The Athanor doesn't work because of exotic physics—it works because Abe and Aaron agree to work together, and then it stops working the moment they can't coordinate what happened.
Watch the film's logic: they don't solve causality, they solve the problem of two people who've lived different timelines needing to act on the same information without one of them lying.
The boxes nested inside boxes—the redundancy, the deliberate obfuscation of which timeline is which—these are governance structures, not engineering details. When Aaron builds the failsafe, he's not preventing paradox—he's building an escrow mechanism between versions of himself.
When Abe's movements become erratic in the second half, the film never explains his calculations going wrong; instead, it shows coordination breaking down. He's no longer synchronized with Aaron's version of events. They've become Byzantine generals trying to agree on a single truth across corrupted channels.
The same coordination failures that destroyed Abe and Aaron appear now in proof-of-work design, in multi-agent training protocols, in any system requiring agreement between entities with misaligned incentives and asymmetric information.
”Primer understood the problem fifteen years before we had to build the solution.
Start at the 47-minute mark where Aaron first considers building the failsafe and notice how every subsequent conversation is about verifying what actually happened, not about preventing what might happen.
Read Shane Carruth's interview with *Filmmaker Magazine* (2004) where he discusses the film's logic system—he explicitly compares the mechanics to 'two people trying to agree on what they both remember' rather than physics.