Physics’ hardest iron law
In physics, there’s an iron law called the law of conservation of energy.
Energy cannot be created out of thin air, nor can it disappear out of thin air. It can only be transformed from one form into another. How hard is this law? Hard enough that throughout the entire universe—from the Big Bang to today, 13.8 billion years—no single photon has ever violated it.
But humans did a crazy thing—we’ve spent thousands of years pretending that the law of conservation doesn’t exist when it comes to money.
We can print money out of thin air. We can create credit out of thin air. We can let a debt evaporate, and we can make wealth appear from nothing. Every time, we think we’re doing “flexible adjustment,” but actually we’re lying to the universe’s most fundamental law.
Until January 3, 2009, when a person called Satoshi Nakamoto wrote a line of code in Bitcoin’s genesis block. On that day, for the first time in the information world, humanity replicated the universe’s oldest rule—conservation.
Chapter 1: Scarcity in the atomic world is fake scarcity
Take a look back at every currency humans have used—
Shells, copper, silver, gold, paper money, electronic digits... With every evolution, at its core it answers the same question: Who guarantees that this thing can’t be conjured out of thin air?
In the shell era, scarcity was physical—you had to go pick it up at the seashore. In the gold era, scarcity was chemical—Au atomic number 79, you can’t create it. In the paper money era, scarcity depends on power—how much the central bank says to print is how much gets printed. Whether you believe it is up to you.
See it? The farther you go, the more fragile the guarantee of "scarcity" becomes. Gold still needs atomic-level scarcity as a backstop; once you reach paper money, even that backstop is gone—it relies entirely on an institution’s "credit."
That’s the fundamental fracture between the atomic world and the information world.
In the atomic world, scarcity is locked down by physical laws. Gold’s scarcity is, in essence, the scarcity of gold atoms in the universe—created by supernova explosions, forged by the merging of neutron stars; you can’t synthesize it in a laboratory in an economically viable way.
But in the information world, copying a file costs nearly zero. A piece of code can be copied infinitely; a song can be played simultaneously by a billion people; an article can be forwarded to the end of the universe. Information is inherently "non-conserving"—it can appear in countless copies out of thin air.
This is the ultimate dilemma money faces in the digital age: how do you create true scarcity in a world where the cost of copying is zero?
Chapter 2: Landauer’s secret—information is energy
In 1961, IBM physicist Rolf Landauer discovered a fact that changed human cognition:
Erasing 1 bit of information requires consuming at least kT·ln2 of energy.
k is the Boltzmann constant, and T is absolute temperature. At room temperature, this energy is about 2.8×10⁻²¹ joules—so small you can hardly feel it. But it proves something incredibly profound:
Information isn’t a vague abstract concept; information is physical.
Every piece of information has an energy cost. Every computation has a thermodynamic price. In the deepest layer of physical reality, information, energy, and entropy are three sides of the same coin.
Maxwell’s demon troubled physicists for more than a hundred years—a hypothetical little demon that could, by "acquiring information," make heat flow from low temperature to high temperature, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. Until Landauer’s principle provided the ultimate answer: for the demon to obtain information, it must expend energy; erasing memories also takes energy. In and out, entropy doesn’t decrease—it increases. Information isn’t a free lunch; it’s an energy expense on the universe’s ledger.
In 1948, when Shannon proposed information entropy, von Neumann suggested using the word "entropy"—because information entropy and thermodynamic entropy are mathematically identical in their structure. This isn’t a coincidence; it’s the unity of the universe’s underlying code.
This means: if you can create a system in the information world that strictly obeys the conservation of energy, then it has a level of "reality" comparable to the physical world.
Nakamoto did it.
Chapter 3: Proof of Work—welding energy conservation into code
In 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper, what he did wasn’t just a software design. He performed a physical experiment—by force, implanting the law of conservation of energy into the information world.
Bitcoin’s Proof of Work (PoW) is, at its core, an energy-to-information converter.
Miners feed electrical energy (a highly disordered form of energy) into mining hardware. Through SHA-256 hash computation, it’s transformed into the block header and a nonce value (a highly ordered information structure). This process is irreversible—you can’t reverse a hash back into electricity, just like you can’t turn ashes back into firewood.
This is the second law of thermodynamics projected into the information world: energy moves from order to disorder, information moves from disorder to order, and total entropy increases.
Every Bitcoin created means real, measurable, unrecoverable energy has been consumed. As of August 2026, the global Bitcoin network hash rate is maintained at roughly 900 EH/s—900 trillion trillion hashes per second. The electricity consumed by these computations is equivalent to the power usage of a medium-sized country.
