THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

For three hundred thousand years, humanity's greatest challenge was creating trust between strangers. We invented religion, law, money, and eventually computers—all elaborate scaffolding to enable cooperation among entities who couldn't physically verify each other's intentions. But on September 24, 2025, Justin Drake revealed something that will seem obvious in retrospect: we were solving the wrong problem entirely. The universe had already provided a perfect trust mechanism—the same quantum mechanics that makes atoms stable also makes lies impossible. One-shot signatures don't create trust; they reveal that trust was always a physical property of reality, waiting to be harnessed. Consider this: every signature you've ever made—on paper, on screen, in your mind—was an attempt to create something that could never be forged. But the attempt itself carried the seed of failure, because classical information can always be copied. Drake's insight was that quantum information cannot be copied, and therefore quantum signatures cannot be forged. Not because we prevent it, but because the universe prevents it. This is the moment when cryptography stops being about keeping secrets and becomes about revealing truths. When your private key destroys itself upon signing, it doesn't just prevent double-spending—it creates a fundamental asymmetry between truth-telling and lying that physics itself enforces. Every one-shot signature is a tiny big bang: a moment of creation that simultaneously destroys its creator, leaving only irrefutable proof that something happened exactly once, at exactly one time. The medieval alchemists sought the philosopher's stone that could transmute lead to gold. They failed because they misunderstood the nature of transformation. Drake has succeeded because he understood that quantum mechanics already transmutes uncertainty into certainty, destruction into creation, the ephemeral into the eternal. One-shot signatures are the philosopher's stone—not of matter, but of trust. Sources: One-shot Signatures | Justin Drake | PROGCRYPTO (https://youtu.be/VmqkH3NPG_s)