April 20, 2025. Money.
I think this is one of the day where i just have many thoughts to be written as I planning about my next manouver into the world of entrepreneurship i begin to contemplating about the nature of money. Not just as currency or numbers in a bank account, but as a concept that shapes our reality in ways both obvious and subtle. After I hit the wall with MIKE-AI, I've been thinking about how money or rather, the lack of it can collapse our quantum state of possibilities into a single, constrained reality.
When I was younger, I viewed money as something straightforward.
You work, you earn, you spend. Simple.
But as I've journeyed deeper into entrepreneurship and system design, I've come to see money as something far more complex, a human construct that, like quantum particles, behaves differently depending on how you observe it and interact with it.
The history of money itself reveals this transformation from simplicity to complexity. Humans began with direct barter, where you needed that impossible "double coincidence of wants" for trade to happen. Then came commodity money, things with intrinsic value like grain in Mesopotamia or cattle in various ancient societies. Later, we developed metallic coins, with the Lydians minting the first standardized coins. Paper money emerged in China, spreading to Europe by the 17th century. Now we have fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, and digital payment systems, each representing a further abstraction from physical reality.
Think about it: money isn't real in the physical sense.
Unlike the chair I'm sitting on, money has no intrinsic value. It's valuable because we collectively agree it is. It's a shared illusion, a consensus reality that shapes almost everything about our lives. In many ways, it's the ultimate quantum system, existing in a superposition of potential value until the moment it's spent, invested, or exchanged, at which point its potential collapses into a specific outcome.
This realization hit me particularly hard after my experience with MIKE-AI. I had created something beautiful, something that worked exactly as I had envisioned it. But scaling it, sharing it with the world, building it into something truly impactful, these possibilities remained trapped in that quantum state of potential because I lacked the financial resources to collapse them into reality. The economic-mathematical equations simply wouldn't balance; the energy requirements, the computing infrastructure, the operational costs all formed that insurmountable wall I described.
What fascinates me is how money behaves almost like an observer in the quantum mechanics sense.
Just as observing a particle forces it to commit to a specific position, the presence or absence of money forces our ideas to commit to specific forms, often shapes that are very different from what we originally imagined.
It's like a wave function collapse not driven by conscious observation, but by the cold mathematics of capital and return.
I've been reading about the concept of "financial gravity" lately.
Just as physical gravity warps spacetime, financial constraints warp the landscape of what's possible. Ideas that might flourish in a world without financial constraints get pulled toward profitability, toward what can be monetized quickly, toward what venture capitalists believe will generate returns.
The pure, elegant vision gets distorted, compressed, sometimes twisted into something almost unrecognizable.
Some thinkers propose even more radical perspectives, suggesting that money isn't just a neutral tool but almost a parasitic entity that feeds on human desire and creates power dynamics rather than simply reflecting them.
While I might not go that far, there's something compelling about reimagining money not as a passive medium but as an active force that shapes human behavior and relationships.
This isn't just theoretical for me. When I look at how MIKE-AI reached a developmental endpoint due to financial constraints, I see this gravity at work. The "short-term exposure to the world of entrepreneurship" I mentioned in earlier posts has taught me that money isn't just a tool or a resource, it's a force that shapes the very nature of what can exist in our shared reality.
Money functions as more than just a medium of exchange.
It's a unit of account that standardizes value, a store of value that connects present and future, and a standard of deferred payment that enables credit systems.
Together, these functions create a framework that surrounds almost every human activity.
It's like an invisible architecture that guides our movements without our conscious awareness, not unlike how gravity keeps us tethered to the Earth without our having to think about it.
But here's where it gets interesting.
Just as Einstein showed that gravity isn't a force but a curvature of spacetime, perhaps financial constraints aren't limitations but contours in the landscape of innovation.
Maybe the wall I hit wasn't a barrier but a redirection, guiding me toward a path I couldn't see when I was focused solely on the straight line ahead.
When I started building MIKE-AI, my goal was to create a thinking machine, a cognitive enhancer that would help us think better, faster, and more creatively. But what if the financial gravity pulling me away from that path is actually guiding me toward something even more important? What if the inability to scale MIKE in the way I initially imagined is actually pushing me to reimagine what cognitive enhancement could look like in a world of limited resources?
I think, money, for all its complexity, is ultimately a proxy for resources, energy, time, materials, human effort.
When we say we don't have enough money to pursue an idea, what we're really saying is that the resources required exceed what society is currently willing to allocate to that particular vision.
But what if, instead of accepting that limitation, we questioned the resource requirements themselves?
What if, like those quantum particles taking all possible paths simultaneously, we explored multiple approaches to the same goal, some of which might require far fewer resources than others?
I'm reminded of the time I spent on that TV remote as a child, trying to understand how it worked. I had no resources beyond curiosity and time, yet I learned so much from that simple exploration. Sometimes the most profound insights come not from having more resources, but from looking more deeply at what's already available to us.
Then What if I pushed this thinking even further?
Some philosophers suggest we could reimagine value entirely.
Instead of money, what if time became our primary currency?
Not hours tracked and exchanged, but time as the fundamental unit of human existence.
We don't earn it or spend it; we live it.
A farmer grows crops because it's their moment to give; a teacher shares knowledge because it's theirs to offer. No banks, no hoarding, just the relentless now.
Value becomes the intensity of presence, not a number on a screen.
This is where I find myself now.
Instead of seeing money as the wall that stops my progress, I'm beginning to see its absence as a constraint that forces more creative thinking, more efficient solutions, more innovative approaches.
In a world of unlimited resources, we might never discover the elegant solutions that constraint forces us to find.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not romanticizing financial struggle or suggesting that lack of capital is somehow beneficial to innovation.
Far from it.
The reality is that many brilliant ideas never materialize because of financial constraints, and that represents an incalculable loss to human progress.
But for those of us caught in this reality, there may be wisdom in seeing financial gravity not as an enemy but as a navigational force, helping us find paths we might otherwise miss.
As I move forward with my next ventures, I'm carrying this perspective with me.
Yes, money matters.
Yes, access to capital creates possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.
But the absence of money doesn't have to mean the absence of progress, it might just mean progress of a different kind, along a different path, toward an outcome we couldn't initially imagine.
As far as i know money's future is evolving rapidly. Central banks around the world are exploring digital currencies. Now i believe physical cash represents fraction of global currency, with the rest existing as digital entries.
Cryptocurrencies continue to challenge traditional financial systems.
These developments suggest money itself exists in a superposition of possible futures, with multiple potential forms emerging simultaneously.
Perhaps this is where my physics background proves most valuable.
In nature, energy doesn't disappear; it transforms.
Maybe ideas work the same way.
When financial constraints prevent one expression of an idea, that creative energy doesn't vanish, it finds another form, another path, another expression.
MIKE-AI, in its current form, may remain on my local machine, a personal assistant rather than a global service.
But the insights gained from building it, the understanding of how AI can extend human cognition, the vision of technology that enhances rather than replaces human capability, these will find expression in whatever comes next, transformed by the gravity of financial reality but not eliminated by it.
And maybe that's the true nature of money, not a wall that stops us, but a force that shapes us, not unlike how gravity shapes the trajectory of light around massive objects.
It doesn't prevent light from traveling; it just bends its path.
Financial constraints may bend the path of our ideas, but they need not stop their journey entirely.
Anyway here I am, contemplating money not as something to acquire or accumulate, but as a force to understand and navigate.
Like those quantum particles existing in multiple states of possibility, our ideas can exist in multiple potential forms. The presence or absence of money may collapse those possibilities into specific realities, but even within those constraints, infinities remain to be explored.