Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

Just so we are on the same page here, what is your definition of quantum? I refer to the etymology meaning “how much” or “amount” in the relation to quantity, portion and measurement. When I say sat, I literally mean thermodynamic (quantum) memory. No sat, no utxo. We are still in the process of the defining the quantum of bitcoin: 1 sat changing over time as we inflate to terminal supply. I agree, everything is a snapshot, time is a snapshot. Time is memory, no memory, no time. Everything is a “block” at the smallest level, experience is the frequency and vibration of the contents of said blocks. To ground this, we now have two distinct domains of observation. In the physical universe, we observe particles as collapsed outcomes without access to the entropy resolution process that produced them. In Bitcoin, we have the mirror image: the entire transformation, entropy search, energy expenditure, and final structure is explicit. Bitcoin remains the purely informational expression. Reality is not one or the other, it’s both. That’s why UTXOs matter (literally). A UTXO is not just a static record; it is the ledgerized expression of this full thermodynamic cycle at the smallest unit (quantum) of time: one block. Until that block is mined, the UTXO exists in the “global” mempool as probabilistic potential (all valid UTXOs can be spent, we all sort locally by signed UTXOs weighting by sat/vbyte). Once included, it is a committed state, immutable, conserved, and fully auditable. Conservation is not an axiom in bitcoin, it’s the only process in physics where it is mathematically verifiable because we have both the transformation (mining) and registration of the ledger. We as humans exist inside the universal ledger, seeing only the outcomes of prior entropy resolution. We are fractions of said ledger experiencing other fractions within said ledger. The is precisely the problem of physics, we don’t have full knowledge of the contents of the ledger, nor can we see its behavior at the smallest unit of time. But Bitcoin gives us the opposite perspective: the entire ledger (forward in time with regard to the flow of energy), the full accounting, the complete mapping of possibility into structure. The behavior of UTXOs reflects this: they behave like particles, but they carry the full signature of the transformation itself. “UTXOs are a web of forking and joining groups of sats” sounds like non-local entanglement to me but demonstrated at the granularity of the quantum of time with the full knowledge of the ledger.

↑ Parent

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ me@mleku.dev 5 months ago

quantum is from the latin root for amount - quant- and has the modifier -um meaning a thing (it is much like the greek -on which also is where the word one and in come from). so it means, essentially, the atom of something. the smallest indivisible thing that a phenomenon involves. the word "atom" got lost in all this because we figured out that atoms were divisible into smaller parts. but a quantum, as in quantum physics quantum, is the actual "atom" of physical reality, and it turned out that this "atom" thing also has a connection to information, which is intangible (so matter is based on something that is intangible, take that materialists). the block is the quantum of bitcoin, according to the definitions i just presented. you can talk about how it is divisible into many parts, and say "but that's not atomic" but it actually is atomic. how can i say that? can you divide the process of bitcoin into smaller units than a block? in terms of time. the answer is no. the block is the clock, the clock is the block. the difficulty adjustment is purely based on the timestamps on the blocks, not on when the node received them, because this information is also atomic, whereas every node sees the block at a different time for the first time, that is metadata, not intrinsic. you can say that the block represents a snapshot, a quantum of bitcoin, but what goes into producing it is not, it is extremely disorderly and concurrent. the atomicity of blocks is because of the physical limitations of the internet. there has been attempts to make the transactions the atom of the ledger but this doesn't work with the increase of latency of the system. it's a consequence of decentralization being a key design target. even though you can point at a mempool and say "this is the process of building a block" what the block actually is, is the mempool and block header of an as yet unknown miner who will mint the next block. also, the UTXOs are extrinsics, compared to the blocks, when you talk about bitcoin as a system. they are what users put into the blocks, and create part of the incentive to mine the blocks because of the transaction fees, which the miner will reject if they are below their target threshold. the UTXOs are atomic, in the sense that at any given block height, everyone agrees that a certain pubkey hash controls it, but their quantum is the spend, which is the next UTXO that will be built on top of it, so it is ultimately subordinate to the block in terms of ontology. the block is the quantum of bitcoin, the transactions are the state in that quantum.

2 replies ↓

Replies (1)