Quantum mechanics may make it possible to mine Bitcoin (the same Bitcoin) on two different planets without losing on time.
It may even enable sending and receiving it!
The following is a hypothetical analysis from the far future.
The Challenge
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency has a fixed block production time of 10 minutes. While this may be too slow for your coffee service, it is too fast considering the distances across planets.
Consider the planet that keeps Elon Musk and many other people (I prefer Venus) hopeful about the future – Mars.
Fast-forward to the future, many humans are living their best lives as Martians. That means they need Bitcoin.
Mars is, on average, 140 million kilometers from Earth, a prohibitive distance to travel for rockets and radio signals. A rocket-powered mission carrying Mars rovers Bitcoin miners will still take seven months to reach the Red planet, while a signal propagating from Earth to Mars to instruct these miners to start mining takes at least 5 minutes to arrive.
Five minutes is too long in the Bitcoin mining game because while everyone else is halfway through the race, the Martian miners will just be starting.
The Solution
One part of the solution is a quantum network to form a multi-chain. We want to connect two cryptocurrencies that are both Bitcoin (how?)—one on Earth and one on Mars.
The other part is synchronized atomic clocks.
Martians need not compete with Earth-people using some notion of absolute time. As Einstein showed, that does not exist.
A special form of relative time is the idea here. Synchronized to appear as if there is no barrier called outer space, 140 million kilometers across.
The Martians should first have their own cryptocurrency, as many narratives have laid out. But unlike those narratives, laying out a law of hash horizons, we shall discuss here how to bridge these hash horizons using quantum mechanics.
Let’s call the version of Bitcoin on Mars “Mars Bitcoin” or MBTC. MBTC could be built to behave just like Bitcoin at the time when MBTC was created. For example, say Bitcoin is going to be at block height 1,000,000 in 8 months and only 3.125 BTC are what Earth-people shall be mining then, that is exactly what the Bitcoin community on Mars should also be mining.
3.125 BTC.
To set this up, we could copy all the critical Bitcoin core code at that time and add a unique MBTC Genesis block modeled to start at 3.125 BTC and count downwards.
Now it might seem like there will be too little MBTC for the Martians to do business, but this shall be remedied with networked quantum computers and atomic clocks to allow bitcoins to flow from Earth to Mars and vice versa.
Why atomic clocks? They are so precise they lose one second after billions of years.
Why networked quantum computers? We need perfect synchronization.
How to move Bitcoins from Earth to Mars without losing time
This is a hypothetical idea, so let’s make more assumptions, like good scientists do. Many of these are currently impossible.
Assume in our scenario we can keep two large entangled quantum states coherent for minutes and even hours, even while one of them is traversing the chaotic distance between Earth and Mars.
Assume we have found a way to inject an entangled quantum state into a quantum computational system without it losing its coherence.
We also assume we have found a way to seamlessly connect quantum computational systems to classical computational systems so that there is a process control flowing in either direction.
Therefore, on Earth, we connect a quantum computer to the Bitcoin blockchain, to an atomic clock, and to a system for sending and receiving signals. The Martians also repeat the entire setup on Mars.
Assume there is planetary and interplanetary unity to let all this happen, facilitated by hyperbitcoinization. Otherwise, it wouldn’t happen.
Steps for Mining on Mars like you are on Earth
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Connect your MBTC miner to a source of electricity, e.g., a nuclear battery.
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Press “Synchronize with Earth miners”. This will make you wait for some minutes.
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Do wait the way Earth people have to wait for banks to process international payments.
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During this time, your atomic clock is adding a time delay while synchronizing with the Earth clock. This time delay takes into account the time taken for your system to query the Earth system, make it create two entangled states, send one to you, plug it into your system, and get on standby. Some time delay is maintained in the background to mimic the Earth clock exactly, which is 5+ minutes ahead.
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At the correct entry point, the two entangled states are measured by the Martian flipping a switch to start mining. A switch is also synchronously flipped on Bitcoin software on Earth machines.
Remember that the time delay is canceled out by the atomic clocks.
Steps for Sending Bitcoins from Earth to Mars
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You on Earth doing the sending should ask the Martian recipient to connect their MBTC node to a source of electricity like a nuclear battery. If they don’t, you will burn your coins somewhere in those 140 million kilometers of emptiness.
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Tell them to enter “Receive Mode”.
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Create a transaction and broadcast it to their node across space, using a packaged signal with an entangled state (for synchronicity with atomic clocks, as in mining above) and a non-entangled state of the signed transaction referencing their public MBTC wallet, which will bypass the quantum computers and go straight into the classical computer, then standby.
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As the two cryptocurrencies are multi-chained, they will behave as one blockchain.
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The Martian is notified, “Incoming transaction. Press to receive”. They press ENTER and voilà. The states are collapsed on both planets, and both the MBTC and the BTC blockchains record the transaction with a unified time. With the time delay removed.
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In reality, the bitcoins sent to Mars enter special wallet addresses on Earth’s blockchain, not addressable without a special MBTC–type key. The same goes for bitcoins from the Mars to Earth system.
Futuristic multi-BTC-chain ish.
Keep Building
While a lot of the dynamics here are currently fictitious, they would enable Bitcoin to truly be a cosmic cryptocurrency without borders. Not even space would contain its magic.
Maybe they would push its utility beyond merely a few years when mining of big coin rewards is done and over with to utility for thousands of years across entire star systems. This is because the biggest value would not be in mining coins; the value would be in exchanging value.
Spreading unity and love from around the world to other worlds where humans like us live.
Even more impressively, ideas from alternative cryptocurrencies and technologies might help make this possible in the fastest time ever.
WAGMI
Buidl.
P.S.>> I created a game with classical and quantum-simulator code in which a bitcoin is sent from one quantum computer to another. Check it out here!