Moving beyond traditional cryptographic and game-theoretic analyses, we model Nakamoto consensus as a dissipative structure maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium. By mapping macroscopic network observables onto a one-dimensional Ginzburg--Landau framework, we propose a falsifiable phenomenological description of blockchain immutability grounded in non-equilibrium statistical physics. In this description, the emergence of a canonical history appears as a continuous ordering transition, and time is treated not as an externally imposed global clock, but as an emergent coarse-grained variable driven by irreversible dissipation. By coupling network power, latency, and block interval into an effective temperature, the model yields a protocol-dependent upper bound on the informational volume of bytes per block (V₁, ₂ₑ₈ₓ) and anchors the ledger's macroscopic stability in the embodied exergy of the physical hardware substrate. In particular, computational validation latency () imposes an irreducible constraint even in the formal limit of infinite communication bandwidth. We further interpret the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) set as an effective Markov blanket providing a compressed state description, and we analyze deterministic subsidy step changes (the protocol's ``Halving'') as non-equilibrium thermodynamic quenches. Within this framework, the observed dynamics are consistent with a persistent violation of the fluctuation--dissipation theorem, maintained by the continuous expenditure of exogenous exergy.
Ranaora et al. (Sun,) studied this question.