Bitcoin, through proof of work, combined with Landauer’s relation for the minimum energy required to flip a bit, reinforces the idea that energy and computation and money are all equivalent. At any given moment, they are fungible

The Planck temperature

thus currently amounts to about one Benjamin.

The apparent meltdown in recent days of the crypto ecosystem has wiped about a trillion dollars of market capitalization, with a whole second trillion knocked out if one marks to the market peak reached late last year.

The wholesale destruction of coin valuations brings to mind past volatility swings of genuinely epic proportions. At current pricing for bit operations, the first morning of the Cenozoic saw Earth taking its largest drawdown of the past quarter-billion years (the Black Clouds paper details the valuation metrics). The economic cost of recovering from a Cretaceous-Paleogene level extinction event prices out at roughly 25 quadrillion dollars. Recoveries, moreover, take time. Even 25 billion mornings later, the squabble between the blue jay and the squirrel over the bird feeder underscores the realization that Earth is still reeling from the echoes of that awful day.