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

[cryptskii at proton.me]

>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.

Here is the tightened version with that added in:

I think time is the actual resource underneath all of this.

Money is the abstraction, but time is the scarce thing we are really trading around. It is the most finite resource in the world, and on an individual level it is also an unknown. You cannot know how much of it you have been allocated, and you cannot create more of it.

That makes it the most precious resource.

It is also the one thing you cannot directly exchange in the purest sense. I cannot simply buy time off you and add it to my own life expectancy. I cannot take ten years from someone else and apply it to my own balance.

So over the course of history, money became the closest abstraction we have come up with. Instead of directly buying your time, I buy what you can do with your time. I pay for your labour, skill, risk, infrastructure, knowledge, or productivity so that I do not have to spend my own unknown allocation of time doing that same thing.

That is why money can be viewed as a generalized IOU. You provide value now, and in return you receive a socially accepted claim on value later. But underneath that, what we are really trading is optionality over time.

Money is the interface. Time itself is the real commodity.