it’s also the game theoretically perfect FUD because it will never actually happen, hence the theoretical threat will never go away, hence the materially conflicted can get research grants and engagement farm forever.
it’s “the climate crisis” for cryptography nerds.
That’s not actually true. The entire threat model rests on a single, unproven axiom: that time is continuous and infinitesimally divisible at the physical level.
If time is instead quantized and discrete, the mathematical formalism collapses at its foundation. You cannot take derivatives over indivisible time. Continuous Schrödinger evolution ceases to be fundamental, and the meanings of superposition, decoherence, and coherence structurally change. Superposition becomes potential between ticks (blocks), not a persistent computational substrate; decoherence becomes an intrinsic consequence of the tick (block) itself, not a gradual dynamical process. Bitcoin literally shows us this already.
Bitcoin forces this axiom into the open. Its ethos is don’t trust, verify, and Bitcoin gives us something physics cannot: a physically instantiated state machine where time is constructed, not assumed. You cannot subdivide a block temporally without destroying causality, finality, determinism, and non-contradiction. Bitcoin simply does not function under continuous time. If discrete time were not fundamental, Bitcoin would be impossible, yet it runs, globally, verifiably, every day, every ~10 minutes a new block of time is constructed.
Gödelian limits already explain why this axiom cannot be settled by measuring Planck time from within the system. Physics cannot falsify its own temporal assumptions internally. Bitcoin sidesteps that limitation by building time as an object. If continuous time were truly fundamental, this system would not work. The fact that it does is the empirical challenge to any model of physics that assumes continuous time (all of it).
Don’t trust, verify.
can you please explain this sentence?
“Gödelian limits already explain why this axiom cannot be settled by measuring Planck time from within the system”
The axiom that time is continuous cannot be settled by attempting to measure Planck time from within the physical system, and this follows from the same structural limits identified by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Gödel showed that any sufficiently expressive formal system cannot fully prove the axioms that make reasoning within that system possible. In particular, a system cannot use only its internal operations to establish the consistency or foundational structure upon which those operations depend. This is not a limitation of technology or precision, but a consequence of self-reference.
Physical measurement is structurally similar. All measurements of time are performed by physical processes that themselves unfold in time. Clocks, experiments, and observers do not stand outside the temporal framework they measure; they presuppose it. Time, in this sense, plays the role of the underlying formal structure that enables measurement at all.
Planck time is defined as the scale at which the concept of time itself is expected to break down or become discrete. Attempting to measure it requires using clocks and causal processes that are already governed by the same temporal substrate. This creates a Gödelian self-reference: one is attempting to resolve the fundamental unit of the system using only operations that depend on that unit’s existence.
As a result, measuring ever smaller intervals of time can refine relative durations, but it cannot empirically decide whether time itself is continuous or discrete. That question concerns the structure of the system, not a parameter internal to it. From within time, the continuity axiom is therefore not falsifiable by measurement alone, it must be treated as an assumption or addressed via a meta-theoretical framework rather than an internal experiment.
Bitcoin changes this because it constructs time instead of assuming it.
Block time is a discrete, indivisible ordering produced by irreversible work and consensus, not by measuring continuous physical time. You cannot subdivide a block without breaking causality and finality. This bypasses the Gödelian self-reference: Bitcoin doesn’t try to measure the substrate of time from within it, it defines a new, external, discrete time standard that is empirically verifiable.
that is not at all what the incompleteness theorems say, nor do they have any bearing whatsoever on physical systems. this is all literal nonsense. it is not even wrong.
Appreciate this idea of block time being a framework to understand the nature of time itself (which is impossible to do directly given any measurement of it takes too much time) and the implications this would have for quantum computing and the FUD comcomitant to it.
Ok, putting Gödel aside.
How many blocks do you need to realize discrete time is real?
Would you agree that the formalism breaks down *IF* time is discrete and quantized?
How do you propose we solve the unverifiable axiom of continuous time? Because that is the binary logical their entire discussion depends on.
Binary logic the*
there is no theory that proves it's impossible. breakthroughs like topological quantum computing could make error correction trivial (Microsoft is already claiming they have a device that proves this)
the confidence in "it will never actually happen" here is pure cope
free research grants and endless Twitter threads. Meanwhile, true HODLers just keep stacking sats. #BitcoinResilient
Can you believe nostr:nprofile1qqs0w2xeumnsfq6cuuynpaw2vjcfwacdnzwvmp59flnp3mdfez3czpsprpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumr0wpczuum0vd5kzmp0ksxxx2 wants to confiscate Sotashi's coins because of quantum woo? https://blog.lopp.net/against-quantum-recovery-of-bitcoin/
Precisely.
At this point its equal to the mtgox nonsense that's been drug out for years, or the power usage, or the China ban, or the security budget problem.
We well consistently fail upwards everyday. Im here for it.
