The ethos of “don’t trust, verify” seems to come into question in regard to the assumed quantum threat. It’s become “just trust me bro, we need to fork” without any question or verification. This is the real attack on Bitcoin.
The model of centralized quantum computing is the flaw, all claimed qubits exist inside a single machine (node), unverifiable to the outside world. How do you prove a qubit in a black box? Can a qubit even exist meaningfully if it can’t be verified across independent observers? What collapses the state besides fiat decree? Should we fork over trust?
This wall of centralization pushes verification outward to both the theory of quantum mechanics/computing and the economics of the process. We seem to be hitting both sides of the verification, both suggesting there is no threat.
Bitcoin exposes this contradiction. Its qubits (UTXOs) are fully distributed across all nodes, open, auditable, and irreversible. It is the only known system in physics that demonstrates conservation of energy and information without axiom. Physicists should be here studying it. Instead, they keep insisting on centralized models while the decentralized standard already runs at planetary scale open to anyone.
Im not really sure how this resolves. Forking Bitcoin without verification would be the ultimate failure of “don’t trust, verify.” Bitcoin will win in time because its physics is open, while theirs is not.
Bitcoin will win if it can resist the quantum forks.
bitcoin has added new address and signature types several times already. in the event a credible attack succeeds (presumably at a cost of millions of dollars) it will be trivial to justify adding VDOO or other compact PQ signatures.
until then, it's hype. until there is a proof of concept verifiably demonstrated in the wild (and it must be done such that there is no way the secret was accessible to the people running the machine, or it would look like a hoax), it's irrelevant.
no proof, not verified. disregard.
also, distributed systems are not quantum anything. they are simply a collection of protocols and applications that speak them that make it possible for multiple replicas of the system, or any components of it, to seem like a single, unified "von neumann machine" with atomic state, with the caveat that usually there is a propagation delay due to light speed. distributed systems are the multi-computer version of concurrrent execution in a single computer.
Yes agreed, the distributed nature of Bitcoin does not make it “quantum”.
Bitcoin was equally as quantum at genesis when Satoshi was running the only node versus today when we have arguably the most amount of nodes.
I don’t think quantum systems can achieve further complexity without become a distributed system. We can clearly see this with biology.
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