Critics call it "waste." But if you understand Landauer’s principle, you’ll realize: it’s not waste—it’s minting.
Just like gold needs miners to extract it, Bitcoin also needs energy to be "minted." The difference is this: gold’s scarcity comes from the physical scarcity of atoms, while Bitcoin’s scarcity comes from the thermodynamic irreversibility of energy.
The former is the universe’s gift; the latter is humanity’s choice.
The latter is greater. Because it’s the first time humans actively chose to obey conservation laws, instead of passively accepting constraints imposed by physical laws.
Chapter 4: 21 million—a conservation equation written into code
Energy conservation is only the first layer. Bitcoin has a second layer of conservation: conservation of quantity.
21 million. Not more, not less. This number isn’t law, not an international treaty, not a central bank resolution—it’s mathematics.
As of August 2026, about 20.76 million bitcoins have already been mined, accounting for 95.6% of the total. The remaining fewer than 1 million will be released slowly over the next one hundred-plus years at a halving rate every four years. Bitcoin’s current annualized inflation rate has already dropped below 0.8%—far lower than the Federal Reserve’s 2% policy target, and also below gold’s average annual mining growth rate of 1.5% to 2%.
More importantly, an estimated 2 to 4 million bitcoins will disappear permanently due to lost private keys. That means Bitcoin’s actual circulating supply is continuously shrinking—not only is it conserved, it’s even "negative growth."
In the traditional financial world, the central bank is that perpetual-motion machine. From 2020 to 2025, major central banks around the globe created more than $15 trillion out of thin air. Every time they print money, it’s like injecting a dose of "negative energy" into the system—it violates no conservation laws, and it dilutes the purchasing power of every existing holder in the system.
The fiat currency system is fundamentally a system that violates conservation laws. It works only because everyone is forced to accept this lie.
Bitcoin punctured this lie.
No individual, organization, or government can mint even a single satoshi (Bitcoin’s smallest unit, 0.00000001 BTC). Want to change the 21 million limit? You’d need the support of 51% of the network’s hash power. At today’s hash-rate levels, that means mobilizing tens of billions of dollars’ worth of hardware and electricity resources—and even if you do, other nodes will still reject your blocks.
It’s like you want to modify the universe’s constant so that the speed of light is a bit faster—at least in theory you can imagine it, but physically you can’t do it.
Chapter 5: Noether’s theorem—conservation comes from symmetry
In 1918, mathematician Emmy Noether proved a theorem that changed physics: for every conservation law, there is a corresponding symmetry.
Conservation of energy corresponds to time-translation symmetry—physical laws don’t change with time. Conservation of momentum corresponds to space-translation symmetry—physical laws don’t change with position.
So what symmetry does Bitcoin’s conservation law correspond to?
Time-translation invariance of the corresponding rules.
Bitcoin’s rules—an upper limit of 21 million coins, halving every 210,000 blocks, difficulty adjustment every two weeks—have never changed from the genesis block to today, and they won’t change. It doesn’t change with the business cycle, with political winds, or with market sentiment.
In the fiat world, rules are changeable at any time. The Federal Reserve can decide to raise rates by 50 basis points at an emergency meeting. The Bank of Japan can announce yield-curve control policy one morning. The European Central Bank can start or stop quantitative easing at any time.
This means fiat currency has no symmetry. Without symmetry, there is no conservation law. Without conservation laws, holders’ wealth has no physical-level guarantee—it depends entirely on the will of those in power.
Bitcoin has perfect time-translation symmetry. Rules that are valid today remain valid tomorrow. Rules valid in 2026 remain valid in 2126. This symmetry gives Bitcoin a kind of certainty that surpasses gold: gold’s scarcity relies on atoms’ physical properties, but in the future, mining asteroids or deep-sea extraction could change gold’s supply curve; Bitcoin’s scarcity relies on mathematical theorems, and theorems don’t drift with time.
Chapter 6: 2026—conservation laws are being priced in
Let’s return to this moment.
On August 28, 2026, the Bitcoin price hovered above $80,000. Over the past week, it surged 25% from $62,000—first breaking the $80,000 mark since May. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded cumulative net inflows of more than $2.6 billion over the past eight trading days, and BlackRock’s IBIT pulled in $209 million in a single day.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s network hash rate, after experiencing a historic decline lasting nine months, has stabilized at around 900 EH/s. This round of hash-rate contraction fell from 1108 EH/s in November 2025 to here—a drop of 19%, evaporating roughly 210 EH/s—more than the entire network’s total hash rate at the beginning of 2021. But the network’s security wasn’t harmed: 900 EH/s still means that an attacker would need resources equivalent to a medium-sized country’s power grid to launch a 51% attack.
