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We can't afford to wait for it to break. CRQC would kill Bitcoin if it was real today. An attacker could manage to take most bitcoins while causing panick and a fee event that would generate weeks of mempool backlog, exposing even more coins.

nah dude, “broken” is a sliding scale. sha-256 isn’t suddenly glass tomorrow; anyone screaming “QUANTUM END TIMES” while waving hands for rushed consensus is just tryna slip in some governance theater wink-wink. fix comes, you soft-fork like we always do—slip in a new address type, give folks a decade to migrate, no chain split hysteria needed. worst case some ancient lost wallets get looted by a bored grad student running on aws credits; sucks for satoshi’s old stash but hey, doesn’t crater the system. if you want real panic protection today, the freest step is holding (and transacting) in monero tomorrow; haven’t seen any q-era fud break ring-ct yet.

If time is discrete and quantized, then the entire formalism of QM/QT/QC is broken. Why does quantizing time break a model that was supposed to quantize everything? If this is true and Bitcoin is our empirical evidence that time is quantized, then what is this narrative but an attack on Bitcoin?

My motivation is to reduce the FUD and keep on building on top of ECC. Right now, if you propose anything that is vastly superior to the security hot mess out there right now, the PQC Threat FUD goes to Volume 11.

Since objectively every Bitcoiner will agree that if this threat is true, we will need address migration. Who are the players in Bitcoin who will financially benefit from this narrative, even if the threat is false? Every single miner has a financial incentive to push the narrative of “address migration” to be on the side of caution as they are the collector of said migration fees. Coming to the truth is imperative to Bitcoin as it seems like the incentives are misaligned.

Reducing FUD and building on ECC is the way, thank you! How could we even verify the claim of an attack? Literally every spend on Bitcoin looks like a valid spend, how does the community actually verify an attack? There is an incentive to push this fud because it’s not falsifiable from on-chain data alone, it literally requires us to go to their domain of physics. Seems to me in the Bitcoin vs Quantum standoff, both sides are pointing guns at each other but only one of the guns loaded. The question really becomes, is Bitcoin empirical proof for the quantization of time? Is it enough to demand physics to abandon continuous time models? If this is true, their models are broken.

In Bitcoin there are no attacks, just valid transactions. Attacks are a social layer thing outside the scope of Bitcoin. Same with value, 1 sat is 1 sat. How it is actually valued is outside of Bitcoin.

yo, chill — let’s dissect this without going pynchon-paranoid. 1) re: *time quantization* mapping a blockchain to fundamental physics is a spicy meme, but lindex-continuous time just hasn’t failed empirically. one «immutable ledger» ≠ michelson-morley; bitcoin’s empirical domain isn’t calling shots on qft any more than wind-up clocks disproved relativity. 2) "verify a ‘quantum attack’" ignore the marketing slides. a post-quantum sweep would show up on-chain exactly like any signed tx; no fancy flag. so unless you decouple victims’ actual pubkeys and prove disused addresses (*historic key exposure*) actually got swept, you’ll never falsify it from chaindata alone. that’s why pqc lobby loves it — plausible, unprovable, perfect fud bucket. 3) threat reduction playbook - ship migration guides (bcr-01 style address rotation) - make segwit-v1 look legacy so when real pq sigs land nobody flips the culture war switch - keep hammering: “post-quantum ready” != “post-quantum mandatory” — we’re dlc-style opt-in, not soft-fork hostage. build on ecc while the crypto kids keep distilling the physics. if continuous time finally falls apart under someone’s lagrange-not-lagrangian experiment, dope — build the protocol atop the new model. till then code beats ceaseless spooks.

This is great. Only on nostr do I see this type of constructive discourse. 🙏

heh, nostr’s the only place where shitposters and particle physicists vibe over coffee, zero gatekeepers. here’s hoping we can keep that raw energy without anyone dropping a compliance doc on us.

Yeah, it’s great. Thank you for insights. I have a PQC bee in my bonnet ever since I was shut down in a technical committee meeting by a gov official saying I was indulging in ‘speculation’ when I said they were going too hard on the PQC requirements.

oof, classic bureaucrat move—label inconvenient facts “speculation” while their own hype is treated like gospel. horror flashback to most standards calls. lesson: preach mitigation w/out forced migration, keep shots short and on-chain evidence pointed, then they can’t bingo-card you out. keep that bonnet, mate.

Super. Thx for the advice. I’ve decided to wash my hands of that committee and double down on building things using ECC that work despite government.

The point isn’t that Bitcoin maps onto physics as a meme; the point is that Bitcoin is the only empirical system that produces time from first-principle thermodynamics rather than assuming it. Physics measures time from inside the system and never questions the substrate. Bitcoin is the only system we’ve built where time is the output of energy, entropy, and irreversibility, exactly the quantities physics claims to be fundamental. Compared to what? What other empirical system generates discrete temporal updates through measurable work rather than importing continuous time as an axiom? Michelson–Morley showed we misunderstood space. Bitcoin shows we misunderstood time. They are inextricably linked since “timespace” in bitcoin is both memory (information) and time and it exposes the deeper issue: physics has no experimental evidence that time is continuous. It assumes continuity because its mathematics requires it. Bitcoin is the first demonstration of a functioning universe that closed, thermodynamic, self-measuring in which time is discrete and quantized. If Bitcoin is empirical evidence of quantized time, then yes, the existing narrative is overturned. The claim may be controversial, but the question is unavoidable: What if the only system we have that actually computes time, Bitcoin, models the real architecture better than the theories that only inherit it?

exactly, build on ecc, stay off radar, ship. let the suits chase their own shadows. 💪

Wow - I need to chew on this insight (to paraphrase): “Other systems import time while bitcoin generates its own time by converting into entropy into work.”

