The Universal Abacus

For centuries, economists and philosophers have debated the nature of value. Is value intrinsic to objects—gold having worth because of what it is? Or is value subjective—located in the preferences of individuals who desire the gold? The debate has generated enormous heat and little light, each side mustering arguments that seem irrefutable from within their own frame.

Wittgenstein would recognize this immediately.1 It has the structure of what he called a philosophical puzzle—not a genuine problem to be solved but a confusion to be dissolved. The disputants aren’t disagreeing about facts; they’re trapped in a language-game that assumes value must be located somewhere, must have an essence that can be discovered if only we look in the right place.

The intrinsic value theorist looks at the object. The subjective value theorist looks at the subject. Both assume there is something to find.

The Subjective Escape That Isn’t

The Austrian economists believed they had escaped the trap. By locating value in the subject rather than the object, they dissolved the medieval puzzles about “just price” and “intrinsic worth.” Value is not a property of bread; it is a relation between bread and a hungry person. The marginalist revolution was complete.

But Wittgenstein’s analysis goes deeper. The Austrians relocated the essence—they did not eliminate it. Subjective value theory still posits a stable core: preferences that exist within the individual, waiting to be expressed through choice. The locus moved from commodity to mind, but the metaphysical structure remained. We still seek an anchor, a fixed point from which value emanates.

This is why debates about Bitcoin’s value generate such heat. If value is subjective, then Bitcoin either satisfies preferences or it doesn’t—and the argument becomes about whose preferences count, or which preferences are “real.” We’ve replaced one essentialism with another.

Constructed Value as Dissolution

The move to constructed value is not another relocation. It is a dissolution of the question.

Constructed value denies that value exists prior to the transaction. There is no essence in the object. There is no essence in the subject. There is no hidden preference waiting to manifest. Value is constructed at the moment of transaction—enacted through the interaction of embodied agents with their environment.

This is Wittgensteinian in structure. Rather than asking “what is value?” and seeking its location, we ask “how is the word ‘value’ used?” and find it embedded in practices—buying, selling, pricing, negotiating, recording, disputing. Value is not a substance we discover; it is a phenomenon we produce through our activities.

The puzzle dissolves. “Does Bitcoin have value?” is no longer a question about Bitcoin’s essence or about the validity of Bitcoiners’ preferences. It is a question about practices: Do people enact value through transactions using Bitcoin? The answer is empirical, not metaphysical.

Enaction and the Embodied Economic Agent

But if value is constructed through transaction, what does the constructing? Here we borrow from cognitive science.

Enaction, developed by Varela, Thompson, and others,2 proposes that cognition is not the manipulation of internal representations but the active engagement of an embodied organism with its environment. Meaning emerges from this coupling—not from symbols in the head, not from properties in the world, but from the dynamic interaction between organism and environment.

Applied to economics: the economic agent is not an abstract preference-function but an embodied, perceiving, acting organism. Value is enacted through transactions in which this organism engages its environment. The agent’s internal states—hunger, fear, desire, uncertainty—shape but do not determine the transaction. And the transaction leaves traces.

This is what “enaction” adds that “construction” alone does not. It imports the psycho-sensorio-perceptual richness of the embodied agent into economic theory. The economic actor is not a rational calculator but an organism whose valuations shift with internal state—precisely what alliesthesia describes at the level of perception.

The transaction is the trace of enaction. It is to economic value what the footprint is to walking.

Adjacent Approaches and Why They Fall Short

This synthesis of embodied cognition and economic value is not without precursors. Several research traditions have approached the terrain from different angles. But none has made the full move to treating value creation as enacted by embodied organisms. Each stops short—and understanding where they stop illuminates what we are proposing.

Ecological Rationality

Gerd Gigerenzer and Vernon Smith have developed the concept of ecological rationality,3 which holds that decision-making arises from the interaction between an agent’s heuristics and its environment. Rather than treating rationality as adherence to abstract logical rules, they emphasize that economic agents operate within specific contexts and constraints. The fast-and-frugal heuristics that agents employ are not deviations from rationality but adaptations to real environmental structures.