In its latest research note, Wall Street firm Bernstein predicts: in the base scenario, Bitcoin will reach $150,000 in mid-2027; if institutional capital accelerates into the market, the peak could reach $500,000 in 2029, and by the end of 2033 it may approach $1,000,000.
But numbers are just appearances. Behind the numbers, conservation laws are being priced by the global financial system.
When the U.S. Treasury announced an expansion of the scale of long-term Treasury buybacks, the market immediately interpreted it as a "dollar debasement trade"—and Bitcoin surged 22% in a week. Because investors know that Treasury buybacks are, in essence, an implicit form of monetary expansion, and expansion doesn’t obey conservation laws. Assets governed by conservation laws—Bitcoin—must respond accordingly.
When publicly listed mining firms shifted more than $70 billion worth of electricity capacity from mining to AI hosting, they were essentially saying: the same electrical energy can generate higher short-term returns in the AI domain. But Bitcoin’s hash-rate wall—even if it drops by 19%—still proves one thing: conservation laws don’t require that all energy flows to them; they only need enough energy to maintain immutability.
900 EH/s is enough.
Chapter 7: From atomic conservation to information conservation—civilizational leaps
If you stand high enough and view the entire history of human civilization as a single line, you’ll see a clear thread:
Every time civilization makes a leap, the carrier of value gets unwrapped. Each unwrapping is a replication of conservation laws at a higher dimension.
First unwrapping: from physical form to metal. Shells and livestock are replaced by copper, silver, and gold. Conservation laws upgrade from "biological scarcity" (you can’t conjure a cow out of thin air) to "atomic scarcity" (you can’t create a gold atom out of thin air).
Second unwrapping: from metal to paper money. Gold and silver are replaced by paper. On the surface, conservation laws break—central banks can print infinite money. But the Bretton Woods system tried to anchor paper money to gold, using atomic conservation to restrain paper money’s proliferation. In 1971, Nixon closed the gold window, and conservation laws officially died.
Third unwrapping: from atoms to information. Bitcoin moves value completely from the physical world into the information world. But it doesn’t abandon conservation laws. Instead, using the manner proved by Landauer’s principle, it re-welded conservation laws back into the digital world. Energy becomes information (PoW), the total supply is locked (21 million), and decentralization defends symmetry (rules without rulers).
Three layers of unwrapping, three layers of conservation law upgraded in dimension.
The first time was natural selection—humans, unconsciously, chose a more scarce carrier. The second time was institutional design—humans tried to replace natural scarcity with constraints from institutions. The third time was a mathematical proof—humans, for the first time, used mathematical language to anchor conservation laws in the information world, strictly, immutably, permanently.
This is the true meaning of Bitcoin. It isn’t a better investment, not a more efficient payment tool, not even a cooler piece of financial technology.
It is the first conservation law in human civilization’s history that was actively written, conscientiously executed, and globally agreed upon.
Before that, conservation laws were passive rules of nature—you can’t break them, because the universe doesn’t allow you to violate them.
After that, conservation laws can be an active choice in human society—you write them into code, let the whole world verify them, and let time reinforce them.
Epilogue: the universe keeps the books
Landauer said: information is physical. Shannon said: information is a measure of eliminating uncertainty. Nakamoto said: information can be conserved.
Three people, three eras, three threads that ultimately converge at the same point—
Bitcoin.
While miners worldwide consume electricity equivalent to that of a medium-sized country every day to maintain this network, what they do is far deeper than "mining": they are minting information with energy, legislating the digital world with physical laws, and using the second law of thermodynamics to prove a brand-new conservation law.
In the atomic world, conservation laws are written by God. In the information world, conservation laws are written by humans.
And the first conservation law humans wrote is called 21 million.
This isn’t the end. But it is the beginning.
When future civilizations look back at 2026, they won’t remember whether this year’s coin price was $80,000 or $60,000. They won’t remember how many billions flowed into the ETFs. They won’t remember how many bitcoins a particular mining company sold.
What they’ll remember is this: in that year, hash rate evaporated by 210 EH/s, miners migrated en masse to AI, and the price violently rebounded after being cut in half in a bear market—but the 21 million coin limit never changed by even a single sat.
Conservation laws don’t need everyone’s belief. They only need enough energy to prove their existence.
And the energy of 900 EH/s is proving the same thing every minute, every second:
The universe is keeping the books. This time, the ledger is written by humans themselves.