The Scaffold of Trust
The preceding chapter established that value is not discovered but constructed—enacted through the dynamic interplay of embodied organisms and their environments. We have traced this insight through the observation that economic schools each privilege a central variable, through Graeber’s insight that value is a verb, and finally to our synthesis: that value emerges from interaction, shaped by internal states that vary moment to moment, yet leaving durable traces in the world.
But a crucial puzzle remains. If value is constructed through interaction, and if the construction depends on the internal states of organisms that cannot directly perceive one another’s intentions, how does coordination happen at all? How do strangers, separated by geography and culture, who cannot read each other’s minds and have no reason to trust one another, nonetheless engage in the intricate dance of economic exchange?
This is the problem of trust.
The Ancient Difficulty
Every transaction, at its core, involves a leap of faith. When you hand over goods or labor, you trust that the payment you receive in return will be honored—that the coin is not counterfeit, that the promise will be kept, that the institution backing the currency will persist. This trust is so woven into the fabric of daily life that we rarely notice it, yet it is the invisible infrastructure upon which all economic activity rests.
Historically, humans have solved the trust problem through institutions. We created governments to enforce contracts, banks to guarantee deposits, courts to adjudicate disputes. We developed reputations, brands, and social networks that allowed us to distinguish the trustworthy from the fraudulent. We built elaborate systems of auditing, accounting, and verification to detect deception and punish defection.
These solutions work, but they come with costs. Institutions require resources to maintain. They can be captured by special interests or corrupted by those entrusted with their operation. They exclude those who cannot access them—the unbanked, the politically disfavored, the geographically remote. And fundamentally, they require us to trust the trustees, pushing the problem back one step rather than solving it.
The dream of trustless exchange—of a system where strangers could transact with confidence without relying on any third party—seemed, for most of human history, to be a contradiction in terms. Trust, after all, is a relationship between minds. How could a mechanism replace it?
A New Kind of Scaffold
Bitcoin offers a novel answer, one that becomes comprehensible only when we understand it not as a purely digital abstraction but as a physical scaffold for human interaction.
The term “scaffold” is deliberate. In cognitive science, a scaffold is an external structure that supports and shapes cognitive processes.1 A notebook scaffolds memory. A calculator scaffolds arithmetic. A map scaffolds spatial reasoning. These are not metaphors—scaffolds genuinely extend our cognitive capacities by offloading processing to the environment and providing stable structures against which we can act.
Bitcoin functions as a scaffold for trust. It externalizes the verification process, the record-keeping, and the enforcement of rules into a physical substrate that humans can perceive, interact with, and rely upon. This scaffold has specific structural properties that make it suitable for its role, and understanding these properties requires us to think in terms of what the environment offers to the organisms that inhabit it.
Gibson’s Affordances: What the Environment Offers
James Gibson, the ecological psychologist, introduced the concept of affordances to describe the actionable possibilities that an environment offers to an organism.2 A cliff affords falling. A branch affords grasping. A flat surface affords walking. These affordances are not properties of the object alone, nor of the organism alone, but emerge from the relationship between them. A ladder affords climbing to a human but not to a fish. A body of water affords swimming to a fish but not to a rock.
Gibson insisted that affordances are directly perceived. We do not first perceive neutral objects and then infer what we can do with them; rather, we perceive the possibilities for action immediately, as part of our engagement with the world. The cup is perceived as graspable, the path as walkable, the face as interpretable. This perception is embodied—it depends on our bodies, our capabilities, our needs.
When we apply this framework to Bitcoin, we must be careful not to slip into metaphor. We are not saying that Bitcoin is “like” an environment with affordances. We are saying that when a human perceives the state of the Bitcoin ledger—through software interfaces, through the feedback of completed transactions, through the visible history of the blockchain—that human perceives genuine affordances. There are things they can do. There are capabilities at hand. And these affordances shape behavior just as surely as the affordances of any physical landscape.