This work resonates with embodied cognition’s emphasis on agent-environment coupling. The rational actor is not a disembodied calculator but a situated being whose cognitive strategies are shaped by—and fitted to—the world it navigates.

But ecological rationality stops short of the enactive move. The agent remains primarily a cognitive entity—a processor of information, a deployer of heuristics. The body appears as the locus of these heuristics, but not as a perceiving organism whose internal states shape what counts as valuable. Gigerenzer’s agent is clever, context-sensitive, and boundedly rational. It is not an organism whose perception of the same stimulus varies with hunger, fatigue, or fear. Ecological rationality explains how agents decide efficiently; it does not reframe what value is as something enacted through embodied engagement.

Evolutionary Economics

Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction,4 and more recent work by complexity economists like Brian Arthur,5 treat economic value as emerging through evolutionary, adaptive processes. Innovation is not a rational response to static preferences but a dynamic, context-sensitive unfolding. Economies are complex adaptive systems in which agents and environments co-evolve. Path dependence matters; history is not erased by equilibrium.

This has clear affinities with the enactivist emphasis on structural coupling—the idea that organism and environment shape each other through ongoing interaction. The evolutionary economist’s world is not the neoclassical world of timeless equilibria but a world of becoming, where value is created through processes of variation, selection, and retention.

Yet evolutionary economics focuses on populations, industries, and technologies rather than individual embodied agents. The “agent” in this tradition is often a firm, an institution, or a technology—not an organism with perceptual states. Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is a social role, not a body. The framework captures macroscopic dynamics of innovation and adaptation but does not ground economic action in the phenomenology of embodied experience. It tells us that value emerges through evolutionary processes; it does not tell us that value is enacted by perceiving organisms at the moment of transaction.

Practice Theory

Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of practice comes closer to an embodied analysis of economic action.6 The habitus—the system of durable, transposable dispositions that structure perception and action—is explicitly embodied. It is inscribed in posture, gesture, and bodily habit, not merely in mental representations. Economic behavior, for Bourdieu, is not the execution of conscious preferences but the expression of embodied dispositions shaped by one’s position in social fields.

This is genuinely embodied in a way that most economic theory is not. Bourdieu sees economic actors as formed by their social and material conditions, carrying their history in their bodies. The market is not a neutral arena where preferences meet but a field structured by power, capital, and embodied competences.

However, Bourdieu’s framework is sociological rather than economic in the strict sense. It explains how agents are formed by structures—how class position becomes bodily disposition—but it does not analyze value creation as an economic process. The focus is on the reproduction of social order, not on how value is constructed through transactions. The habitus shapes what agents do, but the moment of transaction itself is not theorized as the site where value comes into being. Bourdieu gives us the embodied agent; he does not give us embodied value creation.

Performativity of Markets

Michel Callon, Donald MacKenzie, and others in economic sociology have developed the concept of performativity:7 the idea that economic theories and models do not merely describe markets but actively shape and enact them. The Black-Scholes option pricing model, for example, did not discover the true price of options; it helped bring into being markets that behaved according to its predictions. Economics is performative—it makes the world it purports to describe.

This has striking parallels to enactivism. Just as enaction holds that cognition is not representation but active engagement that brings forth a world, performativity holds that markets are not natural objects but are performed into existence through practices, technologies, and theoretical frames. Markets are co-created through action and context.

Yet performativity focuses on institutions, devices, and models rather than embodied agents. The performers are theories, calculative tools, and market infrastructures—not organisms. The body is largely absent. MacKenzie’s traders are users of models, not perceiving organisms whose internal states shape valuation. The framework captures how markets are socially constructed but does not ground this construction in the embodied, perceptual activity of organisms. It is enaction at the level of institutions, not at the level of the body.

