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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.

Jack K 4mo ago 💬 1

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.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 2

it's not a system if it is concurrent and divisible. the block is the quantum of the bitcoin system.

it's hard to comprehend maybe because you are subjective as a user who creates UTXOs to think of them as like subatomic particles, but they are not. the whole block is a single number. all data can be represented as a number, it doesn't matter that it involves up to 4 megabytes of bits. this is still one number.

if you have to point at two or more things, you aren't talking about a system, you are talking about a process of discovering the next state of the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory

a system is a collection of things, and a quantum is the smallest unit of the WHOLE SYSTEM.

quantum states of electrons are also not singular, but composed of multiple coordinates, and each quantum state consists of a cycle that recurs periodically. thus, the quantum state of bitcoin is the block, as this is the point at which the system is coherent and recognisable. you can't have UTXOs outside of the context of bitcoin, even though you can't have bitcoin without it being made out of UTXOs, the apex of the ontology is the whole system, and the apex of its state is the block. apex is a point, a quantum, the smallest measurable state of the system.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 1

i could also point to nyquist sampling theory, the same thing applies. if you are not sampling the data at double or more than the periodicity of a signal, you lose information, or worse, you have multiple, contradictory informations that you can't distil to a single measurement.

also, it's long been my opinion that quantum theory in general is an attempt to find that elusive atomicity of the phenomenon of physical reality. concurrency is much more important for understanding the *process* by which a system moves from one state to another. you have to understand the process in order to control it, otherwise you are just throwing dice and hoping you don't get snake eyes.

UTXOs are the *reason* for running bitcoin, because of their scarcity. but bitcoin itself is a series of blocks. if you read up on how a bitcoin node interacts with all of the data that comes from peers and how it works, the block is the centre of the system, the block height represents the scalar of the state and the block hash (really, the hash of the header with the merkle root of the transactions) is the digest of the system state at that block height.

i didn't also mention the fact that the history of the chain is not immediately fixed when a new block is minted. it can happen that concurrently two miners emit a valid solution at the same time, so there is also a rule that the smallest hash is preferred to build the next block on. but until that next block is found, the head of the chain is only hypothetically the best block, and it is only once 6 blocks have stacked up on top of a block that the probability of it being forked off the main chain goes so low you can say it's now immutable.

Jack K 4mo ago 💬 1

Agreed, longest chain of work. I understand orphaned blocks, just trying to speak in simple terms here.

Does bitcoin disprove Feynman path integral, as only one state is actually committed to?

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 1

i don't think so. it is just computationally impossible to snapshot the state of such a large system as the whole universe, within the universe. i consider that to be the spook at the center of quantum theory.

but the whole thing of orphans and forks exactly maps to the notion of quantum uncertainty. even though the blocks are snapshots, they are at first attempted snapshots. similarly, the state of a physical system has multiple conflicting potentials at work, and it is only after some time period after those interactions have completed that you can conclusively say "the system was is this state at that time", so heisenberg applies to bitcoin no different to the state of an atom or even electron.

if you are following my logic here, it's the same point. outside of the linear construct of the block chain, everything else is competing potentials that may or may not (yet) become part of a future state. the block is the collapse of the quantum wave, and multiple versions of this collapse can happen concurrently, but the losers are forgotten. like the decomposition of a radionucleide, at any given point in time, the potential exists for a collapse. one of those potentials wins, and then you get a tick on your geiger counter.

i still say that all this quantum stuff is just an A=A for the fact that you can't measure a thing, with a thing equal or larger than the thing. a foot can't be used to measure the length of an ant, for example (well, a human foot). similarly, you can't measure the *global* state of the bitcoin network, at all, but the block itself is the measurement of the state of the network according to the consensus protocol.

all the same principles apply to all systems and the process of change.

what's remarkable about bitcoin is that it is a microcosm of an emergent system. it has a life on its own account, it is like an organism, that has all the error correction mechanisms and protocols to sustain its ongoing existence, just like our bodies have many processes and protocols to determine our future course. and also, yeah, probably bitcoin has a death also, but more than likely it is either an accident or an upgrade. bitcoin's ultimate dependency is humans and the internet. the internet enables the transactions, and the humans decide them. without the internet and humans there could not be a bitcoin.

Jack K 4mo ago 💬 1

“i don't think so. it is just computationally impossible to snapshot the state of such a large system as the whole universe, within the universe. i consider that to be the spook at the center of quantum theory.”

