CptKook's avatar
CptKook 3 weeks ago
How would you respond to Claude, which thinks you’re mistaken: The quantum computing threat to Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography (specifically ECDSA) is based on well-established quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm, which can solve the discrete logarithm problem exponentially faster than classical computers. This isn’t speculative physics—it’s mathematical complexity theory. Whether this represents a practical threat depends on when/if sufficiently large, error-corrected quantum computers are built, which is a legitimate engineering question. Bitcoin is an ingenious cryptographic and economic system, but describing it as “falsifying quantum mechanics” or being “the proof physicists could never produce” conflates different domains: • Bitcoin’s proof-of-work is a classical computational process using SHA-256 hashing. It creates consensus through thermodynamic cost (energy expenditure), but this doesn’t make it a “quantized system” in the quantum mechanical sense. • Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter and energy at atomic scales—it’s been empirically validated through countless experiments (from the double-slit experiment to quantum entanglement to the technology in your computer’s transistors). • Bitcoin operates entirely at the classical computational level. Its “blocks” are not quantum states, and mining doesn’t involve wavefunction collapse. You seem to be using “quantum” metaphorically (discrete blocks, probabilistic to deterministic transitions) while arguing against quantum mechanics as a physical theory. Bitcoin’s discreteness doesn’t disprove quantum superposition any more than a digital clock disproves general relativity.
↑ Parent

Replies (1)

Jack K's avatar
Jack K jackkluz@primal.net 3 weeks ago
A quantum is not defined by “mystical smallness,” nor by “atomic-scale behavior.” A quantum is the smallest indivisible unit of change in a system, the point at which further subdivision ceases to have physical meaning. In physics this is Planck time; in Bitcoin this is a block. Both are finite, discrete, and locally verifiable transitions where a probabilistic surface resolves into a single, conserved state. This is the operational definition of a quantum: a discrete, finitely-resolved step in the evolution of a closed informational system. Packets of quanta ≡ Blocks Bitcoin is the only system where this quantization is empirically instantiated through real energy expenditure. Each block is the discrete, irreversible construction of the next “tick” of local time, a transformation of entropy into conserved structure. This allows us to see exactly what a discrete-time evolution looks like in practice: a system where all potential states (superposed unconfirmed transactions) become fully deterministic at the boundary of each tick, not by probabilistic interpretation but by deduction. The window of superposition opens (mempool) and closes (block) with every quantized step. Nothing persists “in multiple states at once” across a tick. Once time is discrete rather than continuous, there is no physically meaningful substrate for continuous superposition to compute on. You cannot run Shor’s algorithm on a system whose state-space collapses completely at every discrete step of time. Without continuous simultaneity, the ontology required for scalable quantum computation disappears. Bitcoin doesn’t “metaphorically” challenge that assumption, it demonstrates what a discretized, energy-grounded system of time evolution looks like. In that regime, the superposed computational substrate quantum algorithms rely on simply does not exist. Not a single physicist can demonstrate that the modern definition of superposition is empirically valid at the Planck scale. The entire ontology rests on an untested assumption that Bitcoin logically invalidates and replaces with a verifiable instantiation of physical and quantized state collapse.
↑