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

[alejandromontana at tutamail.com]

> 19 мая 2026 г., 21:47 От woody at pch.net:
>
>>> On May 18, 2026, at 11:12, Mert Ali Bulut <mrtblt at hotmail.com.tr> wrote:
>>> Inflation is indeed necessary, and money needs to be spent, but if there's no limit to the supply, it leads to inflation that becomes a crisis, like in Germany after World War I, and the value of money decreases. If the use of money increases, inflation may fall in the short term, but after a certain period, it will lead to a full-blown recession.
>>>
>>
>> A fixed rate of increase _is_ a limit to the supply.  At any given moment, there’s an exact and knowable supply.  That’s like the one significant advantage cryptocurrencies have over traditional currencies, in my view: the rate of inflation can be fixed precisely relative to demand, rather than dictated by a board of governors who have to guess based on indirect signals.
>>
>> That is, of course, a more sophisticated way of doing it than fixed-over-time, but it’s not significantly more complicated.  The complicated part is in the buy-back, when it becomes necessary.  :-/
>>
>> -Bill
>>

Dear Bill

Fully agreed on the first point - a fixed rate is a knowable supply: at any window W the total is exactly 13·(W+1), no estimation, no discretion. That’s the sense in which “infinite inflation” was never the real objection.

And I agree the deeper edge over fiat is what you describe: pinning issuance to demand instead of to a board guessing from indirect signals. Where I’d refine it is that the expansion side isn’t the cost - you’re right it’s barely more code. The cost is the signal and the contraction. “Demand” for a monetary good is reflexive and not canonically observable on-chain; any proxy you’d feed the emission rule (price, volume, velocity) is either an oracle - a trust assumption and an attack surface -or an on-chain quantity the participants who benefit from issuance can manufacture.
Which brings us to your buy-back, and that’s exactly why we didn’t go there. 

Symmetric control means contracting when demand falls, and Montana has nothing to contract with: no premine, no fees, no treasury, no governance lever - the only emission is 13 to the window’s operator. Algorithmic contraction without a real reserve behind it is precisely the death-spiral mode (Basis, UST). So we chose predictability over elasticity on purpose: a closed-form, credibly neutral schedule, and we push stable-value units to the application layer rather than trying to make the base unit hold purchasing power.

So I’d take the smiley as the conclusion rather than a footnote: recognizing the buy-back as the wall is the thing that justified fixed-over-time for us.

- Alejandro
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