I’ve been developing a physical model of Bitcoin that measures satoshis in joules and treats each block as an irreversible thermodynamic event. This framework only works because Bitcoin’s UTXOs are observable. Their balances are the informational “mass” that allows us to quantify the Shannon entropy written into each block and map it to the energy expended to create it.
To my understanding ElGamal commitments will hide utxo balances on chain, so that observability disappears. IMO, we wouldn’t just lose supply transparency; we would lose the ability to measure the entropy of the system at all. The thermodynamic structure of Bitcoin depends on visible state transitions. Hide the balances, and you break the physics.
If Bitcoin is the only system where work, time, and value are measurably connected, what happens when we hide the very quantities that make that possible? I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this, myself included.
Almost nobody is thinking about the physical substrate beneath Bitcoin, so I’ll say it from my work currently, it breaks everything. We don’t even fully understand the downstream consequences because it removes the empirical measurability that makes Bitcoin unique among all monetary and computational systems.
The irony is that in this framework, the entire push for PQC becomes unnecessary. A quantized-time model falsifies the threat assumptions behind attacks, because the attack models rely on a continuous-time ontology that Bitcoin itself disproves. The visibility of UTXOs is what anchors these measurements and enables the physical interpretation. Remove that visibility, and you lose both the physics and the ability to falsify the threat model.
I could definitely be wrong here, but this is a point that must be considered and explored beyond just me.