The unique, specific and knowable purpose of humanity — and blockchain is key.

AS a mathematician, my training is to discover new truth by synthesizing old truths with the cold, hard rules of logic. Beauty is another name for the apex truth, the coming together of a myriad of lesser beauties to create that apex.

Humanity and human purpose has uncovered so many of the beauties needed to create that apex of all beauties — the answer to the meaning of our collective existence.

All life and specifically humanity is purposeful in the way a beehive is, but a bee isn’t. There may be notable bees, but there are no utterly essential bees. Even queens are replaceable. And a hive has a purpose.

All the major developments in human history — speech, tools, the wheel, writing, agriculture, religion, political organisation, urbanisation, the industrial revolution, computers, the internet and now blockchain are all deliberative (and perhaps deterministic) expressions of human life, striving to achieve its purpose. A singular, specific, knowable purpose.

Progressive advances in resourcing, the organisation of people into cohesive groups — companies, nations, religions, social media groups, all serve to create a system that support the capability required for the intense focus we need to purposefully advance our technology.

If you look across the ages, the wealth of global resource needed for Satoshi to have the space — surrounded by adequate technology — to create the bitcoin blockchain couldn’t have happened without wars and billionaires and environmentally devastating energy mining. Blockchain couldn’t exist without a global internet capable of the decentralisation needed to make it meaningful. That takes decades, centuries of development to build the structures and systems an idea like blockchain needs to become more than just an idea.

And blockchain is on par with every other major human achievement. Blockchain does something far more important than solving the double spending problem. It gives the digital realm something we take for granted in the “real” world. The passage of time.

In the real world, time creates reality by converting all the as yet unreal possibilities of the future into a present instant that becomes — with times’ passage — an immutable past. Before blockchain, there was nothing in the digital realm that couldn’t retrospectively be altered by editing the digital record. Blockchain gives the digital realm an immutable past. It gives it the digital equivalent of time. And we will come to discover that an immutable past is an essential component of life — and much more besides.

Is this all random? Just a wild thrashing around, in the hope that the direction we end up going is meaningful. Or is humanity aiming itself, laser-like, at a target?

And if so, the obvious question is “what is our purpose?” As a mathematician, the answer is now as obvious as the question.