is not the greed of some emperor; it is the inevitable collapse of human nature in the face of power. The power to mint money is the ultimate power—whoever controls the supply of money controls the lifeline of the entire economy. And those who possess such power, without exception, will use it to benefit themselves. It is not a moral issue; it is a thermodynamic one—power naturally tends to concentrate, concentration naturally tends toward corruption, and corruption naturally tends toward collapse. This is entropy increase.
By the era of paper money, entropy increase had been pushed to the extreme.
In Weimar Germany in 1923, the price of a loaf of bread rose from 250 marks to 200 billion marks. People used wheelbarrows full of banknotes to buy groceries, only to find that the wheelbarrow was worth more than the cash. In Zimbabwe in 2008, a banknote had a denomination of 100 trillion—14 zeros after the 1—and still could not buy an egg.
You think this is just a story about "backward countries"? From 2020 to 2022, the Federal Reserve expanded the M2 money supply by more than 40% in just two years. Since the Fed’s founding in 1913 to today, the dollar’s purchasing power has evaporated by more than 96%. In 2025, total U.S. national debt surpassed 37 trillion dollars, and interest expenses exceeded the defense budget for the first time.
This is the ultimate expression of the law of entropy increase in the world of money: once a system has the ability to expand without limit, no force can make it stop.
Bitcoin: an anti-entropy engine welded together by mathematics
When Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper on October 31, 2008, he did something no one had ever done in the history of human money—he used mathematics and cryptography to weld a permanently unbreakable anchor of order into the monetary system itself.
This anchor has three mechanisms:
First layer: mathematical upper bound
Bitcoin’s total supply of 21 million is written into the code and protected jointly by the SHA-256 hash function, elliptic-curve cryptography, and timelocks. This is not a central bank’s "policy commitment"—policy can be overturned by the next governor, amended by a legislative vote, or quietly rewritten in some emergency late-night meeting. Twenty-one million is a mathematical law, a cryptographic guarantee, a hard constraint that no human will can alter unilaterally.
Second layer: the halving mechanism
Every 210,000 blocks (about four years), Bitcoin’s new coin issuance is automatically halved. In April 2024, the latest halving was completed, reducing the reward per block from 6.25 to 3.125. The next halving will arrive around 2028, when it will drop to 1.5625. This declining curve is as precise as an atomic clock—no one needs to make a decision, no institution needs to enforce it, the code itself is law.
Third layer: Proof of Work
The birth of every new bitcoin must consume real physical energy. Miners use electricity to perform SHA-256 hash calculations, converting thermal energy into cryptographic proof that cannot be forged. This is not a metaphor, not an analogy—it is literally "casting energy into information."
The three layers stacked together form an irreversible negentropy process in the physical sense.
The essence of mining: exchanging energy for negentropy
There is a deeper logic here that 99% of people overlook: the essence of Bitcoin mining is exchanging energy for informational order.
The electricity consumed by miners is encoded by the SHA-256 algorithm and transformed into immutable information—a new block is permanently engraved on the blockchain. Physicists have a precise term for this process: the reverse process of Landauer’s principle.
Landauer’s principle tells us that erasing one bit of information must produce at least kT ln 2 of energy dissipation (k is Boltzmann’s constant, T is absolute temperature). Between information and energy, there exists an unbreakable physical bond.
Bitcoin, in reverse, uses this principle—it creates indelible information by consuming physical energy, establishing deterministic order in chaos. The birth of every block is a process of converting high-entropy thermal energy into low-entropy cryptographic proof.
What does this mean? It means Bitcoin is an energy→negentropy converter. It turns high-entropy electrical energy (energy that can be consumed in any form) into low-entropy cryptographic proof (digital order that cannot be tampered with, forged, or inflated), and then records that order permanently on a globally shared ledger.
For the first time in human history, the value of money is not anchored in anyone’s promise or belief, but in the law of thermodynamics itself.
You can choose not to believe any central bank governor, but you must believe the second law of thermodynamics—it is the underlying code of the universe’s operation, harder than the credit of any human institution by ten thousand times.
Irreversible order: why Bitcoin will never collapse
By now you should be starting to understand why Bitcoin is different from all previous forms of money.
