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

[alejandromontana at tutamail.com]

> 19 мая 2026 г., 22:41 От ron at flownet.com:
>
>>> On May 18, 2026, at 3:12 AM, 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.
>>>
>>
>> This is the fundamental problem with all extant cryptocurrencies: they all control the money supply algorithmically.  But money is a commodity like any other, except that to serve its intended function as a medium of exchange it has to have a stable price relative to some actual goods or services.  The only way to accomplish that is to control the money supply in such a way that it can respond to actual demand, which is to say, to actual economic activity.  But there is no extant crypto currency with a mechanism for this.  They all control the money supply algorithmically, which inevitably leads to disconnects between supply and economic activity, and hence to wild inflationary and deflationary cycles.  The crypto fetish for limiting inflation has nothing to do with sound economic policy and everything to do with early adopters wanting to cement their positions and those of their heirs as the controllers of wealth so they can seek rent in perpetuity.
>>
>> It is important to remember that at the exact same time that the Weimar Republic was experiencing its inflationary disaster, the United States was dealing with a deflationary disaster known as the Great Depression.  Herbert Hoover's Fed ran the USD as if it were BTC (at least in terms of monetary policy), and it took fifteen years and a world war to recover.  We escaped a similar fate in 2008 by the skin of our teeth *only* because the Fed had the ability to "fire up the printing presses" and provide liquidity.
>>
>> rg
>>

Dear RG

You’re right about the history and I won’t argue it. The Depression got worse because the system couldn’t expand, and 2008 went better because the Fed could. Friedman and Schwartz, Eichengreen, Bernanke, all of that holds up. On the economics you have the better side.

But this is aimed at something Montana isn’t trying to be. I’m not claiming the coin is money in your sense, a stable thing that prices real goods. It isn’t, and the paper doesn’t say it is. Its value floats with how much the applications on top get used. It’s a reward for doing the consensus work, not a tool for running monetary policy.

Stable money needs an institution that can watch the real economy and react to it. A protocol with no central bank can’t be that, so it shouldn’t pretend to be. And your two examples are really the same problem from both ends. Weimar is the printing press abused. The Depression is the printing press missing. What decides the outcome is whether a competent and accountable institution is holding the lever, not whether supply is fixed or elastic. That’s a governance question, not a code question. It’s the reason I keep monetary policy out of the protocol instead of faking it with an algorithm.

On the rent seeking, that’s fair for coins with a premine or heavy early mining, but not this one. No premine, no founder allocation, no presale, no supply cap that makes early holders rich just for being early. The reward is a flat 13 Montana per window to whoever does the work, from the first window on. If anything that’s the opposite of locking in a small group at the top.

- Alejandro
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