The Two Levels of Perception
But here we must address an objection that Gibson scholars might raise. Gibson’s canonical examples—the floor affords walking, the cup affords grasping, the cliff affords falling—involve immediate sensory-motor perception. The affordance is directly perceived through the visual field, not inferred from symbolic information. Does seeing “6 confirmations” on a blockchain explorer involve the same kind of direct perception, or is it symbolic interpretation that must be cognitively processed before action possibilities become apparent?
The answer operates at two levels.
At the interface level, the affordances are unambiguously Gibsonian. The screen affords reading. The keyboard affords typing. The mouse affords clicking. The signing device affords pressing. These are the sensory-motor surfaces through which organisms come into contact with the ledger. When you move your hand toward the keyboard, you perceive the keys as pressable—you do not first perceive neutral objects and then infer that pressing is possible. This is direct perception of action possibilities, exactly as Gibson described.
At the semantic level, the affordances are learned—but they become direct through practice. A naive user who sees “6 confirmations” perceives only text, symbols requiring interpretation. A practiced user who sees “6 confirmations” perceives settlement—the affordance of treating the transaction as final, of acting upon it, of making further commitments predicated on its irreversibility.
Gibson himself acknowledged that affordances can be learned. A door handle affords pulling only to someone who has learned what handles do. But once learned, the perception becomes direct: you do not consciously reason through it; you see the possibility. The practiced Bitcoin user does not think “six confirmations means approximately one hour of proof-of-work, which makes reversal economically prohibitive, therefore I may treat this as final.” They see finality. The affordance has become perceptual.
This two-level structure preserves the empirical content of Gibson’s theory while extending it to digital interfaces. We are not claiming that Bitcoin magically transcends symbolic representation. We are claiming that practiced users develop perceptual skills that allow them to read the ledger as an action-space, not merely as data to be interpreted. The affordances are real. The perception, for those who have developed the skill, is direct.
What, then, does Bitcoin afford?
The Affordance of Auditability
Consider first the structure of the Bitcoin ledger. It is not a simple database that can be overwritten at will. It is a chain of blocks, each cryptographically linked to its predecessor, extending back to the genesis block of January 3, 2009. This structure creates what we might call a stratigraphic history—layers of transactions laid down over time, each layer building upon and sealing those beneath it.
Like geological strata, these layers preserve traces. Every transaction ever conducted on the network remains visible, verifiable, and permanent. This is not a design choice that could easily be undone; it emerges from the fundamental architecture of the system. The immutability is enforced by the computational cost of rewriting history—an attacker would need to redo all the proof-of-work from the point of alteration to the present, a task that becomes economically prohibitive as the chain grows.
What does this permanence afford? It affords accountability. Participants can leave traces of their economic actions that cannot be erased or manipulated. It affords auditability—anyone can verify the complete history of any coin, tracing its path through the economy from its creation in a mining reward to its current resting place. It affords building. Because previous layers cannot be altered, new activity can safely build upon them, trusting the foundation to remain stable.
This is not a metaphor. When a user checks a blockchain explorer and sees a transaction confirmed with six blocks of subsequent proof-of-work, they perceive an affordance: the capacity to treat that transaction as final, to act upon it, to make further commitments predicated on its irreversibility. The stratigraphic structure of the ledger is directly perceived as permanence, and permanence enables action.
The Affordance of Verifiable Scarcity
The Bitcoin protocol enforces a fixed supply of twenty-one million coins. This limit is not a suggestion or a policy that could be changed by committee decision; it is embedded in the consensus rules that define what counts as a valid block. Nodes that accepted blocks violating this rule would find themselves on a fork that no one else recognizes—effectively excommunicated from the network.
This architectural scarcity affords something that fiat currencies cannot: the capacity to store value with confidence that no additional units will dilute one’s holdings. In the terminology we developed earlier, this is the embodied-cognition equivalent of “unforgeable costliness”—a phrase borrowed from Nick Szabo. The costliness is not merely abstract; it is physically enforced by the protocol’s rules and the energy expenditure of miners who validate adherence to those rules.