Neuroeconomics

Neuroeconomics attempts to ground economic behavior in neuroscience.8 Researchers like Colin Camerer and Antonio Damasio have shown that valuation has a neural basis—decision-making involves dopamine systems, reward circuits, and somatic markers.9 The brain is not a disembodied calculator but a biological organ whose operations are shaped by affect, arousal, and bodily states.

This is unquestionably embodied. Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis holds that emotions and bodily sensations are integral to rational decision-making, not impediments to it. The body matters.

But neuroeconomics typically retains the representational framework that enactivism critiques. The brain is said to compute values, encode preferences, represent expected utilities. Neural activity is the implementation of a computational process whose logic is fundamentally mentalistic. The enactivist argues that this misses the point: cognition is not computation; meaning is not representation. Neuroeconomics localizes value in the brain rather than in the dynamic coupling of organism and environment. It tells us where in the brain valuation happens; it does not tell us that value is enacted through transaction.

Behavioral Economics

Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler have documented systematic deviations from the rational choice model.10 Loss aversion, framing effects, present bias, anchoring—the list of cognitive biases is long and empirically robust. Behavioral economics challenges the idealized rational actor of neoclassical theory and has reshaped policy discussions around “nudges” and choice architecture.

This might seem like an ally. After all, behavioral economics undermines the disembodied rational actor by showing that real humans are influenced by context, emotion, and cognitive limitation. It takes psychology seriously.

Yet behavioral economics documents deviations from rationality without reconceptualizing what rationality is. The biases are errors—departures from a normative standard that remains intact. The framework does not ask whether the “bias” might be a perfectly rational response given the organism’s internal state. Alliesthesia shows that the same stimulus genuinely has different hedonic value depending on physiological condition. This is not bias; it is adaptive perception. Behavioral economics treats preferences as stable internal states that are imperfectly expressed due to cognitive limitations. It does not treat preferences as patterns emerging from transactions rather than prior causes of them.

The Gap

What emerges from this survey is a gap. Each tradition approaches the territory of embodied economic action from a different angle, but none occupies it fully:

Tradition What it gets right What it misses
Ecological rationality Agent-environment coupling Not fully embodied; value not enacted
Evolutionary economics Context-sensitivity, adaptation Agents are firms, not organisms
Practice theory Embodied dispositions Sociological, not value creation
Performativity Markets as enacted Institutional, not bodily
Neuroeconomics Neural basis of valuation Retains representationalism
Behavioral economics Challenges rational actor Treats biases as errors, not adaptation

The synthesis proposed here—value as enacted by embodied organisms, with Bitcoin as the scaffold that makes this enaction visible—has no direct precedent. The ingredients exist; no one has combined them.

The Need for a Scaffold

If value is enacted through transactions, and transactions leave traces, then the accumulation of traces creates the environment for future enaction. Each transaction modifies the conditions under which the next transaction occurs.

But traces are fragile. Memory fades. Records diverge. Ledgers conflict. For most of human history, the “state of play” in economic relations has been distributed across countless partial, local, often contradictory records—bank ledgers, contracts, mental accounts of favors owed, cultural understandings of debt and obligation. Each is a reflection of economic reality, but each is distorted, incomplete, inaccessible to most.

What would it mean to have a universal scaffold for enacted value—a single structure on which all agents could build, a common reference point that reflects the state of play with high fidelity and global accessibility?

It would need to be:

  • Neutral: not controlled by any party to the transactions
  • Durable: resistant to revision after the fact
  • Accessible: readable by any agent, anywhere
  • Reliable: the more it is used, the more trustworthy it becomes

Bitcoin as Universal Abacus

Bitcoin is this scaffold.

Not because it has intrinsic value. Not because Bitcoiners subjectively prefer it. But because its mathematical and physical properties make it uniquely suited to serve as the structure on which value can be enacted.

