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

[Ron Garret]

> On May 23, 2026, at 3:53 PM, calebpayne at gmx.us wrote:
> 
> The exchange between Bill and Ron Garret cuts straight to one of the most persistent schisms in monetary economics and decentralized systems design: the distinction between **money as a stable unit of account** and **money as a neutral censorship-resistant ledger**.

There is actually a higher level of abstraction which is: money as a GENERALIZED CONTRACT, specifically, a generalization of an I.O.U. where one of the parties is not an individual entity but society at large.

My middle school civics teacher once told my class, "The national debt is different from a mortgage because we owe it to ourselves."  That didn't make sense to me at the time.  It sounded like a category error.  What does it even *mean* to owe a debt to yourself?  It took me a couple of decades to figure it out.  The answer is that my teachers phraseology is misleading.  The "we" who owes the debt is indeed the same group of people as those to whom the debt is owed, but acting in different capacities, and that makes all the difference.  The "we" who owes the debt is society at large acting as a collective, but the "ourselves" to whom the debt is owed is the members of the society acting as individuals.  The deal is: you work (or put capital at risk) to provide value to society now, and in return society will provide value to you at some unspecified time in the future and by some unspecified means.  The flexibility to choose when and how you will receive your compensation is part of the value.  It's like buying an option.

The problem is that people don't think of money as a contract or an option because they've never been taught that this is what it is.  They have been taught that the "time value of money" is an axiom, that compounding interest and increased purchasing power with time is a fundamental human right or somehow a consequence of the laws of physics rather than the product of productivity improvements.  As a result they see money not as a contract but an *entitlement*, and inflation as morally unacceptable *theft* rather than morally acceptable counterparty risk.  IMHO this is a catastrophic failure of our education system.

When viewed correctly as a contract, a certain level of background inflation becomes not only morally acceptable but morally necessary.  The financial obligations represented by monetary contracts must have some kind of expiration date built in.  Money has to be a "stable unit of account" in order to serve its purpose, but only on time scales on the order of one human lifetime, not across multiple generations, and certainly not forever.

The question of money as a "neutral censorship-resistant ledger" is a completely different matter.  This requirement is also a *consequence* of the fact that money is a contract with society at large as one of the counterparties, and so there has to be some way of keeping track of what society's obligations are under this contract that everyone will agree on.  But that is *completely independent* of the actual agreements about future obligations that are entered into.  One of the big problems with both cryptocurrencies *and* fiat currencies is that they conflate these two functions when they really ought to be separated.  Of course, it is completely understandable why fiat currencies conflate them: controlling the record-keeping gives you power.  But crypto currencies don't eliminate this, they merely shift the locus of power away from the issuers of currency towards those who understand technology.  There isn't a government entity who can block someone from issuing a bitcoin transaction, but that doesn't mean there aren't barriers to entry.

Bottom line: the crypto world is reinventing a lot of wheels because people don't understand what money actually is and how it works.  On which note...

> On May 24, 2026, at 4:19 AM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
> 
>> On May 24, 2026, at 00:25, Alejandro Montana via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> wrote:
>> If you want a crypto that works as a stable usable currency, the buy-back is exactly where it gets hard. 
> 
> Perhaps we’ve all just been hung up on the number of units as being the “value” of the currency.  Like, if you have twelve dollars today, and there’s inflation, and you’re holding your twelve dollars, it has lower buying-power tomorrow.  Which makes sense when the number of units is printed in ink on the face of a piece of paper which doesn’t have any other audit-trail…  But if you have the audit-trail, and you know when those specific units were minted, the value, or buying-power, can be related to both the face-value _and_ the mint date.

Or we could create some kind of scheme whereby people put money into accounts whose numerical value grows over time.  But wait, how could we possibly make that work?  Hm, maybe people could take the money they aren't currently using and temporarily assign it to someone else who has an idea for how to to put that money to some kind of productive use.  Then they could take some of the profit from the resulting value and use that to give the original owner of the money *more* than the amount they were temporarily assigned.  That would have exactly the effect we are looking for!  Isn't that, um, *interesting*?

rg