The future
Lifetime as the most valuable currency
For Bairo Gonzalez, every product he creates is measured in human life: time is the only currency that can't be reprinted. An idea, not a price.
You can lose money and earn it back. You can lose a house and build another. An afternoon that has passed never comes back.
The measure of everything
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez often says that every product he creates is based on human life, on history and on something that will never come back. It's the sentence that explains who he is: someone who lost almost everything several times and discovered, at rock bottom, that the scarcest asset wasn't money. It was time.
He calls lifetime energy what a person hands over when they decide to build something. The late nights. The years. The blood, in the word he himself uses. And he thinks that whoever invests in a story invests, above all, in that time handed over.
An idea with ancestors
He didn't invent this intuition, and he doesn't want to pretend he did. Almost two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a short treatise called On the Shortness of Life. In it, he observes that no one lets another person take their money, but everyone lets others take their time, the one thing of which it would be right to be miserly. Life isn't short, he wrote; we are the ones who waste it.
In 1983, Steve Jobs asked the Macintosh team to make the computer boot ten seconds faster. The argument, as told by Andy Hertzfeld: if millions of people turned on the machine every day, ten seconds would add up to the equivalent of several human lifetimes a year. Saving seconds was, literally, saving lives.
And in 1980 the American lawyer Edgar Cahn created time banks, in which an hour of service is worth an hour of service, no matter who provides it. The doctor's hour and the hour of the neighbor who fixes a gate weigh the same.
The BTZ Chain yardstick
It's from this lineage that the yardstick Bairo chose for BTZ Chain is born: "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price. It doesn't say what a coin is worth; it says what the coin wants to remind us of. No one needs to buy anything to understand this idea, and it promises no appreciation. BICOIN is the governance currency of a network, and the idea that sustains it is philosophical before it is financial: that a person's time be respected as the most precious thing there is.
In the future he describes
He imagines a time when companies are also judged by the lifetime they give back to people. A bank that saves the market trader two hours in line. A triage system that saves a mother three trips to the hospital. A legal analysis that saves a defendant months of waiting without an answer. He imagines that one day those returned hours will be counted with the same care with which profit is counted today.
He also imagines a world in which machines do so much of the repetitive work that human time is freed for what only humans do. And he asks: what will we do with it? Care for those we love? Learn? Create? Or waste it again, as Seneca feared?
Technology can give back time. Only the person can decide what it will mean.
The time he himself handed over
Bairo spent six months shut in at home, in front of a computer, learning to build what he didn't know how to build. He spent years in the shadows of a country he loved, without papers. He spent sleepless nights with many people depending on him. He doesn't count those hours as lost. He counts them as invested, because each of them taught him something that later became a company.
For him, time devoted with intention is never wasted. Time lived without intention, that is.
A scene
A father looks at the clock on his phone and sees that the agribusiness platform's app saved him, that week, six hours of lines, spreadsheets and phone calls. Six hours. He closes the phone, calls his daughter and goes to teach her to ride a bike on the dirt road in front of the house.
That afternoon, no one recorded anything on any network. But, if time is the most valuable currency, that was the best deal he made all year.