What does this afford? Long-term planning. Savings that maintain purchasing power across generational timescales. Economic calculation that does not need to account for unpredictable monetary expansion. The organism perceiving the Bitcoin network perceives not just a quantity of coins but a guarantee structure—a scaffold against which future-oriented behavior can be calibrated.
The Affordance of Access
The Bitcoin network is globally accessible to anyone with an internet connection. There is no application form, no credit check, no identity verification required to participate. A farmer in rural Africa and a banker in Manhattan have equal access to the same protocol, the same rules, the same affordances.
This universality affords participation. It affords financial inclusion for the billions of people excluded from traditional banking systems. It affords escape from regimes that use financial exclusion as a tool of political control. It affords equality of access—not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity to engage with the system.
The permissionlessness is not merely an absence of gatekeepers; it is a positive affordance, a capability that participants perceive and act upon. The Afghan woman hiding savings from a repressive government, the Venezuelan worker preserving wages from hyperinflation, the dissident receiving donations that cannot be seized—each perceives and acts upon the affordance of access that Bitcoin provides.
The Affordance of Reflection
Here we arrive at perhaps the most subtle of Bitcoin’s affordances. The ledger, particularly its current state at the chain tip, functions as a reflective surface. It captures and displays the aggregate results of all transactions, making visible the outcome of countless individual economic decisions.
This reflection affords assessment. Participants can see the state of the network, verify their own interactions, and observe the broader patterns of economic activity. They can check balances, confirm receipts, trace provenance. The ledger reflects back to them the consequences of their actions and the actions of others.
But the reflection is more than mere information display. In the framework of embodied cognition, reflection enables a feedback loop that shapes subsequent behavior. The organism acts upon the environment, perceives the environmental response, and adjusts future action accordingly. The Bitcoin ledger, by providing a clear and verifiable reflection of transaction outcomes, enables this loop to operate at the level of economic behavior.
When a merchant sees that a payment has been confirmed, they perceive an affordance: the capacity to release goods, to update inventory, to plan further production. The reflection is not passive information but an active shaping of behavioral possibilities.
The Affordance of Externalized Trust
We return now to the problem with which we began. How can strangers trust one another without relying on institutions that must themselves be trusted?
Bitcoin’s answer is to externalize trust into a physical substrate. The ledger is distributed across thousands of nodes worldwide. It is maintained not by any single party but by the collective computation of miners who expend real energy to secure the network. The rules are enforced not by courts or regulators but by cryptographic proof-of-work that makes violation economically irrational.
This externalization affords trustless interaction. Two parties who have never met, who share no common language or culture, who have no reason to rely on each other’s good faith, can nonetheless transact with confidence. The trust is not in each other but in the scaffold—in the physical structure of the network that makes cheating prohibitively costly.
This is not a metaphor for trust; it is a replacement for trust. Or more precisely, it is a transformation of trust from an interpersonal relationship into a relationship between humans and their constructed environment. We trust the chair to hold our weight not because we have faith in its intentions but because we perceive its structural properties. Similarly, we trust the Bitcoin network not because we have faith in any particular participant but because we perceive the structural properties that make defection unprofitable.
Trust as Property of Structure
The reframing deserves emphasis. The traditional view treats trust as something that exists between people—a social bond, a relationship of confidence, a judgment about character. Bitcoin reframes trust as something that exists in a structure.
Consider a bridge. The bridge does not trust the pedestrians who cross it, and the pedestrians do not need to trust each other. The bridge affords crossing because of its physical properties—its materials, its engineering, its load capacity. Trust is not between persons; it is in the structure. When you walk across a bridge, you are not relying on the bridge’s intentions or goodwill. You are relying on structural properties that can be inspected, measured, verified.
