NASA would define life as "A self-sustaining series of chemical reactions capable of extracting energy from its environment and capable of Darwinian evolution.

Self-sustaining?

Nope.

Chemical reactions?

Definitely not.

Capable of extracting energy from its environment?

Unless you count people plugging in GPUs as the Blockchain's doing, no.

Darwinian evolution?

Hell no.

Overall conclusion: No.

It looks like HN doesn't like metaphors :) Since it's flagged, I will repost with a different title.

People are reacting to the clickbait title, not the use of metaphor. As the submitter, you should be able to change the title of the submission. If you no longer can, contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer so they can update it on your behalf.

Continuing to submit a post tweaking the title to improve it's chances can be viewed as spamming, particularly as it appears that you're also the author. Please don't do that.

Some replies are responding to the title as if the author literally meant "living organisms".

Instead, I think it's clear that the author is speaking of an interesting metaphor.

It's similar to how we might talk about all the various Javscript libraries and framework flavor-of-the-month as a sort of "Darwinism" and "natural selection". E.g. it's a marketplace of coding ideas and the ones with staying power demonstrate "survival of the fittest".

Or to write about all the worldwide computers executing high frequency trades on the stock exchanges as an emergent "super-organism".

He describes phenomena that apply to every market ever (not to mention simple control loops). How are blockchains any different?

Is there something wrong with engaging in the mental exercise of mapping these phenomena in one context? In this case: Blockchains?

It's far fetched, there's a broad spectrum of systems one can fit the same metaphor to, and like those systems it offers no insight about them.

What is the conclusion and what does it mean for blockchains? What is the benefit of modeling a blockchain as a living organism?

Betteridge's law.

Yes, and flagged.