Moving beyond traditional cryptographic and game-theoretic analyses, we formalise the Nakamoto consensus as a dissipative structure maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium. By mapping the network's macroscopic observables to a mean-field Landau framework, we establish a falsifiable, physical foundation for blockchain immutability. We demonstrate that the emergence of a canonical history manifests as a continuous phase transition where time is not an a priori external clock, but an emergent thermal property strictly conjugate to irreversible heat dissipation. By coupling network power, latency, and block interval into an effective temperature, our model reveals a strict thermodynamic limit on the informational volume of bytes per block (VB, crit). This limit transcends bandwidth, constituting an irreducible thermal bound dictated by the silicon substrate's computational validation latency (gamma) to prevent Kosterlitz-Thouless topological collapse. Furthermore, we recontextualise the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) set as a Markov blanket required to dissipate spatial Shannon entropy, and show that deterministic step-functions in the exergy injection rate (the protocol's ``Halving'') function as first-order thermodynamic quenches. In this non-equilibrium regime, the network's violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem is dynamically stabilised through the continuous expenditure of exogenous exergy.
Pascal et al. (Sun,) studied this question.