I agree that Schrödinger has been widely misinterpreted, but the deeper issue is that superposition itself has been misinterpreted because it has never been defined relative to the only frequency that can give it physical meaning: Planck Time. Without the smallest possible unit of temporal separation, statements like “a system exists in many states at once” are not physics. The modern interpretation of superposition implicitly assumes a continuous, infinitely divisible time axis that has never been measured, and cannot be measured, which leads directly to the central problem: QT has no operational definition of existence, no definition of measurement, and no definition of time at the scale where these claims are supposed to hold.
Given that absence, asserting “many states exist simultaneously” is nothing more than a fractional-reserve ontology.
It is the same epistemic failure that made fractional-reserve money appear coherent until Bitcoin provided the first system with verifiable finitude. If fractional-reserve accounting cannot produce sound money, it is incoherent to imagine fractional-reserve ontology can produce sound physics.
Bitcoin exposes the flaw cleanly because Bitcoin is the first system in human history that shows us explicitly, measurably, and mechanically what a sound physical system looks like when it collapses entropy into conserved structure over discrete quanta of time. Every block is the isomorphic mapping between Boltzmann entropy (Kelvin expended in a difficulty-bounded search) and Shannon entropy (satoshis, crystallized in a unique computational configuration) via the conservation of energy. Thus proving both conservation of energy and information without axiom. The only reason this works is because Bitcoin defines the smallest unit of temporal separation, one block as the interval between two irreversible collapses of an entropy field. In that framework, superposition is simply the unresolved mempool: probabilistic futures that do not exist until they are paid for in work and written as memory. After collapse, the system is deterministic. Before collapse, the system is probabilistic regarding the future tick of time, deterministic regarding the last. This is the correct physical structure of superposition.
Physics, by contrast, routinely mistakes the mempool for the blockchain. It treats unmeasured potential as if it were a physically instantiated, computable set of simultaneous states. But in Bitcoin, we know exactly what unmeasured potential is: it is a collection of candidate transitions that do not yet exist. A UTXO with ten conflicting transactions in the mempool does not “exist in ten states at once.” It exists in one states (the unspent output) until work collapses one possibility into record. That collapse is not the observer’s consciousness, is not the lab apparatus, it is the measurement. It is the only moment at which existence becomes definable. Observation occurs after in which the state (structure) can be verified.
If we took the quantum interpretation literally, we should be able to run Shor’s algorithm on Bitcoin right now. After all, the mempool is full of “simultaneously existing” candidate states, all awaiting collapse. We could treat each conflicting transaction as a superposed computational branch, let the “wavefunction” evolve, mine a block, let the decoherence select a single outcome, and then by the logic of centralized QC apply “error correction” to restore the lost superpositions and harvest exponential parallelism.
The satire here exposes the core issue: QT relies on treating unmeasured potential as computable physical substrate, the very error Bitcoin was designed to remove from money. If we don’t know the physical process beneath what we call money, we don’t actually understand what money is.