NCMT 500-314 -- Bitcoin and Philosophy (6 of 8)

Provenance

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: video original (.mp4).

Timestamped map

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 gonna 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…

• 00:24:57

  And therefore, using this technique called Erastophanes' net, which is the only... It's the brute force method for prime factorization, it would eventually find it. But there is... The key point is that there is a vast, vast asymmetry between the ease of the encryption and the ease of the decryption, if you don't have…

• 00:50:55

  But I mean for more... I said more conductive signs... So supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed supposed…

• 01:10:20

  There is no level of deception involved. And the traction that that kind of appearance can have in terms of this goal perhaps, depending on who you talk to, of Bitcoin going mainstream. Right. It's not a kind of coup in any sense. It's a complete open assertion of a system and its advantages rather than a kind…

• 01:31:20

  You know, like, why do people fundamentally quote the price of Bitcoin in US dollars? Yeah. Isn't it the same as the reason they quote the price of oil in dollars, and they quote the 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…

• 01:53:32

  I don't know. Evolutionary theory, like, and it seems to me that, I mean, game theory, as much as this evolutionary theory based again on the principle of the selfish gene, right, that works more or less in making, like, strategic decisions based on game theory, isn't that, like, a bit reductive? I mean, it's just…

• 02:15:19

  Interesting knives. I apologize for my incompetence to kind of catch them properly, equally. I mean, you know, I find this kind of hazy, very hard to process adequately. So it would be interesting to, yeah. Well, it is called the, there's that aphorism, like, entering the game of giving and asking for reasons. Space…

• 02:38:16

  Okay so I'm going to end the broadcast and see you all next week, 10am Eastern Standard Time for the second last seminar. Okay, great. Bye-bye. Thanks everybody.