Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Post-Quantum commit / reveal Fawkescoin variant as a soft fork

From: Jonathan Voss <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2025 11:54:08 -0700 (PDT)

If using a monetary network requires out-of-band payments, then that 
severely limits the actual utility of the monetary network as a medium of 
exchange. Imagine if the only way to make a bank transfer was to first go 
in-person to the bank of the recipient of the transfer to give them 
something that then allowed your bank to make the transfer -- it would be 
an unworkable monetary system. Similarly, if future Bitcoin transactions 
require making out-of-band payments, then it has failed as a monetary 
network with an endogenous unit of account. The whole system has to work 
without reliance upon exogenous monetary media or mechanisms. As such, the 
commit-and-reveal scheme fails to maintain the monetary properties of the 
network as a whole unless we assert reliance upon altruism to get the 
commitments into the blockchain, which instead breaks the incentive-based 
game theoretic design. Maybe it would work as a stop-gap solution in the 
event of the advent of a relevant quantum computer, but it is certainly not 
a good long-term plan as currently formulated.

Recall the original premise: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash 
System". If you can't transact with it as cash, i.e. as the ultimate 
endogenous settlement mechanism, then it is no longer Bitcoin. Requiring an 
exogenous system fundamentally breaks the model.

-- Jonathan

On Monday, June 2, 2025 at 9:53:55 AM UTC-4 Peter Todd wrote:

> On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 03:00:41PM -0700, Jonathan Voss wrote:
> > As far as I can tell, the main flaw in commit/reveal protocols is in the 
> > commit phase: if revealing a commitment with N confirmations is required 
> to 
> > spend bitcoins, then, without spending any bitcoins, how do you get the 
> > commitment into the blockchain in the first place? Maybe I am just 
> > misunderstanding this. If so, then a commit/reveal scheme may be a 
> workable 
> > solution.
>
> You can always purchase new BTC to perform the commitment.
>
> Indeed, this problem is often seen in alt-coins where fees must be paid in 
> a
> native asset, while users are trying to send some kind of tokenized asset 
> like
> a USD token. You can have funds that you can't move because you don't have 
> the
> correct asset. While annoying, this isn't a fatal problem.
>
> -- 
> https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
>

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