The call to "upgrade Bitcoin" is misguided. Since the ledger is a record of human decisions, the focus should be on upgrading our collective understanding of the system. A flawed mental model of Bitcoin will manifest as flawed actions and proposals on the network.
The mempool, containing all possible but unconfirmed transactions, acts as an analogy for quantum superposition. It represents a pre-measured state of potential. The mining of a block serves as the "measurement" that collapses this potential into a single, deterministic, classical reality.
Instead of viewing time as a fourth dimension appended to space (spacetime), the authors propose "time-space." Here, time, as an ordered sequence of thermodynamic commitments (blocks), is the foundational constraint from which spatial and causal order emerge as derivative properties.
In physics, the observer is often conflated with the measurer. Bitcoin provides a model where measurement is an objective, internal process—the mining of a block. Observation is the separate, subsequent act of verification by a node. This clarifies a long-standing ambiguity in physics.
The paper posits that Bitcoin blocks represent discrete, indivisible units of time. This provides a real-world, observable model that challenges the long-held assumption in physics that time is a continuous, infinitely divisible parameter, thus solving the double-spend problem logically.
By converting energy (joules, Boltzmann entropy) into a specific configuration of Satoshis (bits, Shannon entropy) through mining, Bitcoin provides an operational bridge between the physical and information worlds. This resolves the long-standing disconnect between the two forms of entropy.
The fiat monetary system, which lacks a hard cap, trains people to think within incomplete, unbounded frameworks. This "fiat mindset" makes it difficult to understand and trust a complete, bounded system like Bitcoin, where all rules are defined and finite from the outset.
Bitcoin's finite supply is presented as a necessary boundary for a complete logical system, without which measurements become meaningless. This is analogous to physical constants like Planck temperature, which act as boundaries for physical laws, suggesting boundaries are essential for defining reality.
We are inherently part of the physical universe, making it impossible to step outside of time to measure it. Bitcoin, as a human-made system that produces its own discrete time via blocks, offers a novel external perspective, allowing us to observe the mechanics of time from the outside in.
Quantum mechanics relies on the assumption of continuous time. If time is discrete, as Bitcoin's architecture suggests, the foundational math for quantum computing is invalid. This means quantum computers may never pose an existential threat to Bitcoin's encryption, making the two models fundamentally incompatible.