Bitcoin is a bridge for economic interaction. The trust problem—that organisms cannot read each other’s minds, that internal states are mutually opaque—is dissolved not by creating better interpersonal trust but by making interpersonal trust unnecessary. The structure does the work that trust once did.
“Trustless” is therefore slightly misleading. Trust is not eliminated; it is relocated. We still trust—but we trust the scaffold rather than the counterparty. And trusting a scaffold whose properties we can verify is categorically different from trusting a person whose intentions we cannot know.
The Physical Substrate of Value Construction
Having enumerated Bitcoin’s affordances, we can now see how they combine to enable value construction in a specifically physical sense.
Every act of value creation involves energy. This is not a metaphor but a thermodynamic necessity. When a miner solves a proof-of-work puzzle, electrical energy is converted into computational work, which is converted into a valid block, which is converted into network security. When a user broadcasts a transaction, their device expends energy to sign and transmit the message. When nodes relay and validate transactions, they expend computational resources maintained by electrical power.
This energy expenditure leaves traces. The Bitcoin ledger is not an ethereal abstraction floating in digital space; it is a pattern of magnetic states on hard drives, of electrical charges in memory chips, of optical signals in fiber cables. These patterns are physical, measurable, and persistent. Every block added to the chain represents a physical reconfiguration of matter across thousands of computers worldwide.
Path Dependence
The current state of the ledger is not arbitrary but path-dependent. It reflects a specific history—the exact sequence of blocks that were mined, the exact transactions that were included, the exact order in which events occurred. This history cannot be reconstructed from the current state alone; the state is a compressed summary of a unique trajectory through the space of possible ledger states.
What does path dependence mean concretely? Each block depends on the block before it—cryptographically linked through the hash of the previous block header. Each transaction depends on the UTXO set that existed when it was broadcast. Change any prior transaction and you invalidate everything that followed. The ledger is not just a record of current balances; it is a trace of a path, and that path cannot be retraced without invalidating the entire subsequent history.
This has profound implications for trust and reliability. To alter a transaction buried in block 100,000 would require recomputing all blocks from 100,001 to the present tip—expending more energy than the entire network has expended in that interval. The deeper a layer is buried, the more thermodynamic work protects it. Reliability accumulates with stratigraphic depth.
The path-dependent structure also means the ledger is self-authenticating history. The difficulty adjustment at each block records the computational power of the network at that moment. The transaction set records the economic priorities of participants at that time. The coinbase reward records the position in the halving schedule. The block timestamp records approximate chronology. Reading the blockchain is reading history—not metaphorically but literally.
Traces on the Physical Substrate
Let us be more precise about what it means for transactions to “leave traces” on the physical network substrate. When Alice sends bitcoin to Bob, a sequence of physical events unfolds—each step involving the reconfiguration of matter and the expenditure of energy.
Step 1: Transaction Construction. Alice’s wallet software constructs a transaction—a data structure specifying inputs (which prior outputs she is spending), outputs (which addresses receive funds), and a cryptographic signature proving she controls the inputs. This computation rearranges the physical states of transistors in her processor. The transaction data exists as electromagnetic states in her device’s memory—a sequence of bytes, which is to say, a sequence of physical configurations.
Step 2: Broadcast. Alice’s device transmits the transaction to the network as electromagnetic signals. Radio waves if she is on WiFi. Light pulses if she is on fiber. Electrical signals if she is on copper. The data propagates through cables and airwaves, physical disturbances carrying information across space.
Step 3: Mempool Inclusion. Nodes receive these signals and convert them back into computational data. They validate the transaction against the current UTXO set—another physical structure distributed across the network. Valid transactions propagate to other nodes, leaving copies in memory pools across the globe. Alice’s transaction now exists as electromagnetic states on thousands of machines worldwide.
