The earlier points in the piece about the distinction between information and physical matter got me thinking. I only have a bachelor's in computer science and not much cryptography knowledge, so please excuse if this question has a simple answer: What fundamentally prevents us from creating a digital analog of gold? Gold (partially) has value because it is scarce, and it's scarce because it's difficult to create--nuclear fusion takes a ton of energy, and gold is one of the heavier naturally occurring elements. As the article mentions, all physical assets can retain value because they're impossible to copy. If I give you my gold, the transfer of value is being held up by the laws of physics. You now have it, and I don't. There's no ledger keeping track of all the gold atoms in the universe, therefore it's trivial to transfer it from one part of space to another. What keeps us from having some cryptographic primitive that enforces the same thing?
Bitcoin got the part of "requiring some difficulty to create", but I feel like the killer cryptocurrency would be the one where no ledger is needed.
Yeah, I read the article. My question was what really prevents the existence of some cryptographic operation that would allow us to "port" the laws of physics to the digital space, so that when information moves we could enforce that the sender no longer has it and the receiver does.
Bitcoin got the part of "requiring some difficulty to create", but I feel like the killer cryptocurrency would be the one where no ledger is needed.