Ethereum Papers book chapter
ETH is Matter
A giant clock sits inside a mountain in Texas called the Clock of the Long Now. The clock was built to be as sturdy as possible using physical elements– stone and steel – to guarantee its longevity. It is meant to keep time for 10,000 years and designed to function with as little human intervention as possible.
Ethereum uses a different approach to longevity, prioritizing adaptability over fixed structures. Instead of hard physics, it uses a soft strategy of combining scarcity and stories to get humans to continue running its software. Each block produced is a unit of time ticking forward.