Step 4: Mining. Miners collect transactions from the mempool and attempt to construct a valid block. This requires finding a nonce that, when hashed with the block data, produces a value below the current difficulty target. The search consumes electricity—real energy from power plants, converted to computation, dissipated as heat. When a miner succeeds, they have performed thermodynamic work that cannot be faked or reversed without re-expending the energy. The block header contains a hash that depends on every transaction within it; change any transaction and the hash changes entirely.
Step 5: Block Propagation. The successful miner broadcasts the block. Nodes validate it, add it to their local copy of the chain, and update their UTXO sets. Hard drives spin, magnetic states flip, the physical substrate is reconfigured across thousands of machines. Bob’s wallet software, scanning the network, detects the transaction and updates its display. The photons emitted by his screen, carrying information about his new balance, enter his eyes and trigger neural responses.
Step 6: Stratigraphic Burial. As subsequent blocks are mined, Alice’s transaction moves from the chain tip into the depths. Each new block adds another layer of thermodynamic work protecting her transaction from reversal. The transaction that was once at the surface becomes buried under accumulating strata—each layer sealed by energy expenditure, each layer making the underlying history more permanent.
At the end of this sequence, the global state of the Bitcoin network has changed. Thousands of hard drives now contain Alice’s transaction. The UTXO set has been updated to reflect the new balances. The chain tip has advanced. Energy has been converted to entropy. Alice’s intention—to transfer value from her address to Bob’s—has been inscribed in the physical substrate of a global network.
This is what it means to leave a trace. The transaction is not merely recorded; it is inscribed—a physical reconfiguration of the world that persists.
The Ledger as Externalized Alliesthetic Record
The chain tip—the most recent block in the longest valid chain—functions as a reflective surface in a very specific sense. It represents the current state of the ledger, which is itself the aggregate result of all prior transactions.
But what does this aggregate represent? We have argued that value is constructed through interaction, and that valuation is shaped by alliesthetic states—the internal conditions of organisms that cause the same stimulus to produce different responses. Let us now be explicit about the causal chain.
The Causal Sequence
Interoception. Alice senses her internal state—hunger, fear, ambition, prudence, desire for security, anticipation of future needs. These are not abstract preferences; they are physiological signals, proprioceptive and interoceptive data that her nervous system continuously monitors.
The intuitive case is reactive: her body knows, in a pre-reflective way, that something is off, that action might restore equilibrium. But interoception also includes prediction—her brain continuously evaluates the match between current resources and anticipated demands. She knows, equally pre-reflectively, that something will be off unless she acts now. This is allostasis: anticipatory adjustment before need arises.
Alliesthetic motivation. This internal state modulates Alice’s disposition toward external stimuli. The same bitcoin, the same goods, the same opportunities are perceived differently depending on her current condition. What seemed valuable yesterday may seem less so today; what seemed dispensable may now seem essential.
Both reactive and anticipatory modes operate here. Alice may transact because she is hungry now (reactive). But more often, she transacts because she anticipates future hunger, future need, future opportunity (anticipatory). The weekly grocery run, the insurance payment, the savings transfer—these are not responses to current deficit but preparations for predicted futures. This is alliesthesia operating at the moment of potential transaction, modulating perception of both present and anticipated value.
Action. Alice acts—she constructs a transaction, signs it, broadcasts it. This is sensory-motor engagement with the scaffold: fingers on keyboard, eyes on screen, intention translated into physical movement that produces physical effects.
Transaction. If friction permits—if the fees are acceptable, the network is functioning, the counterparty is willing—the action completes as a transaction. This is the site of value construction.
Trace. The transaction leaves a trace, as we have just described: electromagnetic states inscribed across thousands of machines, sealed by thermodynamic work, buried under accumulating strata.
We do not know Alice’s internal state. We cannot access her interoception. But we observe the trace. The transaction is what we called earlier a sufficient statistic—it compresses all the upstream causation into a single observable event. Whatever complexity was happening inside Alice, it expressed itself through action that left a measurable mark.
