This is a fun thought experiment, but it's hard to accept the premise, since it seems less important that we agree to coordinate around one single time value, vs having the semantics of time be broadly equivalent, e.g., 5am means nearly the same thing to someone in Tokyo as it does to someone in Omaha.

It would impose significantly more cognitive burden on me to try to imagine the perspective of any random person speaking about time than it does to have to correct for multiple time zones, which I have tools to help me do whenever needed; and I expect I have a more challenging multi-time-zone coordination problem than most.

To make this even more explicit, imagine the same issues in play, except for seasons. Right now, in North America, we're moving into winter; but in Uruguay, you're moving into summer. We could just agree to take Uruguay as a reference, but now "summer" means vastly different things to you and I, even if the term is literally describing the same universal time. The seasonal affordances of the world predominate in human affairs over the absolute time in which those affordances unfold. Blocktime loses all those distinctions.

BC & AD are overwhelmingly popular despite most of the world not being Christian.

Pretty much all of the religions support it, and we will therefore see a lot of resistance to this change because it will feel like an attack on religion to them.

Of course one day, perhaps a century or two from now, everyone on earth will use bitcoin every day and think in blocktimes. At that point it'll just happen on it's own, no organization needed.

You're just too early to be giving this much thought. Much like I was when I posted this exact topic on the BitcoinTalk forums in 2012. ;)

Firstly I’d like to point out that AD,BC etc… are references to specific eras and are not not the same as the units of time used for daily occurrences

Technically we already have BB and I have seen talks where people start with “before blockchain”.

Knock-on effects would be huge. In America around 33 people die every year due to time zone changes and that’s nothing compared to animals like deer who don’t know we’re starting traffic one hour earlier… I think I read it’s over 33 thousand.

It’s an interesting concept to have the whole world on the same time. Would we become a race that at X time half go to sleep and another time the other half. Opposed to 9-5 standard life. I wonder how that would work… urgh thanks for the rabbit whole ok about to go on…

We definitely would need something that can be measured much finer than waiting for the next block. Our whole science counts on the very small and precise measurement system we have today.

As for interplanetary - a standard time would smooth operations but again different planets and rotations would drastically alter the way we need to record and measure time.

We would need a drastic scientific discovery to alter time we have now in my opinion.

Don’t forget, time has always existed it’s the measurement of time we created and we did so over hundreds of years of study and observation. It’s aligned to our interplanetary observations and scientific methods.

In conclusion: I don’t think block time will be a good substitute for daily time but I have the best use case for it: a measurement of time between validated blocks added to a chain. 😂

It wouldn't be precise. Blocks can happen in 1 second, 10 minutes or 20 minutes or any. You never know.

It will be used alongside the other independent measurements of time we use.

For example, a day and a year are completely independent as a day is tied to how fast the Earth spins around its own axis and a year is tied to how fast the Earth makes a loop around the sun.

A year is not 365 days, that's just an approximation, in the same way that a block is 10 minutes, approximately.

Absolute nightmare. Blocks arent produced on a deterministic interval. You wouldn’t be able to plan it coordinate things.

Also, bitcoin doesnt work past mars.

@tip_nz - timechain.