Giovanni Santostasi, a PhD in astrophysics with ~11 years teaching experience and participation in large scientific collaborations (notably LIGO), describes how a TED talk by Jeffrey West on scaling and power laws led him to explore power-law patterns in Bitcoin on-chain data (addresses, price, hash rate). Finding pervasive power laws in those metrics convinced him of Bitcoin’s structure and motivated him to engage with Minotaur Trading Systems after meeting the team in Nashville. He evaluated their trading bot scientifically, helped integrate power-law signals, and views the bot as an effective, community-serving tool.
Chapters
I am a PhD in astrophysics. I taught in college for several years. Physics. Almost 11 years in college. I was part of large scientific projects. One of them is called ligo. You know, it has thousands of scientists working together. They're trying to detect gravitational waves from black hole neutron stars. You know, this was my field of interest. One day I was watching the TED talk. It's by this physicist called Jeffrey west, and he's an expert in studying this phenomena that is called scale. So scale is when you have different phenomena in nature and this phenomena goes from being very, very small and then it grows, it grows, or it covers a vast range of possibilities. Like, for example, a famous scale scaling principle is that if you have an animal and has a certain mass, it's going to consume a certain level of energy, right? But it's not like that. It's more sophisticated than that. It's actually a power law, what is called a power law because a lot of these scaling laws are expressed by power laws. So there are many, many of these laws everywhere like these power laws. And I was familiar with them, but I didn't know they apply also to social phenomena, you know, to human beings. While he was talking about this, I immediately saw the relevance for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is this living city. And so I went online and started to download all the data. Because with Bitcoin, we have the fortune of getting all the possible information from the chain, right? You can get the number of addresses, you can get the price, you can get hash rate. So I went to this frenzy where I was plotting all these quantities and there were power laws everywhere. It was like a revolution, you know, because now I could make sense of Bitcoin. And in fact, this is when I jumped in and became a bitcoiner. I came to a conference and Costa contacted me and said, giovanni, look, we have this trading system. We really like the power law because the power law gave us. He said it was almost like an altimeter or a radar. You know, they had this very good trading system. But once they discover the power law, give them a sense of direction of what bitcoin is doing. And also it allows them to calibrate better their algorithm and all kind of things like that. And they said, you saw that, you are at a conference. And you know, this was in Nashville last year. Why don't we meet? So I went and I really like the team, etcetera, and said, look, you know, the only way I have to appreciate what you're doing is that if you let me try, I need to have scientific evidence that your system is really working. I started to see the result. They were just amazing. I could see that they bought AD intelligence. We started to talk about how to integrate with power law, what they did to integrate. We started to collaborate and I was very surprised of how it behaves and the results and also the intelligence and that basically the bot works. I see it as a service to the community. I'm really enthusiastic about working with the team and making it available to people, you know, because that component is very important to me too. I want more and more people benefiting from Bitcoin.
