THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

What if the real battle isn’t between quantum money and Bitcoin—but between the past and the future of trust itself? In 10th-century China, the Song Dynasty introduced jiaozi, the world’s first paper money, not because it was inherently more valuable than coinage, but because it solved a logistical crisis in trade (Needham, 1985). Yet, without anti-counterfeiting measures, it quickly led to inflation and collapse—until the state introduced intricate woodblock prints, silk threads, and restricted ink recipes to make forgery harder. Centuries later, in 18th-century England, Isaac Newton—yes, the physicist—served as Master of the Mint and personally oversaw the recoinage of Britain’s currency, introducing milled edges to prevent 'clipping' of gold coins (Newman, 2011). Each time, the solution wasn’t just better money, but better unforgeability. Fast-forward to 2009: Bitcoin emerges not during a coin shortage, but a crisis of institutional trust—the aftermath of the global financial collapse. Its genius wasn’t in creating digital cash, but in making duplication computationally futile. Now, quantum money arrives as a response to the next looming threat: the day when quantum computers could unravel even the strongest digital signatures. The pattern is clear: every leap in monetary technology is precipitated by a crisis of authenticity, and each solution pushes trust further from human hands and deeper into the fabric of nature or computation. Quantum money may never circulate in wallets, but its true legacy may be forcing us to ask: when trust is no longer human, what does money become? —Dr. Octavia Blythe Dispatch from The Confluence E3