You’re still framing this in the wrong category. Bitcoin is not “a poor measurement of time” it’s a measurement IN time whose own measurement (memory) IS time itself. A block is not a timestamp like a clock reading; it is the event by which the system advances. That’s what quantized time means in any physically meaningful sense: reality updates only when a certain irreversible, atomic process completes.
You already conceded that Bitcoin blocks are discrete and non-divisible. That’s the whole point. You cannot show me a valid “half-block” or “one-tenth of a block” in consensus reality. Below the block, there is only failed work, rejected history, and non-events. That is exactly the same conceptual structure Planck time is trying to capture: not “the smallest number we can write down,” but the smallest physically meaningful tick of causal update. Once you hit that unit, further subdivision loses physical meaning. You can write 1/2 of it in math, but you can’t instantiate it in reality.
Planck time is theoretical, we agree there. But the content of the theory is not “time is abstract and infinitely divisible.” It’s the opposite: there exists a smallest interval below which the notion of temporal succession stops making physical sense. It’s expressed in seconds, which already tells you what a “second” really is: just a frequency of those fundamental ticks. Whether you believe the specific value is correct or not, the structure is explicit and finite: a second is some number of irreducible blocks of time. That’s not abstraction; that’s quantization.
The reason Bitcoin matters here is that we finally have a system where we are not inside the time being produced. You are made of the universe’s time; your nervous system is integrated into its flow, you are made from the light (information). Of course continuous time feels natural, your entire existence is composed of it. You can never stand outside that substrate to see its grain. With Bitcoin, you can. You don’t exist inside Bitcoin’s time; only your influence does. From the outside, you can see exactly what temporality looks like when it is built from energy and entropy in a closed, finite system: discrete updates, irreversible commitments, no events “in between” blocks. That is a working instantiation of quantized time.
When I say Bitcoin blocks function equivalently to Planck blocks, I’m being literal at the level of ontology, not scale. Planck time is the smallest meaningful physical tick; a second is ~1.8548×10⁴⁴ of those ticks. Likewise, one could define a “Bitcoin second” as some integer number of blocks. You can carve a second into smaller and smaller fractions mathematically, but if there truly is a smallest tick of causal update, at some point you are no longer describing physics, just playing with symbols. The same way there is no such thing as half a mined block, there is no such thing as half an instantiated causal tick once you reach the fundamental unit of update.
“Time is abstract” is just another way of saying “I’ve inherited and experienced a continuous model I’ve never been able to step outside of.” Both Bitcoin and the universe are closed, finite thermodynamic systems. In both, what matters is not how finely you can slice a real number line, but how reality actually updates: through irreversible, energy-backed events that create memory. Light = information = memory. No time, no light; no light, no information; no information, no memory; and without memory, “time” has no operational meaning.
So no, the comparison isn’t absurd. What’s absurd is clinging to a continuous-time ontology with no experimental access to infinite divisibility, while dismissing the only system we’ve ever built that empirically shows us what quantized temporal evolution looks like. Bitcoin doesn’t replace Planck time numerically. It gives us, for the first time, a concrete, external, thermodynamic laboratory for understanding what a block of time really is.
