💠🌀🔶 This is not mysticism. It is engineering...
If silica - presented by Steiner - acts as a natural threshold through which formative forces descend into visible life, silicon represents a modern, technological refinement of that same threshold quality. It is matter selected, purified, and disciplined precisely because of its capacity to stand between - neither fully open nor fully closed, neither purely chaotic nor staunchly rigid.
Indeed, silicon is a semiconductor. Unlike conductors, which allow electrical flow indiscriminately, or insulators, which resist it entirely, silicon occupies a middle ground. Its defining feature is conditional permeability. By introducing minute impurities (a process known as doping) engineers can shape regions where electron flow is permitted, restricted, or redirected. The result is not mere transmission of energy, but controlled decision.
This capacity gives rise to the transistor, the fundamental unit of all modern computation. A transistor is not primarily a device for moving electricity, it is a device for discrimination. It determines whether a signal passes or does not pass, whether a potential becomes an action or remains unrealised. At scale, billions of these microscopic thresholds form the logical substrate of the digital world.
Computation, therefore, is not continuous flow but structured discernment. On and off. Yes and no. Valid and invalid. What appears abstract at the level of software is, at its foundation, a choreography of physical thresholds; electrons disciplined into lawful patterns of allowance and refusal.
Seen through Steiner’s lens, silicon appears as a modern echo of silica’s ancient role. Where silica momentarily received formative forces to allow living form to condense, silicon receives electrical potential and gives it just enough structure to condense into logic. In both cases, the substance itself does not determine the content of what appears, but instead enables the passage from formless potential into articulated form.
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Discover Episode 155 feat. @Chris Alaimo - cool, calm, collected and based Bitcoiner, mentor, real one 🔶👀
WE discuss:
- Chris' Bitcoin origin story
- Why Poor Incentives Are Poor
- Electric Trash
- Jets & Jet Packs
- Heaps More
YUGE thanks to Chris for spending some scarce time and finite energy telling the tale of how he discovered Bitcoin.
MASSIVE shout out to @HardBlock - Australia's longest running Bitcoin exchange, helping plebs save hard money since 2014 - and Discovering Bitcoin's first proper sponsor - Discover Bitcoin with HardBlock and...
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