A few weeks ago, I learned something about energy conservation from an unexpected source: a fig tree.
My family and I were picking figs together. They were delicious to eat on the spot, but we harvested far more than we could consume fresh. Within days, the rest would rot. Unless we turned them into jam, which my wife did. By removing the skins, cooking the figs with sugar, and sealing the mixture in glass jars, she transformed perishable fruit into something that would last through winter and beyond.
We don't actually eat much jam in my house, but the process got me thinking about why people invented it in the first place. It wasn't culinary boredom—it was necessity. Jam is a technology for preserving calories across time, converting an abundant harvest into stored energy that could sustain you months later when nothing grows.
Being a Bitcoiner, I couldn't help but see a parallel.
Money emerged to solve a similar problem, but across both time and space. In a barter economy, if I make knives and you grow wheat, we can only trade if our needs align perfectly in that moment. If I don't need wheat right now, we're stuck. Money breaks this deadlock. By selling my knife for money, I can store the value of my labor and spend it later, or somewhere else entirely, on something I actually need. Money preserves economic energy.
Bitcoin takes this concept further in two distinct ways.
First, as a form of money, Bitcoin aims to be an ideal store of value—resistant to inflation, seizure, and debasement. Like jam in a sealed jar, it's designed to preserve purchasing power across time.
Second, and perhaps more remarkably, Bitcoin enables a new kind of energy arbitrage across space. Imagine a hydroelectric dam in a remote corner of Africa, generating electricity that can't economically reach any population center. That stranded energy can power Bitcoin mining rigs. The mined Bitcoin can then be sold instantly to someone in Manhattan to pay their electricity bill. In effect, the Bitcoin network converts geographically isolated energy into globally transferable value.
This isn't really a post about jam, or figs, or even Bitcoin specifically. It's about the technologies—ancient and modern—that allow human societies to conserve energy across time and space. These are the innovations that let us scale, coordinate, and thrive.