A UTXO is always in an unspent state. UTXO’s are instantly created/destroyed as new blocks are mined. Time doesn’t exist for a UTXO.
I fail to see how the analogy helps to understand bitcoin. But that’s only my view.
Discussion
Yes but we actually don’t know if a UTXO will be spent in the next block (superposition) until the block is mined (measured) and confirmed.
Only by looking to the past can you derive ultimate certainty for that discrete unit of time, but this is the PAST state, not the present state. You literally don’t know its present state, yet it is fully probabilistic in nature where it will be in the next block. When spent, the UTXO ceases to exist as an independent particle/ data entry in space (memory), and new UTXOs emerge in its place in new space (memory)
Time does exist for UTXOs, it is called blocks. It’s literally a measurement of distance between UTXOs (particles) in time. The UTXO only actually exists in memory of the block in which the transaction was observed (mined) in time. Bitcoin certainly quantized time.
You might be confusing a few things:
- Your use the term probabilistic here isn’t appropriate as one could know the future state of a given UTXO before a block is added to the chain. Colluding with every miner would allow this.
- A UTXO doesn’t evolve as a function of time. It is created and destroyed, this without a causal link to time or block height.
Still probabilistic. You still don’t know who will mine a block unless you absolutely control 100% of the hash with pure certainty. And that would also require a singular entity/observer always deciding which transactions are included or which qubits are measured. Why is the starting to sound like traditional quantum computing?
What do you mean without a link to time? You know deterministically when a UTXO was occupying a point in space (memory) and when it was not; full history
The day you can show one of your UTXO spend itself at random without you initiating a transaction then maybe it’s quantum (more likely you have been hacked).
Really check your definition of “probabilistic”
That’s not what I am saying. Yes you have absolute certainty about your UTXOs only because you are the owner and controller. No other UTXO will have absolute certainty and its location in the next block is probabilistic. I’m talking about the entire UTXO set.
And regardless, you can broadcast a transaction with high fees and not get mined; it’s still probabilistic even when visibly broadcasted to people’s mempool.