Bitcoin and Philosophy (Session 6)

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unclear approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: Landian Bitcoin. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Going live. Hello and welcome everyone to the sixth session of Nick Land's Bitcoin and Philosophy seminar. I'm going to pass it on to Nick to begin his lecture. Okay. Okay, cool. So the preset topic for this week was cryptography, or especially concentrating on the crypto aspects of it. So I was thinking we could have…

• 00:20:57

  And by that, I think we mean history. It's a completely new of secrecy and hiding, which I'm very inclined to call the open secret. The open secret is the same thing we see in Bitcoin on the ledger, in the fact that everything is completely exposed. And yet you still are able to engage in hidden activities, hidden…

• 00:45:23

  It's a kind of sign that there's a cryptographic problem at the absolute origin of Western philosophy. Now that, that is fragment one, two, three of Heraclitus. And fragment, and one, two, three is a very interesting number because it actually is like a toy version of the kind of prime number based cryptographic…

• 01:06:05

  So you have to somehow be, you have to have that, enough of a speck of economic reality there to provide incentives for people to reproduce the system. So how that would work exactly in this identity system, I think is an interesting, an interesting form, and I think it would be, you would have to spend some…

• 01:31:26

  Isn't it the same as the reason they quote the price of oil in dollars, and they quote price of gold in dollars, and the price of everything in dollars? It's because of the position of the US dollar in the world. It doesn't seem to me, at all, that this is an artifact that's coming from the side of Bitcoin. It's that…

• 01:53:12

  I had another question regarding the, like, I don't know, game theory. And I don't know, which, again, was in the Nexa album piece, together with the, he was referring to evolutionary theory. And it seems to me that game theory, as much as this evolutionary theory based, again, on the principle of the selfish gene…

• 02:14:17

  So what I'm saying there is, you know, with this supervenient layer of non-instrumental rationality being postulated in the name of agency, how is that producing kind of leverage on the theory of games? It seems, it seems that the theory of games is already, like, talking about agents almost to a fault. I suppose that…

• 02:38:08

  But I've got a lot out of this, so I'm very grateful to everybody. Okay. So I'm going to end the broadcast and see you all next week, 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time for the second last seminar. Okay, great. Bye-bye. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Have a good week.