Nick Land The blockchain solves the problem of spacetime

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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 open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: video original (.mp4).

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• 00:00:00

  I thought I was going after Laura, but that's totally... Oh, another Nick. Sorry, I apologize. We're drowning in Nicks. Wait a second. We've got to get the sound happening. Thank you. Just give us a second, Nick. This is down. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm…

• 00:02:58

  I'm probably going to a certain level of immersion, but I'm among I'm sure other people very happy to go into more expository mode if that's helpful at some stage about how this actually works. But it's very helpful that Satoshi Nakamoto's paper is structured as a definition. And I think that's what I'm trying…

• 00:04:59

  being a blockchain systematically for the reason for which the online market is not attractive for systematically for the reason for which the online market is not attractive for I'm going to move on immediately to my second question. This one becomes acute by the fact that now it's almost 4 o'clock in Shanghai…

• 00:10:18

  to being carried by political excitement or by fashion, you attach a post-prefix to it, post-modernity being one that we've already encountered a lot. And implicitly, I think also, post-critique, or as we'd be more familiar with that, post-Cantonism. And I'm not going to obsess here on the philosophical issue. It's…

• 00:13:31

  And it comes to seem implausible, first of all, because Kant seems to take Euclid's parallel postulate as if it were a general issue. axion that's to say he he he assumes that I'm the geometry that you cleared laid out was a timeless necessary structure geometrical understanding and obviously in the modern period…

• 00:18:04

  And Einstein, as the sort of abstract physicist, is very happy to see it as a problem of physics, a problem of speculative theory. Poincaré is never willing to abandon... that problem as a practical administrative problem. And Galison says this is why we know Einstein as the great theorist of space-time. And Poincaré…

• 00:19:54

  This is in the theorization of the blockchain. The problem is approached through something called the Byzantine General Problem. And the Byzantine General Problem is exactly the same as the problem of relativistic space-time. Okay. So, let me just quote from Satoshi Nakamoto responding to a question by James A. Donald…

• 00:23:10

  So sorry, I apologize if I've overstretched my time limits, and I'll... Stop there. No worries.