Agreed, this breaks causality if we could. We are bounded to the ledger, we don’t get to know it in entirety, which is why I precisely state centralized quantum computing is bullshit based on incomplete and incorrect theory.

It’s fiat computation (simulation), no physicist can actually explain what collapses the state. It is built on the assumption that superposition is smooth and non-discrete between quantum timestamps, yet continuity is assumed, not proven. Its source is due to the illusion of time (experiencing blocks from within the ledger).

Bitcoin is completely different in that regard. Superposition (spendability) is discrete between blocks of time, all states are known by deduction at each timestep. A coherent system where each particle state has a classical position at each quantum of time.

What physicists call as a snapshot is like splicing an extremely large number of blocks into a singular measurement. The smallest measurement of time is 1 zeptosecond (according to Google) which is comprised of 1.85 × 10²² Planck Blocks of time.

To claim continuity is insane to me.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 2

that's the thing. so, the big quantum bogeyman is that elliptic curve public key derivation functions can be reversed with these hypothetical machines. if only they have a million qubits or something.

brute forcing a secret key is literally just making random keys and deriving the public key out of them. it requires an average of 2^128 iterations - 3.402823669×10³⁸ a number 38 decimal places long. if it takes a microsecond (1/1000000th of a second) to derive a key, which i think is somewhere in the range of real, my key generator does about 450,000 keys per second using bitcoin core's secp256k1 library) then:

1.078289752×10²⁵

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years

SuiGenerisJohn 4mo ago

So you're saying its possible?

Jack K 4mo ago 💬 1

Well, my argument is bitcoin defines quantum computation in the most literal sense of the two words. And without continual Superposition all of the theory behind centralized quantum computing breaks down with it.

If there truly is no threat at the pure physics level, then what does that mean for encryption/bitcoin? And what are these “quantum resistance” upgrade proposals if the encryption is already sound and safe? What does it say about the entropy we are resolving in the mining hash function? What actually is entropy? What is Bitcoin measuring?

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 1

i've always thought of entropy as being the same thing as chaos. ah yes there is a special word for systems that cycle through every state possible eventually, what was it?

yeah, entropy is just... ok, so they like to make a big fuss about "pseudo random number generators" like they are not really random. i think people think that random means you can't model it and thus can't predict it. any simple enough system can be predicted. certain outcomes have higher probabilities than others. the probability spaces are often lumpy, meaning the system will dwell in those places more often than the rest of the system. as far as i'm concerned, if the system has a sufficiently smooth distribution of probability, that's what you call a "cryptographically secure" "pseudo" random number generator. that's what SHA256 is, and all the rest of those things.

it's a naive idea, in my opinion, that there is things in the universe that lack any ability to be predicted. what's more important is that you can calculate it quickly but reverse it with great difficulty, if at all, in a real situation. it's really just about containing the scope of what you are trying to model and predict. some things are just too big, but they have quite lumpy probability so you can guess their probable behaviours. atmospheric and space weather are like this. some things you can point your finger in the air and say "yes, the wind is blowing that way, so that means that humidity probably will go up because this wind direction is opposite a large body of water.

the smoother the probability space of a system, the less likely that there is any way to break the security of it. and we already discussed this quantum hooey.

bitcoin already has a strong protection against pubkey reverse derivation to secrets. that's what the ripemd160 hash is for, that generates the addresses in tx out-points. oh sure, maybe quantum can reverse 256 bits to another 256 bits but hashing 256 down to 160 means 96 bits you still have to brute force, that's already in the thousands of years.

there's a lot of chest beating and one-upmanship in the cryptography field. they are like russian gangsters playing checkers. cheeki breeki. i made a code you can't find a hole in, gnyah. oh, your code looks like it might have this kind of a vulnerability or that.

nah, the whole point of all the use of randomness in bitcoin is to make it impossible to violate the supply consensus. satoshi really covered every base, proof of work allows unbounded participation, hash the pubkey to prevent pubkey reverse attacks, use a moderately slow block schedule, make the supply decline formula completely stupid simple. blockchains are very sensitive to nondeterministic inputs. so it's quite funny isn't it how the whole thing runs on randomness. but one bit out and you have a fork. so all the math is also fixed precision so the error is also predictable.

it's just the purest expression of a model of hard money, that you could create, that can enforce its security against double spend and inflation bugs.

