[Cryptography] Montana: A Post-Quantum Blockchain with Time as Scarcity

[alejandromontana at tutamail.com]

> 19 мая 2026 г., 20:57 От woody at pch.net:
>
>>
>>
>>> On May 18, 2026, at 09:12, Pierre Abbat <phma at bezitopo.org> wrote:
>>> With  cryptocurrency, a lost coin cannot be found
>>>
>>
>> This kinda leads to a circular definition of “lost.”  I guess I would say that in traditional currencies, large amounts tend to go into reserves, and optimists assume that they will stay there, but when things get bad, optimistic predictions which may have held fast for long periods of time suddenly become inapplicable.  With cryptocurrencies, optimists assume that large blocks which haven’t moved in a long time are associated with lost keys, which will not be found or brute-forced.  I imagine optimistic assessments which have held true for a long time could, likewise, go out the window rather quickly if the status-quo changes.
>>
>> -Bill
>>
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Dear Bill

You’re right that “lost” is circular, and right that an assumption holding for a long time isn’t the same as it holding necessarily - a long-dormant block is “lost” only until the day it moves. I’d just note this cuts in Montana’s favor rather than against it, because the design never leans on lost coins as a source of scarcity.

Two things follow. First, Ɉ’s value is explicitly tied to application-layer demand, not to a constrained float; there is no 21M-style cap whose economics depend on what fraction is permanently out of circulation. Second, supply grows linearly forever - S(W) = 13·(W+1) - so any fixed stash, lost or merely dormant, becomes a vanishing fraction of the total over time. A whale waking up is a price event, not a supply-schedule event.

So the failure mode you describe - optimistic “it’ll stay put” assumptions snapping during a regime change - is exactly the one a fixed-cap, scarcity-narrative coin is exposed to, and the one this design is structurally insulated from. We don’t need the lost-coin assumption to be true.

- Alejandro

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