Here is the beginning of my book "The Physics of Bitcoin".

CHAPTER ONE
A Life at the Edge of Order and Chaos
The lecture had been sitting in my browser tab for three days. I kept meaning to watch it, kept getting pulled away by the ordinary business of a scientist's life — data to analyze, papers to review, the endless small fires of academic existence. It was 2012, and I was a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, a long way from the Louisiana college where I had spent seven years teaching physics, and a longer way still from the Italian child who had built his first telescope at the age of ten out of a conviction that the universe owed him an explanation.
The lecture was by Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist turned complexity scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, recorded at a TED conference and titled, with the confident simplicity of the best scientific talks, "The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations." I pressed play, intending to watch for ten minutes. I watched it three times in a row.
West was describing something I had known about in the abstract for years as a physicist, power laws, scaling relationships, the mathematical regularities that appear, improbably, across systems as different as heartbeats and highway networks. But he was showing something I had never fully appreciated: that these laws did not care whether the system was biological or human-made.
A city, West argued, was not a machine built to a blueprint. It was a living organism, and it obeyed the same scaling laws as a mammal. Double the size of a mammal, and its metabolic rate increases by only seventy-five percent, not one hundred — a sublinear scaling that holds with extraordinary precision across species as different as mice and blue whales. Double the size of a city, and its economic output, its rates of innovation, its infrastructure — all scale superlinearly, by approximately fifteen percent more than you would expect from simple proportionality. Cities, like organisms, were not exponential. They were power laws.
A city was not a machine built to a blueprint. It was a living organism and it obeyed the same scaling laws as a mammal.
I paused the video. My mind had gone somewhere else entirely.
I had been thinking about Bitcoin for several months by then, turning it over with the particular kind of persistent, low-grade puzzlement that physicists develop for phenomena that do not behave as expected. I had first encountered it through a newsletter from a transhumanist organization I had been part of for years — a community of scientists, engineers, and futurists who believed that technology could and should be used to radically extend human life and capability.
The article that introduced me to Bitcoin was written by an engineer, and it spoke to me in the language I understood: not financial speculation, but civilizational transformation.
The author's argument was that transhumanists wanted to do extraordinary things — cure cancer, defeat aging, get to Mars — and that all of it required resources. Bitcoin, then trading at around nine dollars, might one day be worth a million. If so, this was a redistribution of wealth unique in human history, and those who recognized it early enough would have the means to fund the future they wanted to build.
I found this argument compelling, but not for the reason you might expect. I was not particularly moved by the promise of wealth. What arrested me was the scientific and mathematical architecture of the thing — the elegance of a decentralized ledger, the cryptographic proof-of-work, the hard cap on supply. I had spent my career studying systems. This looked like a very interesting one.