The laws of physics are the only limitations as to how fast automobiles can travel there.
They have also figured out how to make very safe fast cars, because nobody wants to die getting somewhere fast.
Consider the challenges faced by German car engineers compared to those in a highly-regulated country where speed limits are far lower than the speeds observed on the Autobahn.
Thus, the mechanisms that Satoshi built into Bitcoin to enforce its rules are nothing less than the laws of physics themselves.
Bitcoin lets owners of its units of currency store them where only the rightful owners can find them.
The laws of physics dictate that over the entire foreseeable future of the universe, nobody can be expected to guess one of these astronomical numbers where satoshis are being stored.
If you HODL satoshis, you are guaranteed they will not be stolen by a thief guessing where they are stored .
That steady pace that Bitcoin is after is to ensure that one block will be added to the blockchain, on average, once every ten minutes, forever.
Once again, Satoshi utilized the eternal, unchanging laws of physics to engineer Bitcoin to always achieve this pace.
If all the world’s energy or even all of the sun’s energy was directed toward trying to accelerate this pace, Bitcoin would “slam on the brakes” within 2,016 blocks at most, slowing down the block discovery rate to one block every ten minutes.
Not even the pretentious arrogance of a bow-tie wearing, award-winning economist, eating Russian caviar at a cocktail party for New York’s elites and claiming that Bitcoin “has a fundamental value of zero” can change the actual laws of physics.
As we did when comparing German car engineers to their peers in countries with low speed limits, let’s consider the results of the engineering efforts of Satoshi and other Bitcoin contributors with those of the designers of the incumbent monetary system — fiat money.
Whereas nobody can steal or seize satoshis, fiat money is stolen and seized so often that we don’t even keep count of how many times this happens or how much fiat money is affected.
To summarize, by relying on the eternal and unchanging laws of physics, Bitcoin guarantees perfect reliability that its promises of property protection and continued operation will always be in force.
In the final analysis, it is ultimately a voluntary decision for each individual to choose whether they prefer Bitcoin and the reliability of physics over fiat money and trust in politicians.
*Proof of work requires that someone that produces unpredictable, random-looking numbers, but always the same output for the same input.