The invention of the Bitcoin protocol is not the invention of digital money. It is the invention of digital laws of physics.
The protocol's significance is not that it specifically created a cryptocurrency. It is that, for the first time, it imposed physics-like constraints (scarcity, irreversibility, thermodynamic cost) onto a domain that previously had none. Digital space, prior to Bitcoin, was a realm of infinite and costless replication. Bitcoin changed the rules of that space for itself.
It is only within a digitally constrained environment, one governed by its own *immutable* laws, that a truly digital commodity can emerge. And it is only from a genuine digital commodity that sound digital money can arise.
You cannot have digital money without first having digital physics.
#bip-110
