Could the mathematics behind blockchains help describe the Arrow of Time? Is it possible that this discussion about Boltzmann Brains, consciousness and the arrow of time on the old Everything List by Hal Finney could have sparked the idea of the blockchain?
Imagine if the arrow of time can be modeled by the blockchain. Just as blocks are added to the blockchain by a winning miner, and the distributed ledger is updated, perhaps quantum entanglement can be explained using the blockchain as a model. This implies a computational universe. Increasing entropy is like mining with more and more computational power mapping to the size and energy output of stars. Time and space communication paradoxes are possibly resolved using the blockchain model as a rule for communication, as a distributed shared state - the universe, the stars, black holes, and humans etc..., effectively mine the transactions of the universe. The blockchain model perhaps shows that an omniscient universe, like Leibniz' monad, possessing non-locality, can co-exist with a local model where there appears only to be one reality, one truth, and everything is local. Just like the blockchain, everyone gets a copy - or is a copy of the monad. Interactions in spacetime could be like a Bitcoin transaction, and position and time when those quantum numbers change is recorded by each observer, just like each miner gets copies of all transactions (aka particle interactions). Perhaps symmetry is broken because just like the blockchain, it takes little energy to encrypt transactions into the blockchain, but takes massive amounts of energy to decrypt without all the private keys used to encrypt the data.
Anyways, it's just a crazy thought at this point, but my intuition says that the mathematics behind crypto is not exclusive to man-made things but applies to natural phenomenon as well.