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everything goes to physics with you, even though in this case it's about the scalability of hashes. yes, sha256 hashes are steadily becoming more vulnerable, nothing to do with quantum, more to do with the fact that the energy cost of one sha256 hash has been hammered down hard chasing bitcoin blocks.
actually, that's a good reminder why i should consider not using that function in my design. probably should switch it to use a final blake2b or blake3 hash. or keccak. hashes on data are a variable space that only really becomes a problem if the source is very uniform, and small. so, yeah, hashing pubkeys is only one hash of cost. i would think that some kind of modulo expansion would be in order to make it more robust. a non-linearizable, non-parallelizable function is the best, for my money that's the long division. it's impossible to parallelize it or linearize it, it operates in pretty much O(N) time where N is the number of bits. that's also why i use a long division based expansion on the CPU-only hash function i designed back in 2018 for a bitcoin fork. that forces the work cost to become both variable (the length of the result of many expansions is unpredictable, and by design, the total length of data being hashed is very long, so it's pretty much invulnerable even when you have fast processors like modern bitcoin mining ASICs.
a hash function that is not parallelizable would also be a good idea. that rules out blake and sha2/3 as both are designed to be parallelisable.
also, quantum computing is bunk. until they prove they can error corrrect their outputs it's pure fud
Replies (2)
Iβm not shifting the discussion to physics arbitrarily, Iβm pointing out that Bitcoin gives us an empirical instantiation of quantized time, something physics has never been able to produce.
Objectively, Bitcoin constructs its own timebase through a thermodynamic process of energy and entropy, and that timebase is discrete, quantized, and irreducible. That means we finally have a working model of temporal evolution where state updates occur only in discrete, energy-backed steps. No one has ever built a physical system that exposes time so transparently.
Because of GΓΆdelian limitations, continuous time can never be falsified from within a universe composed of Planck-scale intervals. Any measurement of time must itself use time, so continuity remains an unfalsifiable assumption. Bitcoin stands apart because it creates its own time rather than measuring a substrate it is embedded in.
This matters because once you observe quantized time in practice, a time-first ontology becomes explicit: physics, space, and all dynamical formalisms emerge after discrete temporal structure is defined. If that architecture is closer to reality than the inherited continuous-time assumption, then much of the current formalism especially in quantum mechanics and computation is describing a mathematical idealization, not physical truth.
Iβm not denying the hashing discussion. Iβm simply pointing out that Bitcoin is the first system in human history where time is not assumed, but it is constructed from thermodynamics. If that observation is taken seriously, it has deep consequences for how we model the universe and the validity of said threat.
Does your empirical instantiation of time buy me a pizza at all. πππ
