By The Breakdown
Money, in its modern incarnation, has undergone a profound transformation. As Stefano Gogioso points out in A Quantum Moneyfesto, currency has been reduced to a mere simulacrum of its former self—an obligation by a counterparty to perform bookkeeping functions rather than a tangible item of intrinsic worth. To understand where our financial systems might be heading next, however, it helps to look backward at science fiction and forward to the emerging realities of quantum physics.
In Star Trek, traveling from the Starship Enterprise down to the surface of a nearby planet took only seconds. Crewmembers stepped into the Transporter, which dematerialized them into an energy pattern accurate to the quantum level, beamed them to a target location, and converted that energy back into matter so the person could be reassembled. But the philosophical question that has long haunted fans and physicists alike is whether the person who beams back up is truly the same individual who beamed down.
The official, in-universe answer is that they are one and the same. The consciousness of transported crewmembers supposedly remains continuous thanks to the perfection of the Transporter’s quantum-level scan and reconstruction, with crewmembers citing memories of being in transit as proof.
However, humanity has since learned how quantum-level transportation actually works in the real world, and that is not it. In quantum teleportation, which was first discovered in 1993, the only thing being teleported is information. Teleporting something like a qubit requires that the original quantum state of that qubit be destroyed. Under the fundamental laws of physics, collecting precise information on a quantum state collapses its superposition, thereby destroying the original state entirely.
Yet, that collected information can then be transmitted as classical data consisting of ones and zeros over a satellite or fiber-optic cable. Thanks to the physics-magic of entanglement, it can then be reassembled using other particles at its intended destination. The unsettling truth, therefore, is that the Transporter on the Starship Enterprise could only work by killing its passengers. The crewmember who beams down is fundamentally not the exact same entity that beams back up.
This realization carries profound implications not just for science fiction, but for the future of money itself.
In traditional banking, the way money is sent from Bank A to Bank B is remarkably mundane. Bank A subtracts a number from its internal spreadsheet and sends a digital message to Bank B instructing it to add the exact same number to theirs. Only the message is sent, never the money itself. This fundamental limitation is precisely why human society needs banks in the first place: to act trusted intermediaries that send each other messages about our respective money.
With quantum money, however, the money sends its own messages.
Quantum money is built on the concept that economic value could be directly represented by the quantum state of a particle and exchanged via quantum teleportation. Fabrizio Genovese explains this distinction clearly in an email, noting that the most important thing to understand is that quantum money behaves like a physical resource, rather than like data.
Where a traditional bank deposit is merely information about money, and Bitcoin is a distributed consensus record representing money, quantum money would literally be the money itself. It would be an uncopyable atom, photon, or molecule that is money, rather than just data pointing toward it.
This approach offers immense utility because it would allow currency to be secured and transported according to the unbreakable laws of superposition, entanglement, and the no-cloning theorem. In other words, the laws of physics might someday accomplish what current databases and distributed ledgers achieve today, but entirely without the need for a database or a ledger.
Quantum money would consequently possess the self-custodial properties of physical cash. Individuals could keep qubits of money stored securely in a local hardware device in the exact same way they keep physical bills in their wallets. That capability would make the exchange of money completely permissionless, eliminating the need for any intermediaries whatsoever, while also ensuring absolute privacy because there would be no centralized ledger recording the transaction history.
At the same time, quantum money would retain the highly transportable properties of digital money. Destroying the money on a user’s local device creates the exact sendable information required to recreate it on another device, no matter how far away that device might be located.
Of course, during the brief moment when the quantum state is in transit as classical data across a network, it temporarily ceases to exist—a phenomenon that inadvertently proves the Star Trek Transporter really is a suicide machine. Sending quantum money will feel much like sending physical cash through the mail, but with the distinct advantage of arriving instantaneously.
The necessity of sending money over great distances originally created the demand for commercial banks, but solving that geographical problem introduced the financial intermediaries that now control nearly all of our money supply. Bitcoin was engineered as a way to make peer-to-peer transactions possible over great distances without traditional banking intermediaries. But quantum money could represent a truly unstoppable way to achieve the same goal.
As Stefano Gogioso observes, blockchain transactions are not quite truly peer-to-peer because there is always some part of the underlying mechanism that can theoretically stop a transaction from going through for economic, political, or technological reasons. With quantum money, nothing will ever be able to stop a quantum transaction for any reason whatsoever.
There is, however, one significant physical limitation. Unlike Star Trek, where Captain Kirk could beam down to any newly discovered planet on a whim, quantum money can only be transported to a hardware device that has been specifically prepared to receive it.
Because that specialized device does not yet exist today, quantum money remains unfeasible for immediate practical deployment. Gogioso estimates that humanity is still roughly three or four years away from seeing the earliest iterations of this technology. When it finally arrives, however, it promises to be the safest conceivable way to transfer value.
Deriving security directly from quantum states is akin to harnessing energy from the Sun, as Genovese points out, noting that it is simply what the universe gave us. Because of this inherent strength, he expects that all future cybersecurity will eventually be conducted through quantum states, and money will naturally follow that path.
Humanity will still face the challenge of giving that quantum money agreed-upon value, however, which may ultimately prove to be the hardest trick of all. Building a theoretical device to teleport qubits is one thing, but convincing the broader public and global markets to accept those subatomic states as legitimate payment is an entirely different hurdle.
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