All previous forms of money—shells, gold, silver, paper money, bank digital money—their order was "man-made." Their value was maintained by social convention, and human nature is fragile, power is corrupt, and institutions can loosen. When the hearts of those maintaining order begin to waver, money collapses.
Bitcoin’s order is mathematical. SHA-256 cannot be bribed, elliptic curves cannot be threatened, timelocks do not loosen under political pressure. The 21 million cap is a "crystal" within the information structure—in thermodynamic terms, it is the most stable state in the system. Any operation that tries to "dilute" this structure would require an attack using more than 51% of the entire Bitcoin network’s total hash power, and such an attack is economically impossible—you would have to spend far more value than you could possibly gain.
This is the most astonishing thing about Bitcoin: the order it creates will never be broken from the moment it is created.
Not because it is strong enough that no one can break it—but because it is mathematically impossible to break, just like you cannot make 2+2=5.
Self-organization: order emerging from chaos
The Bitcoin network is a decentralized structure composed of more than 18,000 full nodes and hundreds of mining pools worldwide. There is no central server, no CEO, no headquarters, and no single command center.
This seemingly "chaotic" distributed structure is precisely the ultimate expression of a dissipative structure—each participant acts out of self-interest (miners seek block rewards, holders expect asset appreciation, developers maintain technical reputation), yet their behavior is transformed through cryptographic protocols into a "negentropy flow" that benefits the entire system.
With no central planner, order still emerges spontaneously. This is the "spontaneous order" Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek longed for—he spent his life dreaming of it, but never saw it fully realized in reality. Satoshi Nakamoto made it happen.
Satoshi Nakamoto carved this order into the physical layer—SHA-256’s computational barrier and elliptic-curve cryptographic signatures ensure that the cost of tampering with Bitcoin’s ledger is thermodynamically unbearable. Any attacker would need to control more than 51% of the world’s hashing power, which means tens of billions of dollars in hardware and electricity costs—even if you succeeded, honest nodes would reject your altered blocks, leaving your attack to come to nothing.
The stronger the chaos, the stronger it gets: the ultimate antifragile currency
The traditional monetary system is fragile—it depends on the judgment of central banks, government policy, and the soundness of banks. Any failure in any link can trigger a systemic collapse. Lehman Brothers in 2008, the liquidity crisis during the pandemic in 2020, Silicon Valley Bank’s failure in 2023—each one was a stress response from this fragile system under pressure.
Bitcoin is antifragile.
This is the concept proposed by Nassim Taleb—fragile things fear chaos, robust things resist chaos, and antifragile things benefit from chaos.
Bitcoin perfectly embodies antifragility:
Every price crash purges the weak, and the network becomes healthier. Every regulatory crackdown pushes miners into more countries, and the network becomes more decentralized. Every halving further reduces inflation and strengthens scarcity. Every market panic brings in more conviction from true believers, and consensus becomes firmer.
In 2021, China comprehensively banned Bitcoin mining, and global hash power briefly plunged by 50%. What happened? Miners dispersed to North America, Central Asia, and Northern Europe, and the network became far more decentralized. In January 2024, the U.S. SEC finally approved spot Bitcoin ETFs, and capital from Wall Street giants like BlackRock and Fidelity poured in like a tide. In August 2025, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) added 4,603 bitcoins at an average price of $80,318, with a total investment of about $370 million.
Price crashes make it stronger. Halvings make it stronger. Attacks make it stronger. Panic makes it stronger.
This is not money—this is life.
Civilizational negentropy
Let me widen the view to the maximum.
In the 13.8-billion-year history of cosmic evolution, every ordered structure—stars, planets, life, civilization—is an "island of order" in the flood of entropy increase. But these islands of order are products of natural evolution, not things that were "designed."
Bitcoin is the first time in human history that our species has actively created an information structure resistant to entropy increase.
It uses cryptography and game theory to inscribe order into chaos. Its 21 million cap is an irreversible promise. Its 10-minute block time is its heartbeat. Each of its blocks is a tiny peak of negentropy in the flood of universal entropy increase—small, but unbreakable.
And this structure, as long as there is electricity on Earth, computing devices, and the laws of physics do not change, will keep running forever. Its lifespan may exceed that of human civilization itself.
Bitcoin is not the future of a currency—it is the first eternal mark humanity has carved into the chaos of the universe.