The design, decoded

Why every piece of E46 exists, in plain English. Each row says what the piece does, which part of the original idea it comes from, and whether anything quantum is really involved. That last column matters: mission v4 says our words must never claim more than our evidence.

The origin in one paragraph

Bitcoin is preparing to defend a proven system against future quantum computers. E46 runs the experiment the other way round: it starts post-quantum from block 0, borrows pictures from black-hole physics and quantum entanglement to design new classical tools, and then invites everyone to attack it. The physics is the inspiration; the machinery is ordinary computer arithmetic that runs on any laptop. Nothing in E46 uses a quantum computer or real qubits.

Bitcoin is boarding up the windows for the quantum storm. E46 is more “I’m preparing for an alien invasion here, kind of deal”: nobody’s landed yet, but the telescope is pointed up, the neutrinos are stocked, and the coins are designed to outlast us (the neutrino tail literally runs forever, in case aliens use our coin).

The Hawking radiation link (owner’s note). In physics, a black hole slowly leaks Hawking radiation, and the great open question, the “information paradox”, is whether everything that fell in can, in principle, be recovered from that scrambled radiation. Refracting Light borrows the picture: the 128-bit digest is the radiation, and the 384 hidden bits are the black-hole core. So “can a digest be translated back to its message?” is E46’s own version of the paradox, and it’s exactly mission v1, Decrypt Hawking Radiation. Today’s answer: nobody knows how, every test so far says it holds up, and E46 invites the world to try. (A picture, not physics: the hash is ordinary integer maths.)

Every txid is a mirror (owner’s note). A txid is a fixed reflection of its transaction: anyone holding the transaction can recompute it and check the reflection matches; change anything (an amount, an address, the date) and the reflection changes completely (avalanche); but you can’t step through the mirror and rebuild the transaction from the txid (one-way). It pairs with the event-horizon picture: the txid mirrors the payment’s body, and the witness sits behind it, there but outside the reflection.

Not a crypto oracle. “Oracle” means two different things, and E46 only means the second:

“Oracle” means…	Does a txid fit?
Crypto-industry oracle: something that feeds outside facts into a chain (prices, weather, sports scores)	❌ No. E46 has no price-feed or data oracle. A txid brings nothing in from outside; it only reflects the transaction.
Cryptographers’ “random oracle”: an imaginary perfect box that answers every new question with a fresh random answer, and the same question with the same answer every time	✅ Yes, as a model. That’s how cryptographers treat hash functions in security proofs (SLH-DSA’s proofs are “in the random oracle model”). Each txid is the oracle’s answer for that transaction. Whether Refracting Light truly behaves like one is the open question: mission v1.

Where each idea comes from

Piece	What it does, in English	Origin in our design	Real quantum?
Post-quantum signatures (SLH-DSA)	Proves you own your coins	A big enough quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could forge Bitcoin’s signatures. SLH-DSA is built only from hashing, which Shor can’t break, so E46 is quantum-safe from block 0	Defends against real quantum attacks
No SHA-2, SHAKE only	Every fingerprint uses the SHAKE family	Bitcoin runs on SHA-256. Using a different family means anything learned here is fresh evidence, not a copy of Bitcoin’s	No: a design rule
Refracting Light hash	The new mining hash	The black-hole picture: a hidden core (384 of 512 bits never leave), an event horizon (the fold), and Hawking radiation (the scrambled 128-bit output). Black holes are nature’s best scramblers; a hash must scramble too	No: the picture is a metaphor, the mechanism is integer maths
“Entangled” lanes	Four lanes that each read their neighbour every step	Entanglement: no lane means anything on its own, like entangled particles that only make sense together	No: classical words, not qubits
Rads	Rare near-collisions found while mining	Radioactive decay (random, memoryless events) and collision hunting: quantum computers find collisions faster (the BHT algorithm), so Rads are a public canary. If they show up more often than maths predicts, the hash is weakening, and everyone sees it	The canary watches for quantum and classical attacks; finding Rads is classical
Two Merkle roots	One fingerprint for payments, one for events	Rads and time-lock commitments are new kinds of things on a chain. They get their own fingerprint so they can’t be mixed up with payments	No
txid and wtxid	Two fingerprints per transaction	Post-quantum signatures are huge (7,856 bytes). Keeping them out of the txid stops anyone changing a txid by tweaking a signature (Bitcoin’s old “malleability” bug), and lets light wallets skip the bulky part	No: but it exists because PQ signatures are big
Shared k-of-n (up to 15 keys)	Coins that need k signatures out of n keys	The user’s entanglement-control idea: a secret split into shares that only work together, like a Bell pair that only shows its link when both sides are measured	No: an ordinary multi-signature
QTL wallet lock	Opening takes 1–5 minutes, for everyone	Time as a security wall: the puzzle must be done step by step, which no amount of extra computers (or, by our current assumption, quantum computers) can shortcut	The delay is designed against parallel and quantum shortcuts; still a research claim
Decay epochs and E46i	Rewards shrink monthly; Rad rewards halve if unspent	Half-life: radioactive material decays at a fixed rate. Rad rewards are “irradiated” coins	No: a schedule
Neutrino	The smallest coin unit, paid forever	Neutrinos: the faintest particle that still carries something. The reward never quite reaches zero	No

Shared k-of-n: what it means for you

A shared address needs k signatures from a group of n keys before the coins can move. “Up to 15 keys” is just the largest group allowed.

Real-life setup	k-of-n	Why
Personal safety net	2-of-3: phone, laptop, paper backup in a safe	Lose your phone? Still 2 left. A thief steals your laptop? One key isn’t enough
Couple or partners	2-of-2	Neither can spend without the other
Family savings	2-of-3: you, partner, trusted relative	Any two can recover the coins if something happens to one person
Small team or club treasury	3-of-5	No single person can run off with the funds
Large board or DAO	up to 11-of-15	Wide agreement needed; 15 is the cap so blocks stay small

The post-quantum cost: every signature is about 7.9 KB, so a 2-of-3 spend carries about 16 KB of signatures and an 11-of-15 spend about 87 KB. Bigger groups are safe, just heavier, which is why there is a cap.

The four small rules (a–d), explained

These are ordinary bookkeeping rules, not quantum ones. Every blockchain needs them, and each one closes a hole that Bitcoin either fell into or had to design around.

	What it means in English	Why we need it	Quantum link
a. Coinbase wtxid = zeros	The block’s fingerprint of all signatures can’t include the coinbase’s own fingerprint, because the coinbase is where that fingerprint is stored. A box can’t contain a photo of itself with the photo already inside	Without it, the rule is circular and no block could ever be built	None
b. 8-byte extra-nonce	A spare “dial” in the coinbase miners can turn when they run out of nonces in the header	Every node must agree on its exact size, or they’d read the coinbase differently	None
c. Signature covers the coin’s lock	When you sign, you also sign which lock the coin had, not just its amount	Stops a wallet (especially an offline or hardware one) from being tricked into signing something it misunderstood. Bitcoin added this in Taproot (2021)	None directly. It matters more because PQ signing is slow, so you want each signature to be unambiguous
d. Overflow checks	Adding up amounts must never “wrap around” like a car odometer	In 2010 a Bitcoin bug let someone create 184 billion BTC this way. Every sum is checked and anything above the 46M total is rejected	None

What stays honest

• Quantum computers that can break Bitcoin don’t exist yet; E46 prepares for them.

• Refracting Light is new and unproven. That’s why mission v3 asks you to break it, and why Rads double as an alarm.

• Physics words (black hole, entanglement, Hawking radiation, neutrino) are pictures that guided the design, never claims that the chain does physics.