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.
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also, just sayin, but quantum perturbation does still operate on shorter time scales and distances than the whole internet. microprocessors have got so fast that there is a need for mutex locking schemes and atomic queues to maintain synchrony between concurrent processes, within a circuit only a few milllimetres size in each direction. the whole internet is a communications network and processes that are practically infinitely larger and more unpredictable.
within all circuitry there has to also be error correction, and redundant data physically stored and transmitted between points because a stray X ray photon can flip bits and corrupt the output of a process, usually, fatally.
even within the distance between subatomic particles there is concurrency and randomness.
so, what i am defining as quantum is the smallest time period you can measure the state of a system. so, it's a block.
Yes agreed! UTXOs are atomic, the smallest unit. They are also purely bits in a large, but scarcely defined Hilbert space defined by the elliptic curve. The either exist 1 or don’t 0. Each utxo has a scalar of information of both classic bits and quantum memory (satoshis).
This becomes the “space” or locations in memory, all UTXOs exist in discrete locations of memory in discrete blocks of time. There is no present block, all blocks a in reference to past states, the present state of utxo is never actually known.
The block is the quantum of time, not the smallest actual unit of information. Memory = Time, the are the same dimension. But yeah the UTXOs are the block as well, they are the memory of time.
As far as the quantum of entropy, Difficulty, D=1 is that quantum.
D=1 is the quantum of entropy of a 32-bit nonce space, each unit of difficulty is defined in relation to D=1.
In Genesis at D=1 a 32-bit nonce space resolved into 50 bitcoin exactly, or 5x10^9 sats, no other inputs or outputs. At Genesis the quantum of 1 sat is maximal (the largest), and the quantum reduces with each timestep as each block is in relation to total supply.
Anyways long tangent, bitcoin also emerged from a singularity. You could argue that the genesis utxo is the only true shcrodingers utxo (both spent and unspent) metaphysically.
There can’t be a Schrödinger’s utxo without double spending; I’d extend that same truth to quantum mechanics. An incomplete view of time has resulted in belief of continual superposition, which would be a double spend in bitcoin. Yet we also live in a reality of no double spends, with a framework beneath it that does allow double spends. There’s the inherent problem 🤔
If superposition was discrete to the quantum of time (it is), all theory behind centralized quantum computing would be disproven. But what would that make bitcoin other than THE quantum computer? Is there a second best or not?
Absolute scarcity defined by a quantum ledger is the death to speculative quantum physics. We’ve never actually seen absolute scarcity until bitcoin.
Based on your response, we have a lot of common ground. Not sure if you see my point. Only then can we process backwards when integrating Bitcoin back into are systems. We need to know what it *actually* is. Money alone is not the correct answer.