Bitcoin mining generates immense heat as a byproduct, which has historically been wasted energy. Now, companies are packaging mining rigs as home heaters. While inefficient for heating, it represents a clever strategy of finding commercial value in operational waste, turning a liability into a potential asset.

In physics, the observer is often conflated with the measurer. Bitcoin provides a model where measurement is an objective, internal process—the mining of a block. Observation is the separate, subsequent act of verification by a node. This clarifies a long-standing ambiguity in physics.

Bitcoin's finite supply is presented as a necessary boundary for a complete logical system, without which measurements become meaningless. This is analogous to physical constants like Planck temperature, which act as boundaries for physical laws, suggesting boundaries are essential for defining reality.

Economics can be viewed as the physics of information, where profit is the surplus created when intelligent agents organize chaos into useful order (reduce entropy) faster than the system naturally decays back into disorder.

The mempool, containing all possible but unconfirmed transactions, acts as an analogy for quantum superposition. It represents a pre-measured state of potential. The mining of a block serves as the "measurement" that collapses this potential into a single, deterministic, classical reality.

The paper posits that Bitcoin blocks represent discrete, indivisible units of time. This provides a real-world, observable model that challenges the long-held assumption in physics that time is a continuous, infinitely divisible parameter, thus solving the double-spend problem logically.

The conversation about Bitcoin's energy usage often misses a key point. The network doesn't just consume energy; it actively encourages developing underutilized energy sources by monetizing stranded or wasted energy, driving innovation toward a more energy-abundant world.

We are inherently part of the physical universe, making it impossible to step outside of time to measure it. Bitcoin, as a human-made system that produces its own discrete time via blocks, offers a novel external perspective, allowing us to observe the mechanics of time from the outside in.

Instead of viewing time as a fourth dimension appended to space (spacetime), the authors propose "time-space." Here, time, as an ordered sequence of thermodynamic commitments (blocks), is the foundational constraint from which spatial and causal order emerge as derivative properties.