The article itself isn't great, but it does briefly mention Leslie Lamport's 1978 paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distrib­uted System."

In a 2016 interview, Lamport talked about his experience writing this paper and its association with special relativity. This short clip [0] from that interview is worth a watch.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRouGH0oMg

I really dislike these faux-philosophical pieces about Bitcoin that posit some cosmic or metaphysical problem that Bitcoin and specifically proof-of-work is the solution to. Even when it is something like having a interstellar civilizational clock that's achievable and maybe plausibly useful, it's presumed that that's like some very very important thing to have and it's treated as much more profound than it really deserves to be, and that Bitcoin/PoW is the only solution. This article is a more mild example of this writing style but it still feels like it does it.

There was another article I saw a while ago that tried to argue seriously that broadcasting the Bitcoin blockchain to space is how we'll show to aliens that we're an advanced civilization capable of harnessing vast energy. If someone has the link please share, I can't find it at the moment.

Edit: a different example from Michael Saylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXix6OIU1hw

> How do you create the concept of a singular time if your system spans the galaxy?

Pretty sure that's ruled out by Special Relativity, no matter how popular Bitcoin becomes.

What’s interesting here, I think, is not the thesis but the prolific madness of some writers. I came to the same general conclusion about what I guess you could call “Byzantine sync” in like 2017 when I first read the Bitcoin white paper. But I didn’t feel the need to write a thesis. Like, it’s one of the first things you stumble over when you mull things. I mean maybe reality itself is a blooming blockchain where quantum state is actually local and echoes outward resolving with some wild rules when there are conflicts, and the expansion of the universe is due to an accretion of this past information, stacking up in some imperceptible yet dimension.

The other thing is solving global consistency isn’t necessarily… well, necessary. Maybe the truth about blockchain is that we don’t need a global unified network of clocks, that is fault tolerant against cancerous internals. Maybe the more efficient architecture is to have a trusted entity that we delegate to.

In conclusion, who cares