Since re-reading the Library of Babel (cf. previous post) the concept has been sitting in the back of my mind, interacting with other thoughts.
Today, I was playing with the idea that the Library of Babel might be a physical archive of a blockchain. Each book contains a block, which is mostly complete gibberish: cryptographic hash codes. Every so often, a meaningful sentence occurs, for instance when someone burns some Bitcoin to leave a short message for the world to see.
A crypto trillionaire decided to build this Library, both on a megalomaniacal whim, and because it would keep all crypto wealth documented even in the case of a worldwide power outage.
The outage occurred, but the power did not come back on. Civilization reverted to pen and paper, and all cryptocurrency became worthless because computing SHA-256 hashes by hand quickly turned tiresome.
As the years passed, the original purpose of the Library was forgotten. Now, its inhabitants live in these ruins of the Digital Age, believing that it holds some meaning (it does) which will illuminate their existence (it won't).
(Illustration by TheDigitalArtist: link)