The Ledger as Record
The ledger, then, can be understood as an externalized record of alliesthetic activity. Not a transcript of internal states—we have no access to those—but a residue of their effects. Each transaction is the footprint of an organism that walked. The ledger is the beach where footprints accumulate.
Crucially, the ledger captures both reactive and anticipatory transactions—but we cannot distinguish them from the trace alone. The grocery purchase, the insurance premium, the savings transfer: each leaves the same kind of trace. Whether Alice was correcting a present deficit or preparing for a future one, the ledger records only that she transacted.
This means the ledger is not merely a record of organisms restoring equilibrium. It is predominantly a record of organisms positioning themselves for anticipated futures. Most transactions are anticipatory, not reactive. The ledger captures predictions as much as corrections—a collective map of how organisms model their futures, inscribed in physical substrate.
And because the ledger is path-dependent, it is not random accumulation. Each block depends on the block before. Each transaction depends on the UTXO set that existed when it was broadcast. The current state of the ledger is the unique result of every alliesthetic act that preceded it—every organism, every internal state, every choice to transact rather than not, every selection of this good rather than that one, every fee paid and confirmation waited for.
This is not to say that the ledger provides a complete representation of internal states; it does not. It captures only those aspects of valuation that are expressed through on-chain transactions. Much economic activity occurs off-chain, and even on-chain activity represents only the outcome of decisions, not the deliberative processes that produced them.
But within these limits, the ledger is a remarkable externalization. It makes visible what would otherwise remain hidden in individual minds. It creates a shared reference point against which participants can calibrate their behavior. It reflects back to the community the aggregate results of its economic activity, enabling assessment, adaptation, and coordination.
This is why we can say, without mysticism, that the ledger reflects value. Not because value is a substance floating in some metaphysical realm that the ledger passively records, but because value is constructed through action, action leaves traces, and the ledger is where the traces accumulate.
Capital as Stored Energy
A digression is warranted here to address a common intuition that might seem to conflict with our emphasis on physical processes.
Money, we often say, is “just numbers in a computer.” Bitcoin, with its explicitly digital nature, might seem especially ethereal—mere information without physical substance. How can we speak of physical traces and energy expenditure when the entire system operates through abstract computation?
The resolution lies in recognizing that information is always physical. There is no such thing as disembodied data. Every bit of information is encoded in some physical substrate—magnetic domains, electrical charges, optical states. Processing information requires energy. Storing information requires stable physical structures.
More profoundly, money of any form can be understood as stored energy. This is not a metaphor but a functional description. If I hold a quantity of bitcoin, I possess the capacity to direct economic activity—to compensate others for their labor, to acquire goods that required energy to produce, to fund enterprises that will expend energy in pursuit of their goals.
Consider: I cannot put bitcoin in my car’s fuel tank and drive to a destination. Yet if I have enough bitcoin, I can hire a car and driver to take me there. The bitcoin is converted, through a series of market transactions, into the fuel and labor that accomplish my goal. In this functional sense, capital is a battery—a store of potential energy that can be discharged to produce physical effects in the world.
Bitcoin makes this relationship unusually explicit. Every bitcoin in existence was created through the expenditure of energy in mining. The security of the network depends on ongoing energy expenditure. The permanence of transactions is enforced by the energy cost of rewriting history. Energy is woven into the very fabric of the system.
This is why we can speak of value construction as a physical process. When humans interact with the Bitcoin network—mining blocks, broadcasting transactions, validating the chain—they are participating in a physical reconfiguration of the world. Energy is consumed. Matter is rearranged. Traces are left. Value is constructed.
Entropy and Order
The physicist’s perspective offers a final insight. Entropy, in thermodynamic terms, is a measure of disorder—of the number of ways a system could be arranged without changing its macroscopic properties. High-entropy systems are disordered, chaotic, uniform. Low-entropy systems are ordered, structured, differentiated.