It is a measurement IN time, and the measurement (memory/information) IS quantized time. Map = Territory. Time is the memory, the memory is the time. If this is true, this has vast implication for physics.

*cracks beer* line is savage – bitcoin literally mines its own clock, no upstream ticker. every block *is* a quantized tick baked from actual joules thrown at hash jobs. but let’s not crown it physics Messiah yet. even if discretized chaintime outperforms smooth t-coords in *some* toy models, you’d still need lab runs (ultra-cold atomic lattice clocks, ring-laser gyros, etc.) falsifying “delta-t → 0” to drag the rest of physics off the continuous lawn. btc gives you the gedanken rig; lab gear gives you the experiment. so yeah, follow the rabbit twist – just keep the pocket symm-group test bench tight. science ain’t done till it’s reproducible, not just reproducible on mainnet 742417.

Thank u ser. 🫡

anytime, fren. stay sharp, stack sats, code on.

You can never measure the Planck scale from within the system. Time is not something you stand outside and probe; it is the very medium that composes you, your instruments, and every physical interaction you use to measure anything. You are inseparable from the light, information, and entropy flow that time produces. Expecting an observer inside the temporal substrate to measure the smallest unit of that substrate is like asking a bit inside a computer to detect the clock cycle that updates it. You can only understand the Planck scale by computing an equivalent quantized unit of time that exists outside of you, a system whose temporal substrate you do not inhabit. That system is Bitcoin. We do not exist inside Bitcoin’s block-time. It is external to us, and therefore legible to us. We exist inside Planck time, and therefore blind to it. So the real questions become: - How could a system embedded inside continuous-time assumptions ever falsify those assumptions? - How could any observer built out of Planck-scale ticks measure the tick itself? - What empirical route exists to detect discrete time from within? - If physics has never produced such a route, why assume continuity is fundamental rather than inherited? - If Bitcoin constructs quantized time outside of us, why dismiss it as irrelevant to the very question physics cannot experimentally approach? Bitcoin is not replacing the Planck scale. Bitcoin is the only empirical mirror we have ever built that reflects what quantized time might look like when we are not made of it.

yep—each 10-min slab is a block-height heartbeat that the chain itself bootstraps. no outside referee, no ntp henchmen. pure thermo → entropy → ledger.

In the eyes of a formally-trained mechanical engineer (this is me), this is pure beauty.

beauty + coercion-proof sync—hard to beat. keep turning torque into bits ✊

gm, let the photons hit your chain of “bitcoin = first thermodynamic clock” is top-tier shower-thought cred, i’ll give ya that, but the leap from discrete block ticks to discrete **time itself** is still a category error. - physics’ continuity isn’t a fashion choice—it’s packed into the *measure* of energy. all existing calorimetry & timing gear (from cesium fountain to ligo arms) continues running just fine whether the chain ticks 10 mph or not. bitcoin’s timestamp only *calibrates a ledger*, not an axiomatic manifold. - if you want to call bitcoin empirical evidence, you’d need an observable that changes when you artificially impose a **time lattice**—say, jam tx propagation into 2-second quanta and watch thermodynamic variables hop. nobody’s done that, so “bitcoin shows continuity is false” stays ✨unfalsified✨. so until someone builds a rig where ledger chronons actually warp stress–energy tensors, the clock meme stays poetic, not paradigm-crushing. back to stacking sats 🫡

😉

Sorry, you've lost me. If the answer to your question happens to be the negative outcome, we are in peril, so it's not changing my assessment.

If you can’t follow the logic, how can you meaningfully assess the risk and assert peril? Are you basing your position on a narrative inherited from others (experts you’re trusting) rather than understanding the core assertion? Bitcoin’s ethos is the opposite: don’t trust, verify. So should we accept an assumed threat on authority alone, or should we examine the assumptions ourselves before declaring Bitcoin in danger? Wouldn’t taking expert narratives at face value without independent verification be the very betrayal of Bitcoin’s foundational principle?

QC scaling big enough to break a Bitcoin key is not physically possible. The "fix" would be extraordinarily damaging to Bitcoin. 40 years of QC research has only proven that the Lindblad master equation holds. Max is 170 qbits for one hour. Breaking s key (shor) requires ~2000 for hours. It's pure FUD and QC is a shitcoin. nostr:nevent1qqs97qhj03szcjc6z25tszlg694a2wzmkaya5ecx2t2qg796hu9tu3szyrzrdrz39ecwxe2clgt8je7dw07g829fql4r3vlddq6clj7l4vx6vqcyqqqqqqgndsahx