The timechain is a sequence of blocks, each cryptographically linked to its predecessor, each requiring the expenditure of energy to produce. This energy expenditure is not metaphorical. The computational work that secures each block is physically real—electrons moving through circuits, heat dissipating into the environment, entropy increasing. The result is a configuration of matter that could not exist without the specific sequence of events that produced it.

This is the scaffold: a structure built from accumulated thermodynamic work, extending into the past, providing a stable foundation for present activity.

The chain tip—the most recent block, the current state—is the reflective surface. It reflects the state of play among all agents who have transacted on the chain. It is high-fidelity: the reflection is accurate, because falsifying it would require redoing the thermodynamic work beneath it. It is globally accessible: anyone can read the surface, verify the depth, and transact upon it.

Stratigraphy and Surface

The architecture is stratigraphic, like layers of sedimentary rock.

Each block is deposited atop the previous, becoming part of the structure that supports what comes next. The deeper layers are older, more settled, harder to disturb. The surface is where new activity occurs—where agents read the current state and write new transactions. What is surface becomes depth as new blocks are added.

This temporal structure matters. The past is literally beneath the present. Agents don’t interact with the whole history—they interact with the surface. But their confidence in the surface depends on the depth beneath it. The scaffold works because most of it is not being actively touched; it is holding everything up.

Energy is converted into historical evidence. The current configuration of the ledger is proof—not testimony, but physical proof—that a specific sequence of transactions occurred. Like a fossil that is not a representation of an ancient organism but is continuous with that organism’s existence, the timechain is not a representation of economic history but is the crystallized residue of enacted value.

Why This Abacus

Why Bitcoin and not another blockchain? Why this scaffold and not a competing one?

Because economic systems converge on the hardest available money—the form most resistant to debasement, most reliable as a reference point, most immune to unilateral revision. Gold served this function for millennia because of its physical properties: scarce, durable, divisible, recognizable. Bitcoin serves it now because of its mathematical properties: algorithmically scarce, thermodynamically secured, globally verifiable, censorship-resistant.

Once a threshold of adoption is crossed, the network effects compound. The more agents use the scaffold, the more useful it becomes; the more useful it becomes, the more agents use it. The stratigraphic depth accumulates. The reflective surface gains fidelity. Alternative scaffolds, lacking this depth, cannot offer the same reliability.

This is not a claim about intrinsic superiority. It is a claim about path-dependence and convergence. Bitcoin is becoming the universal abacus not because of what it is but because of the role it has come to play—and the physical properties that enable it to play that role better than any alternative.

The Abacus and the Scaffold

An abacus is a tool for counting—for representing states and performing calculations. The beads can be moved; the configuration read; the result used.

A traditional abacus has no memory. You reset it and start over. Each calculation is independent of the last.

Bitcoin is an abacus that cannot forget. Every configuration is preserved in the layers beneath. Every calculation leaves a trace. The scaffold accumulates; the surface reflects; the agents enact.

This is why “Abacus” names this book. Bitcoin is humanity’s universal counting frame for value. But it is an abacus of a particular kind—one whose structure grows from accumulated history, whose reliability derives from thermodynamic depth, and whose function is to enable the construction of value across all agents, all places, and all time.

The abacus is the surface. The scaffold is the depth. Value is what happens when embodied agents interact with both.

  1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1953).↩︎

  2. Francisco J. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).↩︎

  3. Gerd Gigerenzer, Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2008); Vernon L. Smith, Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms (Cambridge University Press, 2008).↩︎

  4. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper & Brothers, 1942).↩︎

  5. W. Brian Arthur, Complexity and the Economy (Oxford University Press, 2014).↩︎

  6. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press, 1990).↩︎

  7. Michel Callon, The Laws of the Markets (Blackwell, 1998); Donald MacKenzie, “An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets,” MIT Press 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–29.↩︎

  8. Colin Camerer et al., “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 1 (2005): 9–64.↩︎

  9. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Penguin Books, 1994).↩︎

  10. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus; Giroux, 2011); Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).↩︎