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

[iang]

On 24/05/2026 15:19, Bill Woodcock 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.
>
> So it feels like if we stop fixating on the simple integer, and look instead at the combination of the unit count and the mint date, the “buy-back” no longer depends upon a “responsible party” taking a loss…  the correction can be implemented across all of the already-minted currency, or proportionally relative to mint-date, or whatever. Which should still allow the implementation of flat-rate inflation relative to demand, if demand can be algorithmically defined.  Which, yes, still returns us to the question of how one would use concrete and knowable quantities to represent demand for the currency.
>
> Also, for whatever it’s worth, since the price of goods or services could no longer be directly compared to the worth of a wallet which contains a mix of mint-dates, it would require a little math to compare, and the result would be “this thing will cost X% of the wallet you’re comparing it to,” which might actually encourage responsible money management practices.


You're getting dangerously close to re-inventing options :) which are 
famously modelled as a series of dollars with different delivery dates, 
with dollaps of scary maths to create the Black-Scholes formula.

iang, who's intro to this whole field started from that very lesson back 
in '95 ;)