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

[Ron Garret]

> On May 25, 2026, at 1:29 AM, iang <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> To cut to the chase, I think money IsAn accounting machine (system) that accounts for the relative inputs and outputs of each person.

I respectfully (because I think we're actually mostly on the same page here) disagree.  This fails to account for observed data, like the fact that money can be inherited and gifted.

One of the *intended uses* of money is to keep track of inputs and outputs in the hope that this will motivate people to behave in ways that keeps these in balance, but that is often not what is observed in nature.

> That was a fine contract, but the issuer of the contract (in this case the Fed) reneged on the contract by removing the printed commitment to pay in gold. Ever since then, the leading people who educate us about the money - central banks => economists - have stopped talking as if money is or has a contract.

It was never about the gold per se, but rather about leveraging the laws of physics to prevent fickle humans from producing inflation.  But physics can be fickle too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution

This is the big draw of Bitcoin: it controls inflation via an algorithm, and algorithms are not fickle.  They are merely inflexible.  But sometimes you really want to be flexible, especially when dealing with contingencies.

> The other thing that Central Banks do is surround the topic with boring mysticism. This is a ploy to keep people away from their grip on the power of money.

Sometimes I wonder if it's a cynical ploy, or if even the central bankers don't actually understand how the system works.

> Sort of - but inflation isn't the only tool. Companies that issue money-like units (eg airline miles) often build in various barriers into the contract that cause the 'money' to not last. As you point out, one obvious one is an expiry - 2 years is popular. Another is making it difficult to spend, a third is the general loss rate, and also lesser ability to convert to other forms of valuable tokens.

Yes, all of this is true.  But IMHO inflation is actually a much better design than an expiration date because it's continuous.  Discontinuities and economies don't generally play well together.

> The general rule here should be that companies should be free to experiment with their money contract and the market will tell us what works best.

Well, maybe.  We've actually done such experiments in the past as well, and they often ended badly.  Bank runs used to be common.  Now they are rare.  When you turn money over to the free market you run into problems with information asymmetry.  Empirically, the system that works best (by my personal quality metric which values stability and predictability very highly) is a central bank overseen by a democratically elected government.  This is far from perfect, but no alternative has ever produced better long-term results.

> For example, if Microsoft were to issue a money, there would be no need to reserve it. The company has a solid revenue stream, and can make good on any contract from that.

Maybe.  It depends on the terms under which they issued the money.  Nothing prevents Microsoft from printing MSDollars, just like nothing prevents Eve Online from issuing ISK.  The problem arises when you try to peg the value of the MSD or the ISK to the USD.  Yes, Microsoft has a solid revenue stream, but there is a reason that revenue stream is measured in USD and not MSD nor ISK.  It's the same reason that the value of Bitcoin is measured in USD, and the value of *everything* is measured in USD, because the USD is well-managed within a legal framework that prevents the people in power from fucking it up too badly.  (At least, that used to be true.  Whether it is still true, or will remain true, is far from clear right now.)

> As an aside, if we present money as an accounting machine, then money as a "neutral censorship-resistant ledger" can be easily seen as an *implementation*.

No, money is not the ledger.  Money is the *unit of measurement that the ledger tracks*.  It is the thing that reduces the economy from a high-dimensional vector space to a scalar.  The record-keeping is essential, but it is not the thing.  The ledger is the map, not the territory.

> I would say, controlling (reneging on) the *contract* gives you power, and controlling the accounting of the unit also gives you a separate power.

Not quite.  It is not controlling the *accounting* of the unit, it is controlling *the unit itself*.  The accounting is the easy part.  Defining the unit is the hard part.  Recording a transaction of USD123 or MSD123 or ISK123 is the easy part.  The hard part is defining what the units USD and MSD and ISK *mean* in a way that gets everyone on the same page so no one has to *worry* about what they mean because everyone more or less agrees what they mean even if (and this is the really important bit) very few people actually know what they really mean.

> But yes - hard agree - Bitcoin world doesn't so much conflate the contract with the accounting, they don't even know that contracts exist. And when they are forced to acknowledge them, they go silent and run away.

Exactly this.  This is why the value of BTC is measured in USD.  Bitcoin is parasitic on the USD.  It could not exist without the USD.  There is a reason that the computers that keep the blockchain going are bought with USD, not BTC.

rg