Everything can and must be thought of as a clock. Bitcoin is a ledger of information that serves as a monetary clock. Quantum thermodynamics and related disciplines concern the flow of information and energy, providing the appropriate language to describe clocks. All clocks operate by proof of work to depict the consumption of information/energy. When you truly understand this perspective, it becomes clear that a clock is essentially a thermal machine that creates the illusion of time. Like an engine, a clock uses the flow of energy to perform work, producing exhaust gases in the process. Engines use this energy for propulsion; clocks use it to tick. The exhaust gases in cells are encoded in the CO2 and water created with the amount of heat generated. Entropy, in the form of energy or information, is the quantity whose relentless increase in the universe is closely associated with the arrow of time.

A clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes where energy is distributed among more particles or over a larger area. Energy tends to dissipate, and entropy, a measure of this dissipation, tends to increase, simply because there are many more ways for energy to spread out than for it to be highly concentrated.

Since all clocks operate by proof of work, it should be clear why you would not want your money denominated in a proof-of-stake currency.

How do you create the concept of a singular time if your system spans the galaxy? How do you measure time in a timeless realm? To answer these questions, we need to closely examine the concept of time itself and how cells and Bitcoin handle it. The physics of organisms creates time for cells. Cellular organization creates time by using sunlight. Sunlight or the photons that comprise it are timeless. They never experience time. As for Bitcoin, money in the form of tokens is timeless, but monetary ledgers are not.

Bitcoin does the same. Bitcoin creates its own time: block time, more commonly known as block height. Block height allows Bitcoin to track things: cells and Bitcoin are decentralized timekeepers that track energy and information. There are two decentralized systems, one naturally created by evolution and the other by humans. Here is an irony: there is no absolute time in a decentralized system. Absolute time exists only in the Newtonian mechanistic world that Einstein disrupted in 1905 with the theory of relativity.

Bitcoin and cells uses causality and unpre­dictability to build its own sense of now.  Timekeeping devices have trans­formed civiliza­tions more than once. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in 1934: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern indus­trial age.” Today, it is again a timekeeping device that is trans­forming our civiliza­tion: a clock, not computers, is the true key-machine of the modern infor­ma­tional age. And this clock is Bitcoin.

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I encourage you to read the book by Valery Chalidze (1938-2018) titled *Entropy Demystified: Order, Life & Money* (2000), written eight years before Bitcoin.