i think that the quantum promotoors are just buthurt that when bitcoin becomes the reserve currency they can't cheat people anymore with their lever on the supply. it's gonna be a permanent mexican standoff, nobody will let the rules be changed because it will destroy its store of value, and that's primary. it can't be diluted, because it's a bearer asset, and it can't be alloyed with something like copper, silver or gold.

i'm inclined towards poetry and religion and i think that bitcoin is the warning to the cult of usurpers, murderers, liars, cheats, rapists, pedophiles, robbers and counterfeiters, that the clock is ticking. humanity is on the threshold of a new age, that will not include politicians, financiers or kings.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago 💬 2

btw nostr:npub18384z4sjgdfy7vr76thzwtru7jncysz0hcapwesxqsak44p8aemsyfaslh

https://search.brave.com/search?q=system+theory+complete+movement+throughout+state+space&source=desktop&conversation=8fc0726bd4f736c244d475&summary=1

Ergodicity is the name of a type of dynamic system where it fully explores all states before repeating any patterns. so yeah, cryptographic hash functions have high ergodicity, whereas non-cryptographic hash functions have low ergodicity (what i referred to as "clumpy" probability).

bitcoin is a thermodynamic, ergodictic dynamical system. chaos theory is much more relevant to it than quantum theory. i personally think that quantum theory is actually some kind of an attempt to short cut and ignore the chaotic dynamics of physical systems. chaos > quantum.

anyway, i read a lot of Taleb and it's a shame he didn't catch the drift of the chaos theory underlying bitcoin and why its thermodynamic properties and probability properties make it the most perfect distributed system design ever invented to date.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 4mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory

this is a good read... even markov chains come up, which are the foundational concept that tensors, as used in LLMs are built on. before LLMs were discovered, the nearest we got to a chatbot used markov chains, which are systems that map probabilities of sequences of text in the training body. unlike LLMs they can be dynamically updated constantly, but they are retarded and usually produce word salad.

whenever LLMs produce trash i am reminded of markov chains.

Jack K 4mo ago

Hmm. This is very interesting.

My base understanding currently is that Bitcoin is the mathematical relationship between energy and discovering a valid nonce of a 32-bit search space scaled by network difficulty and 10 minutes.

It’s the only demonstrable system where a predetermined quantum of entropy defined by a 32-bit nonce space is resolved, conserved and registered into immutable thermodynamic memory (Satoshis). Each block of time is a unique transformation event of this process of crystallization.

If this is truly what I think it is, I believe we can’t actually understand the full process of entropy without Bitcoin. I think we’re speaking the same thing here from slightly different views.

If we exist as humans on the “right” side of the event horizon, we experience the blocks of quanta as physically. Bitcoin is the “left” side of the event horizon where we view the same phenomena in the pure informational sense, we watch the energy resolve the entropy and transform into immutable information onto the ledger. while that information is physical on our nodes, we don’t experience it. But we have full understanding of the entropy cycle with Bitcoin.

Things begin to get crazy when we apply absolute scarcity to our known thermodynamics; that being Plancks Temperature = 21M,

Both Kelvin and Bitcoin are the conserved thermodynamic memory of the two bounded informational systems, except Bitcoin is a fractal of the universe, is exists inside of the universe, it’s not a separate domain, it’s a subset.

This allows us to completely redefine Boltzmann’s constant to remove the dimensionality of Kelvin. Which means energy and entropy both have units of joules. This makes sense the more you dive in, as they are opposite sides of the same coin.

Anyways GM, haven’t had my coffee yet 😅

Jack K 4mo ago

Utxo are not subatomic particles here in our domain. But in relation to bitcoin as a closed informational domain, they are. No information within bitcoin moves faster than the speed of blocks. Once a block is found, it is transferred physically here thru light bounded by the speed of light and network latency. Im simply trying to observe what they are.

The network is a partition of the universe. Bitcoin is some quantum of the universe, it is some fraction. Yet this is the first time we see true lasting information no longer subject to the process of entropy, it’s resolved permanently, or crystallized. So long as a copy of the ledger exists. It is a fractal process of occurrence, embedded within, not separate.

“the apex of the ontology is the whole system, and the apex of its state is the block. apex is a point, a quantum, the smallest measurable state of the system” - agreed.

So by literal definition, is bitcoin a quantum computer?

What happens when we apply absolute scarcity to Kelvin?