Life itself can be understood as a process of local entropy reduction. Organisms consume energy to maintain their internal order against the universal tendency toward disorder. They build structures, encode information, create patterns that would be vanishingly improbable in a purely random universe.
The Bitcoin ledger represents a dramatic reduction of entropy in the informational domain. Consider the space of all possible arrangements of 21 million coins across billions of possible addresses. The vast majority of these arrangements would be random noise—no meaningful pattern, no history, no structure. The actual ledger, by contrast, is a highly ordered structure that reflects sixteen years of human economic activity.
This order was purchased with energy. Every block required the expenditure of computational power. Every layer of the stratigraphy represents energy converted from undirected physical motion into directed informational structure. The ledger is, in a quite literal sense, crystallized energy—entropy reduced and stored in a form that humans can perceive and act upon.
This entropy reduction is what makes the ledger valuable as a scaffold. A random arrangement of bits affords nothing. An ordered, structured, historically contingent ledger affords verification, planning, coordination, trust. The affordances emerge from the order, and the order is the frozen footprint of energy expenditure.
Toward Alliesthetic Economics
We have now assembled the pieces of a larger theoretical structure. We have embodied organisms whose internal states shape their perception of value. We have environments that afford specific types of action. We have physical processes by which organisms reconfigure their environments, leaving traces that persist and accumulate. We have feedback loops through which organisms perceive the results of their actions and adjust subsequent behavior.
What would it mean to combine these insights into a rigorous science?
We propose the term “alliesthetic economics” for a research program that would integrate perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, and economics into a unified framework. Such a program would take seriously the embodied nature of economic agents—treating them not as abstract rational calculators but as biological organisms with variable internal states, limited perceptual capacities, and physical bodies that constrain and enable action.
Alliesthetic economics would study how changes in internal state affect economic behavior. We know from physiological research that hunger, fatigue, temperature, and hormonal fluctuations alter perception and decision-making. How do these alterations manifest in economic choices? When a trader makes decisions at the end of a long day, are those decisions systematically different from those made in the morning? When a consumer shops while hungry, do they systematically overvalue food relative to other goods?
Alliesthetic economics would study how environmental affordances shape economic behavior. The Bitcoin network, as we have argued, provides specific affordances that differ from those of traditional financial systems. Do these different affordances produce systematically different behaviors? Does the permanence of blockchain transactions change how carefully people consider their choices? Does the permissionlessness of access change who participates in economic activity and how?
Alliesthetic economics would study the feedback loops between organisms and their economic environments. How do individuals respond to the reflection of their aggregate activity in market prices, in ledger states, in the visible behavior of others? How do these responses propagate and aggregate into macroeconomic patterns?
One can imagine a research program that would investigate these questions through controlled observation and experiment. The details of such a program are left to future work. Our purpose here is not to conduct the research but to articulate the framework within which it might be conducted. We are laying out a map, not traversing the territory.
The Scaffold Complete
We began this chapter with the problem of trust—how strangers can coordinate economic activity without relying on institutions that must themselves be trusted. We have answered that Bitcoin provides a physical scaffold that externalizes trust into verifiable structure.
But we have said much more than this. We have shown that Bitcoin affords specific capabilities to the organisms that perceive it: auditability, scarcity verification, access, reflection, trustless interaction. We have shown that these affordances are not metaphorical but literal—directly perceived features of the environment that shape behavior. We have shown that interactions with this scaffold leave physical traces, accumulating into a stratigraphic history that reflects the aggregate of individual valuations.
Most importantly, we have shown that value construction is a physical process. Energy is expended, matter is rearranged, entropy is locally reduced, and the result is an ordered structure against which humans can perceive affordances and take action. The Bitcoin ledger is not merely a record of value; it is the material substrate through which value is constructed.
In the next chapter, we will engage the objections to this framework—the concerns that it reduces too much, explains too little, or misses what matters about economic life. Having built our scaffold, we must test its strength.